Elon Musk lays traps with his deft tweets.
The tech billionaire’s set-up goes something like this: choose a controversial topic that gives you traction; throw in a few divisive characters; spice it up with rage; add optional half-truths; manufacture a false solution – like directing blame and loathing at the chosen target; press post; repeat several times; then sit back and wait for commentators and retweeters to take the bait and create your desired distraction and division.
Musk most recently inserted himself into the UK child sex abuse tragedy – the so-called grooming gangs scandal – through remarks on his social media platform, X. On the surface his tweets seem to reflect outrage over the lack of justice for 1,400 girls who were victims of a brutal sex abuse and grooming scandal that rocked Britain in 2011.
This came to light after an investigation by The Times that year, exposing grooming gangs active in North England and the Midlands, most notably Rochdale, Oldham and Rotherham, from around 1997. The newspaper article series found that the children, some as young as 11, were targeted in public spaces, befriended then abused, brutalised and groomed for sexual exploitation.
The gangs were made up of mostly British Pakistani men and their victims were white British girls from vulnerable backgrounds. This racialised dynamic fit perfectly for Musk to amplify race hate, Islamophobia and xenophobia.
Musk’s tweets are a follow-on from his earlier X tirades directed at senior members of the ruling Labour party and Prime Minister Keir Starmer which started in July 2024. At that time the far-right Southport riots swept across England and Northern Ireland. This came in the wake of fatal stabbings at a children’s dance class. Misinformation spread on social media claimed that the suspect was an illegal migrant.
It led to Starmer calling out Musk’s social media platform for fuelling misinformation and inciting violence and public rioting. He said at the time that “violent disorder was clearly whipped up online”.
Musk doubled down. Exploiting the already combustible claims, Musk’s tweets supported swirling sentiments that police were soft on the left-wing and Islamic protesters but heavy-handed with white working-class protesters.
Added to this, Musk has deliberately conflated the grooming gang scandal with support for the prominent far-right, anti-Islam campaigner Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.
Robinson is currently serving an 18-month jail sentence for contempt of court for repeating false claims made against a teenaged Syrian refugee that he first targeted in 2018. Robinson repeated his false claim that the teenager was violent, especially towards white girls, to his millions of Facebook followers. He also screened a video titled Silenced during a protest in Trafalgar Square in 2024, rehashing his claims against the teenager.
Robinson was banned from Twitter but Musk reinstated his account when he bought the platform in 2022. In early January Musk called for Robinson to be released, apparently on the grounds that he believes Robinson to be a kind of political prisoner bravely speaking out on issues like the grooming gang scandal.
But Robinson’s jail time is for contempt of court, not for commentary on the grooming gang. Musk ignored this fact.
Musk falsely accuses media and UK government of ignoring scandal
Fast forward to Christmas 2024, and Musk tweeted about UK home office minister Jess Phillips, calling Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”. Phillips had in October rejected a request from the local government in the town of Oldham for another national inquiry into the child sex abuse and exploitation in that part of the country between 2000 and 2020, on the grounds that a local inquiry might be a better option. The leader of her party, Starmer, was director of public prosecutions when the cases were first investigated, and prosecutions were being pursued.
Once again Musk cherry-picked bits of this to add to his X traps. The racialised dynamics of the grooming scandal, and fuzzy memories of how the matter was reported on by the media more than a decade ago, provided two useful nuggets for Musk to exploit.
The media did not ignore the case, as Musk has made out. The work of journalists led to the grooming scandal becoming a matter of nationwide reckoning and led to an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay that spanned seven years, starting in 2014. It involved examination of four million pieces of evidence and testimonies from 6,000 victims.
Musk’s tweets implied the scandal was simply swept under the carpet or covered up.
As for Starmer’s role, The Guardian offered more context when it reported that the Crown Prosecution Service lawyers did not seek prosecutions in some of the cases because they were legally weak cases.
The October 2022 independent report by Jay is also scathing. Her report points to multiple institutional failings of police, local councils and social welfare structures and called for urgent action. She called it “blatant collective failure”. She did not find that there was cover-up of the grooming gangs. There were 20 recommendations made by the child sex abuse inquiry. What is damning is that to date only five have been acted on.
Majority of grooming gang members in UK are white males
Sabah Kaiser, who was the ethnic minority ambassador to the inquiry led by Jay, said in an opinion piece she wrote in Al Jazeera in May 2023 that their data showed the grooming gangs accounted for less than 3% of all child sexual abuse cases in England and Wales. South Asian perpetrators make up a much smaller subset of this, she wrote.
Kaiser added: “The framing of childhood sexual abuse as a crime committed overwhelmingly by gangs of brown men against young white girls is destructive, distracting, and irresponsible, but most importantly, it is not based on evidence.”
She said their data showed that grooming gangs in this country were, as expected in a country with a majority white population, made up of white males below the age of 30.
Her warning: “Pulling this important issue into the culture wars of the day is not the way to achieve [successful tackling of child sex abuse]. Scapegoating one community without meaningful evidence, only because it fits a certain narrative.”
Jay, interviewed by the BBC in early January, reiterated that beyond the X distraction is the matter that the recommendations made in the 2022 report are still to be implemented. She said victims “have had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions”, as some have called for another national inquiry.
She added, in reference to Musk’s tweets, that she was “very unhappy with the politicisation of child sexual exploitation” and that the comments were made “in a very uninformed way”.
Jay’s points ground the real issue at hand: that victims and the most vulnerable are still falling through the tears of inadequate nets of protection, prosecution and actual consequences for perpetrators and enablers.
Those victims are being re-victimised, not only through political side-stepping and inaction, but also through Musk’s social media traps.
Yet in reality, the Tesla CEO is in a unique position to act, if he chose to do so. His personal wealth, his political power, especially as Donald Trump returns to the White House, and his control of the megaphone that is X, affords him an array of formidable tools to find solutions, to implement solutions and make an actual difference – maybe even an actual legacy.
But what Musk’s endgame is, is anyone’s guess. All we know for sure is that it’s his game. For the rest of us, our role is to be clear-eyed enough to stay focused on the issues if we want to build better. Stay awake; don’t get played. DM