Musk ‘a threat to democracy in Britain’, says Wes Streeting amid Southampton disorder

The world’s richest man has become a “threat to democracy” in Britain after months of interference in UK politics, Wes Streeting has told The Observer. The prime ministerial hopeful issued the stark warning during a week in which Elon Musk used his X social media platform to stoke tensions and outrage over police bodycam footage of officers arresting fatally stabbed student Henry Nowak, leading to protests and disorder in Southampton.

Streeting, who follows Keir Starmer in criticising Musk, also condemned US vice-president JD Vance’s suggestion that Nowak’s murder was linked to “the mass invasion of migrants” and showed how “a civilisation dies”.

The former health secretary said: “We do not provide a running commentary on events in the United States, and it’s not unreasonable to expect the Americans to do the same with us. If JD Vance wants to come and spend some time with me in Redbridge, he’d be very welcome. Far from witnessing the end of civilisation, he’d see what makes Britain the most successful multifaith democracy in the world.”

The day after Nowak’s killer, Vickrum Digwa, 23, was convicted of murder, Musk’s SpaceX company was busy announcing a new contract with the US Space Force worth more than $4bn (£3bn) for a satellite project that will form part of the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome” missile defence ⁠system.

Still, he managed to tweet four times on Friday 29 May about the murder in Southampton of Nowak, who had been walking home from a night out when he was attacked with a 21cm (8in) ceremonial Sikh knife known as a shastar. Over the seven days after Digwa’s conviction, the man on course to become the world’s first trillionaire posted 10 times to the platform, reaching an estimated 240m accounts, analysis for The Observer shows.

Although the social media frenzy had begun, the touchpaper was lit in the UK last Monday when police released shocking bodycam footage of officers ignoring the handcuffed Nowak’s dying pleas. The 18-year-old undergraduate told them repeatedly that he had been stabbed, saying “I can’t breathe”, while Digwa can be heard accusing him of a racist assault and saying he was lying about having been stabbed. The killer was handed a minimum life sentence of at least 20 years.

Protests began on the streets of Southampton the same day and far-right groups swelled their numbers. On Tuesday, anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson called for the removal of the government and told those present to “fight”, before disorder broke out. “He was murdered because he was white,” said Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, to the hundreds who gathered outside Southampton police station.

Musk appeared via video link at a Robinson rally in Whitehall in September attended by 150,000 people, calling for the removal of the Labour government and telling those present to “fight”. The march last week in Southampton from the police station to the murder scene descended into attacks on officers in riot gear with bottles, bricks and other weapons. A total of 11 police were injured and more than a dozen men have been arrested for offences including violent disorder, assaulting a police officer and possession of an offensive weapon in a public place.

Musk’s most popular tweet on X about Nowak was on Tuesday. It was a repost of an image of George Floyd being restrained by police in Minnesota in 2020 above a still of Nowak’s hands in cuffs with the words: “Leftists killed Henry Nowak”. Musk added: “Yes, they did.”

According to analysis for this newspaper by the nonprofit Reset Tech, it had 368,000 engagements and more than 11m views. The Nowak image in that post had been digitally manipulated to make one of the officer’s blue-gloved hands look like a claw, Reset Tech said.

The claw image, which appears to be an altered screenshot taken from the bodycam footage of officers handcuffing Nowak, was posted by Reform UK’s treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, on Facebook to his 150,000 followers.

The Reset Tech report found that the far-right’s longrunning claims of “two-tier policing” in favour of of non-white citizens dominated discussions on X, appearing in feeds up to 257m times, with 1.19m likes, shares and replies. 

Reform’s leader Nigel Farage, made an “emergency address” – a video uploaded on X in which he conflated the murder with immigration and justified “pure, cold rage” as a response – that has been watched more than 4.5m times through a tally of posts on the party leader’s profile alone.

Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, whose new Restore Britain outfit – backed by Musk – has been eating into the vote share of his former Reform party, called for the death penalty to be brought back for Digwa in a post viewed 15m times.

Meanwhile, Grok, the AI tool embedded in X, wrongly identified two former police officers as being among those attending the scene, resulting in details about the individuals being widely shared online. Streeting said the social media service “should be treated like any other publisher, and they should be held to account and prosecuted”, adding: “If we don’t have the powers to do that now, we should create them.”

The blurred line between the US government and Musk’s empire was further emphasised on Friday when Vance used X to blame Nowak’s death on “the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants”. The US vice-president was criticised by No 10, among a slew of politicians.

Academics who have studied the changes to X under Musk’s ownership issued stark warnings about how he has altered the platform, formerly known as Twitter, which he bought for $44bn in October 2022, reinstating Donald Trump’s account shortly afterwards and rebranding the company the following year.

João Magalhães, an associate professor of AI trust and security at Manchester University, who has studied the billionaire’s takeover of X, said: “Musk is now a sort of informal leader of the global far right, whose huge influence stems less from his wealth than from his power over what gets visible on X.”

Musk’s account is the most followed on the platform. Magalhães and others found in a study that he had radically simplified internal content moderation systems, largely by firing staff and alienating or disempowering external actors who could counter his own power.

He also redesigned the platform to give himself unprecedented power over how internal decisions about content were made, including by ordering Twitter engineers to multiply the visibility of his own account, making himself “almost omnipresent”, Magalhães said.

In an as yet unpublished report on the effect of changes to the political opinions of users who maintained their accounts after the acquisition, Theo Serlin, an assistant in the department of political economy at King’s College London, found that, between 2020 and 2024, there was a discernible rightward shift in users’ opinions. The study analysed surveys from the American Trends Panel at the Pew Research Center for daily Twitter/X users before and after the takeover, and found that opinions shifted by a measure equivalent to the effect on opinions of switching from CNN to Fox News.

“We found the strongest effects for certain questions that ask about race and economic issues... People become less likely to say that they support the Black Lives Matter movement... [and] we find kind of a pro-Russia effect in the foreign policy questions,” Serlin said.

According to one biography of Musk, the mother of two of his children once explained his megalomania to him, saying: “I have this feeling that, as a kid, you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”

As Britain tries to discern between genuine outrage at a teenager’s murder and the meddling of Musk and other outside powers, it would do well to learn the rules of that game.

Photographs by Finnbarr Webster/ AFP/Getty Images, Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images