Musk has used his social media platform to call for the far-right figurehead to be released from prison.
Elon Musk has shared a post on X calling for the release of Tommy Robinson, who is serving an 18-month sentence for contempt of court.
In several recent posts on the social media platform, the billionaire owner of X has posted and reposted calls for Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, to be released from prison.
Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October last year after making false accusations against Jamal Hijazi, a young Syrian refugee, in a video on social media where he claimed Hijazi was “a violent school bully”.
The first video was posted in 2018, but Robinson continued to repeat these claims, screening a libellous film about the case at an event in Copenhagen in 2023.
Hijazi vehemently denied the allegation and took legal action against Robinson. He was sent to prison after breaching an injunction by repeating the false claims again.
Musk instead said that Robinson was in solitary confinement in prison for telling the truth about “migrant rape gangs”.
In a video interview that Musk reposted yesterday, he claimed that pedophiles were being released from prison “in order to put people in prison for Facebook posts”.
Musk also published a post criticising Keir Starmer: “Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008 -2013”.
He also claimed that Starmer’s role as head of the CPS meant Jess Phillips would not investigate the grooming gangs as Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls.
In a post, he said: “The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the CPS at the time).”
When Musk acquired X in November 2023, he reinstated Robinson’s account, after he was banned from the platform, known as Twitter at the time, in 2018 for violating rules governing ‘hateful conduct’.
Robinson has branded himself as a ‘protector’ of children and women, producing videos in which he talks about child sexual exploitation cases in Telford and Huddersfield.
However, women’s charities have accused the anti-Islam activist of exploiting the pain of survivors to fuel racist hate for his own gain.
The founder of the now-disbanded far-right group, the English Defence League, played a central role in the far-right riots that erupted following the Southport stabbings in the summer of 2024.
Musk has faced much criticism for allowing X, formerly Twitter, to become a social media platform on which fake news and extremist content can be shared without consequence, and also previously shared fake news on the site himself.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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