Elon Musk could be summoned for a grilling by British MPs over X’s role in race riots that have rocked the U.K. over the last week, as well as his own incendiary comments about the violence.

Labour MPs Chi Onwurah and Dawn Butler, who are competing to chair parliament’s science, innovation and technology committee, both told POLITICO they’d press the billionaire X owner and other technology executives to answer questions about the role of social media platforms amid mounting unrest in the U.K.

Musk has spent days beefing with British politicians over the riots, and is locked in a war of words with Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the U.K’s handling of them. Musk on Sunday wrote “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K. and claimed that the response by U.K. police has been “one-sided."

Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter) saw misinformation about the identity of the attacker — wrongly identified as an asylum seeker who had just arrived in the U.K. — spread widely in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The X boss has also come under fire for re-instating the account of high-profile far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who co-founded the English Defense League.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      This case alone has absolutely tarnished the reputation that the US has in the UK in the eyes of many people. It’s something people aren’t going to forget for a very long time, and could prove a blocker for cases where the US wishes to extradite in the future.

      • IcyToes@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        They claimed it because she was married to a CIA employee.

        Kind of free reign to break the law and kill people if you’re a relative of a CIA employee. She could have been trialed without any risk to national security, so it’s absolutely a BS excuse.

        • Flax@feddit.uk
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          4 months ago

          That is kind of mad. I think even staff at an embassy generally don’t get immunity, just the diplomats themselves, of which there’d be a small handful even for a large country