Politicians and the public should consider quitting Elon Musk’s X platform en masse, the Labour mayor of the Liverpool city region has said after riots spread in his area.
Steve Rotheram, who has more than 75,000 followers on X, and whose region covers Southport where three girls were stabbed to death two weeks ago, said misinformation on the platform had contributed to the far-right-led riots.
He told PoliticsHome: “The time is approaching where we’ve got to all examine whether we should, en masse, withdraw from it and for there to be a different platform.”
The Guardian reported on Monday that Labour MPs had begun leaving X, with two telling colleagues they would stop using it and several others opting to join alternative platforms.
Two Labour MPs who are contenders to chair the science and technology select committee said they were among those looking at alternatives.
Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West, said: “We can see that Musk is using his platform to drive misinformation and division.”
She said it was unclear how X’s secretive algorithm was “amplifying hate speech and misinformation and how X is profiting from that”, adding: “I totally recognise and understand my colleagues who are leaving X and I am looking at alternatives myself, but as a politician it’s my duty to be where my constituents are and not where I would like to be.”
Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent East, said she was looking at other options because the tech billionaire’s online behaviour “emboldens the far right”.
“Elon Musk’s recent online behaviour has been dangerous and irresponsible. His sharing of misinformation about our country, and his provocative posts about the recent riots, in my view only emboldens the far right,” she said.
“X is far worse with his changes and I’ve personally noticed more racist, abusive and violent content. I urge people and organisations to switch over or at the very least actively use other platforms, such as Threads, to send a message that Musk’s platform is not our only option.”
Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, has been widely criticised for failing to crack down on misinformation and for sharing fake news.
Rotheram said that while X had not “created” the riots, it did have a “causational effect” on the violence.
Unrest was whipped up by far-right activists online who falsely claimed that a Muslim asylum seeker was behind the Southport stabbing attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
“It’s just vile. It [X] really is in the gutter and something needs to happen,” Rotheram said. But he added that it was a “difficult” issue for politicians because of the risk of “leaving the landscape open” to the far right.
“There won’t be people like us countering the stuff that they’re saying,” he said. “It could be sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that we end up with … a communication tool for the far right and Nazis and haters, and is that what we want? But something needs to happen, and if they [the social media companies] don’t police it themselves, then the government needs to step in and police it for them.”
The Liverpool mayor agreed with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, who told the Guardian last week that the Online Safety Act should be revisited urgently. Asked whether the act went far enough, Rotheram said: “Possibly not.”
Downing Street has indicated that social media companies could face stronger regulation if they failed to take robust action against disinformation on their platforms. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has said he wants to “look more broadly at social media” after the riots.
On Tuesday the social media platform Bluesky said it had seen a surge in signups in the UK in recent days, in a possible sign that people were seeking alternatives to X.
“For five out of the last seven days, the UK had the most Bluesky signups of any country,” Bluesky told Reuters, adding that had seen a 60% jump in general activity from accounts in the UK.
In July, Bluesky’s monthly active user base stood at about 688,568, a fraction of X’s base of 76.9 million, according to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.
