No, Elon Musk is not an ‘extremist’ threat to the UK

The British government seems to be increasingly in the grip of Musk Derangement Syndrome. How else to explain the news this week that the Homeland Security Group, a counter-extremism unit within the Home Office focussed on tackling the ‘highest harm risks’, is now monitoring Elon Musk’s X account. That’s right – the social-media activity of the X owner is now being treated as a threat to UK national security.

This is borderline bonkers. Musk has certainly been making a nuisance of himself for the Labour government with his offbeam comments recently. He seemed to think prime minister Keir Starmer planned to send political prisoners to ‘detainment camps’ on the Falkland Islands during the Southport riots, and has called on King Charles to dissolve parliament. Last week, he called Starmer’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, a ‘rape genocide apologist’ for blocking a government-led inquiry into the handling of grooming gangs.

But spouting off on X surely doesn’t warrant being treated by the British state with the same seriousness as a terror threat. Is Starmer really that frightened of his claims? How insecure and uncertain of itself must the Labour government be to see the owner of Tesla making crass comments about Jess Phillips as a cause of national unrest?

It’s not just Starmer and Co who are terrified of the X owner’s excitable social-media activity. EU officials are also petrified of Musk’s influence. According to Politico, 150 EU officials are monitoring the promotion of Musk’s X-hosted, live-streamed interview with the AfD’s Alice Weidel, who is campaigning to become German chancellor, to see if it breached EU law. Apparently they are worried that by streaming and disseminating the interview to millions, X could be giving an ‘unfair’ campaign advantage to the right-populist AfD over its rivals in the upcoming German elections.

Just think about that for a second. The EU has over a hundred officials poring over the promotion and dissemination not of an incendiary propaganda video, but of a spoken-word interview with a populist German politician.

Like the British government, the EU is clearly terrified by Musk’s willingness to give a platform to critical, dissenting content. Indeed, Musk claims that last year, the EU even offered him a ‘secret deal’ that would have exempted X from fines under its Digital Services Act if he agreed to censor content on Brussels’ behalf.

Intemperate as many of his comments may be, Musk really is not a threat to civil peace. In the UK, he has merely given a platform to public concern over the grooming-gangs scandal, arguably the biggest crime and cover-up in UK’s peacetime history. Likewise in the EU, Musk is merely giving a platform to an already popular politician whose party is second in the polls. If the EU paid half as much attention to the concerns over immigration and the economy driving the rise of populist movements like the AfD as it does trying to rein in Elon Musk, perhaps it wouldn’t need to worry about him in the first place.

UK and EU elites are losing the plot over the X owner. They seem more interested in monitoring and regulating an eccentric tech billionaire than addressing the concerns of the public. In the long run, this could cost them very dear indeed.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.