British MPs want to haul Elon Musk before parliament over riots
British MPs want to haul Elon Musk before parliament over riots
Musk has spent days beefing with politicians over the far-right unrest sweeping the UK.
*Musk has spent days beefing with politicians over the far-right unrest sweeping the UK. *
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."
He has clearly been inciting the riots online. Treat him like all the other instigators of this and put out an arrest warrant for terrorism. He should stand in a court room and answer for his actions like everyone else, the billions shouldn't mean he gets to talk to parliament first.
167If there’s any group that needs to be taken out, it’s the PayPal mafia of Theil and Musk.
51saved
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If you take him there's no returns
50As they should. Online grifters should be held accountable for the lives they destroy.
48Why not just block that whole dumpster fire
41Love how this guy's one of the richest people in the world yet he's got nothin better to do than fuck with the common folk. Guess he doesn't get enough attention at home, so here we are watching him stoke racism and stupidity to entertain his pathetic insecure self
35Love how this guy's one of the richest people in the world yet he's got nothin better to do than fuck with the common folk.
to entertain his pathetic insecure self
To those who have finished watching the first season of Squid Game, this observation is prescient.
Capitalism replaced feudalism; and the new aristocrats are the billionaires.
16It's actually so much simpler than that. He's tweaked the Twitter algorithm to serve more right wing brain rot for engagement and, being a habitual user, rotted his own fucking brain more and more. He's indirectly self radicalizing. He's getting high on his own supply.
At least zuck doesn't actually use that shithole called Facebook.
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Not trying to minimise this
But this also works as a test drive for what he can do in the US
32Less to the point of the article and more to it's wording:
Why the fuck do they call it "race riots" as far as I can tell there are a bunch of rioting fascists and then a broad group of people (refugees, local citizens and Antifa) trying to defend places or stop the riots. This is not a black vs white fight this fight is between fascism and anti-fascism (or at least democracy)
27Why do you think it's more fascist or than racist? The political "right" of the UK is incredibly anti-immigrant, you can see that in how they've voted for MPs and Brexit. The racial hate is more noticeable towards brown people, i.e. anyone looking anything from Arab to south Asian, there's even the p-word that comes close (but isnt quite) the equivalent of the n-word.
8Sorry I didn't mean to imply that the Nazis aren't racist I definitely know that. For me it's just a different framing between "There are Race riots" (i.e. riots/fights between racial identies) vs fascist/racists rioting because of their racists reasons (and people fighting them in a (self)defense way. I hope I made clear what I meant.
6The word that's the first four letters of a country's name is that serious of an insult now?
I'm a yank so I'm pretty out of touch on this but I was under the apparently mistaken impression that it was no more serious than calling an Irishman a mick or a paddy (neither of which are awesome but don't approach the derogatory ferocity of the T- word for Roman Catholic Irish).
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Musk is really upping his asshole game. He's alienated 50% of the US, a good bit of Norway and now Britain.
21Promise the protesters you'll squeeze rich people like Musk and his companies for all they're worth to solve the issues with housing and NHS to start with.
16DO IT YOU FUCKING COWARDS
16Let's fucking go. Drag this fucker Infront of parliament.
10They should. It’s nuts this motherfucker has the influence he does. He’s an actual dipshit who’s only able to do this because he was born into money and failed upwards. He’s a moron with outsized influence. Hold him to account, please.
10I was hoping they meant “keel-haul Musk” because I approve this message.
7Shitheels has a fucking opinion on how to run everything it seems. Clear sign he should run nothing, since the only thing being actually run is his fucking mouth.
7Today in “Stop! I can only get so hard!! 😖😰” news…
6DO IT!!!
2I think we should strap Elon Musk to one of his rockets & launch him directly into the sun... Or maybe just like a big wall, that might be more entertaining.
2Under what law would the UK govt do this though? I am not sure it’s a great idea since Musk is a private citizen and not a government actor. Would any govt then extend this precedent to any viral comment? Like the person who made the JD Vance couch comment?
OTOH, Musk is in a unique position because of his money and influence, that a normal commentator does not have. So I don’t know, but seems like a legal quagmire.
If however Musk is shown to funnel money to UK PACs persons or parties via any means, then the UK govt has a case to question him as a hostile foreign operator. But otherwise it seems like a tricky scenario. Perhaps the same legalities around the Assange case extend to this? But Assange was a sympathetic figure in many respects. I am not sure Musk has the same freedom of press and speech justifications.
2I think it's more over the fact that he runs the platform and therefore if his platform helped stoke the flames that caused this then it's completely valid for him to be brought in to be questioned about his involvement and what X will do in the future to combat racism and misinformation.
13Free speech in the UK does not include hate speech or inciting violence, so that's probably all they need, doesn't matter that he's an individual, in fact it probably makes it much simpler since that makes it not a diplomatic issue.
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I doubt they could do it since Musky is a US citizen. I didn't know the laws for this kind of thing though, so maybe they could with the right kind of legalese?
1I guess he can ignore a court summons, but then he can never enter the UK again, which he might want to do at some point.
11They have some powers, they got upset at Facebook and decided to flex a bit by sending one of the boys around, to invite one of his mates for a chat.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/24/mps-seize-cache-facebook-internal-papers
The person sent was the serjeant at arms. They carry a sword. Doubt they took it out but they also carry one of the House of Commons maces, which is gold covered and jewel encrusted, about 1.5m (4.9ft) long and weighs roughly 10kg (22 lbs).
Imagine some large, pissed off looking dude, dressed like he’s from the year 1415, kicking your hotel door in because you didn’t RSPV properly. Then being told hand over documents or we may stick you in jail (and you know the pretended it would be the Tower of London).
The 1,000 yard stare he must get when asked if he enjoyed London and how lovely that history must be.
4
What has that fucker done again?!
1Added to the false narrative that the killer of three little girls at a Taylor Swift themed party at a holiday daycare center. Was a migrant who had just gotten off a small boat and was on an MI5/MI6 watchlist. Which has ledt to a few relatively sporadic race riots from the far right. And now saying that Civil War in the UK is inevitable.
21I wonder how much better the world would be if that guy learned to shut up...
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https://www.politico.eu/article/united-kingdom-mps-elon-musk-parliament-riots/
-5Not from uk, but do you really believe that one person comment or a single criminal event can cause such a mess? It is like saying the troubles were caused by a speech of ian paisley. In uk you have huge examples of revolts/wars between different populations ( irish/english/welsh/scottish ) but this time is a comment the cause... seeing from outside it seems ... weird
-18He owns the site. The site is a shit hole of hate and it spreads lies. So yes he should be held accountable.
13Any media spread hate against other groups/spread lies. Or you have even read any newspaper in the past 100 years. I read reddit and i read the worst things about adversarial groups any day. Sometime even war crimes apologies, a post was so terrible that could be used as a war crimes proff ( a drone targeting and killing a medical unit doing their work during wartime ). But it is very rare that this kind of speech cause some riots. Ex: never heard of democrats targeting republicans with riots in USA. The strange thing is that russians tell that usa and uk are using the social to promote colored revolutions ( and is x is between them ). So X is an instrument of CIA / MI5 or a russian asset? When the troubles erupted were more simple time.
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Thanks for your uninformed opinion/question thing. I'll assume that you are asking in good faith and simply don't know... much about the UK.
He isn't the root cause, but he chose to insert himself by encouraging violence when he hasn't a fucking clue what he's talking about either...
9I don't think that uk political class too ( as other european countries ) know much about Uk. I have direct experience about "communities" in other european countries, but when the problems erupt, the ruling class flee. I don't think about a civil war, the situation is more complex than it happears and i think that is very difficult that labour starting seriously to wage war to their voter base. Musk is part of the capitalist globalist elite that is causing all this mess ( like tories ).
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You seems surprised and yet Trump has been charged with almost the same thing for inciting the Jan 6th riots.
3I'm not understanding your comparison to the Troubles, because Paisley was the lead figure who fuelled the fires of religious hate through his influence, having founded a number of the groups involved in the incidents that kicked off the Troubles.
Maybe it wasn't a single speech that caused it, but he was very much the face of the loyalist movement for most of his life.
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Yeeeeah no. As much as I despise musk, the UK doesn't get to call a US citizen into parliment, we fought a war about that one.
(So uh, just as an aside, go after his business interests. You'll nail that fucker to the wall if you snag his UK investments. We haven't gotten around to fighting the war against capitalism...)
-94the UK doesn’t get to call a US citizen into parliment, we fought a war about that one.
I know American history classes suck, but I didn't realize they sucked this badly.
Parliament can call summon anyone they like anywhere in the world. Whether or not the person they summon is required to go depends on local laws.
Believe it or not, even if the U.S. had a "you can't summon us to parliament, so there" clause in the Constitution, the British could say "fuck your constitution" and do the summoning anyway.
91Dude has rot in his brain like damn. Yes he can always just run away, but that wont improve his situation. If you dont answer when you are accused, the sentencing will happen without you. If the UK and EU ban twitter, he wont like that, so its in his own best interest to show up.
If you wanna do business somewhere, you will answer to the laws of that place or deal with the consequences.
51Ah hell, you make one deeply drunken joke and suddenly you're at -25...
FWIW, the US does have a whole host of laws and various treaty clauses that dictate US citzens cant be held to account by a foreign power without either US government consent or consent of the party. Our extradition and criminal parity treaties mean that, in criminal cases, we might let a citizen be tried outside of the US, but calling a US citizen is really really difficult to pull off. Thats what I was referring to when I said "we fought a war". The UK government cannot compel him to testify, by hundred-year-old-treaty, without US consent.
But calling a US citizen to testify in front of a foreign legislative power is 100%, by both treaty and hegemony, entirely consensual on the part of the called party. Musk can just say no, and there's nothing that can be done without getting the buy-off from the state dpt, which... we're an oligopoly, we're not going to hand over a billionare.
HOWEVER the UK is entirely able to hold his business interests and investments ransom, which would be highly effective. If parliment is serious about this they'll do that, but since I have no more faith in the UK government than my own (okay a little more, the US is in a bad place, the tories would honestly be a step up in most states) I absolutely do not expect them to go after musk in a way that even slightly might work. Which I would love to be proven wrong about, please, some government hold this asshole to account.
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@Warl0k3 @MicroWave give you one guess where his private jet lands every time he comes through Europe …
He may want to cooperate.
31You do realize that Musk is a citizen of two commonwealth countries (in addition to the fact that parliament can demand whatever the fuck they want - and that doesn't necessarily mean it will happen).
21Can't they call him in due to him being the owner of the company and stoking racist riots via that companies only product in attempt to destabilize their government?
Tho I guess you really only could request it. Unless Twitter is doing actual business in the UK, which for adverts and now with the pay outs for tweeting, they probably are. But even then, one would probably only get the bootlicking CEO Yackinasackarino.
20They can call him in for having a K in his name. They could summon Vladimir Putin if they wanted. There's no restrictions on who they can summon as far as I know.
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As a businessman with major companies operating in the UK. Who is inciting racial hatred and riots. Parliament has a right to request him to appear. I don't believe that they can even order a UK private citizen to appear before them. Unless they're a civil servant.
12There's a difference between a request and a subpoena. Right now They're discussing basically politely asking. If they want to subpoena him they'll have to make an extradition request, at which point America will look over the details of the case and decide if they want to cooperate. It happens literally all the time. Sometimes we cooperate. Sometimes we don't. Usually because Britain is our ally, we cooperate.
12Capitalism has been fought and defeated many times. Each time it went just about as well as beating medicare.
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