Elon Musk shares fake news claiming UK rioters will be sent to ‘detainment camps’

LONDON — Elon Musk is at it again.
Amid an ongoing feud with the British government about unrest on the country’s streets, the billionaire X owner boosted, and then deleted, an entirely-manufactured news headline Thursday pushed by a far-right political party.
Musk shared a fake headline — purporting to be from the Telegraph newspaper — that said U.K. PM Keir Starmer is “considering building ’emergency detainment camps’ on the Falkland Islands” to house far-right rioters arrested in the country’s round of race riots.
A cursory Google search for the headline would have quickly proved that it isn’t real. The Telegraph itself has since confirmed it did not publish such an article.
Musk shared the image posted by Ashlea Simon, the co-leader of Britain First. It’s a fringe far-right party in the U.K. known for its “invasions” of mosques and the time its senior figures have spent in jail for religiously aggravated harassment.
Though Musk deleted the tweet within an hour, he is yet to acknowledge the move. According to one U.K. journalist, the tweet was seen by almost two million people before it was deleted.
Simon’s initial tweet has since been hit with a “community note” — one of Musk’s X innovations that allow users to propose context to viral tweets — stating that the story isn’t real.
The social media boss has been locked in a battle with the U.K. government this week over the spread of misinformation on his platform and his own tweets as violence broke out in the U.K. — including his claim that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain.