Musk inserted himself into U.K. politics at the turn of the new year when he called for Tommy Robinson, a British activist characterized by critics as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim, to be released from prison. Robinson has become the face of an anti-censorship movement in Great Britain after he was targeted by the government for spreading what it deemed hate speech and disinformation, particularly relating to Muslims and Islamist extremists. 

FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT

Robinson captured Musk’s attention when he was arrested last year for violating a court order that restricted him from discussing a case involving British high schoolers Jamal Hijazi and Bailey McLaren. Robinson rose to McLaren’s defense after he was accused of bullying his classmate. While Hijazi, a Syrian refugee, was cleared by the courts of any wrongdoing, Robinson argued that he had exhibited violent behavior such as saying he wanted to rape McLaren’s younger sisters. Critics said there was no meat to Robinson’s narrative, which they characterized as anti-Muslim, and Hijzai successfully sued Robinson for libel. Yet after being ordered to pay over $125,000 in libel damages and legal fees, Robinson persisted, creating a documentary called Silenced outlining his case against Hijazi and telling psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson last July that McLaren had tried to end his life over the affair. 

BRITISH GROOMING GANG SCANDAL AND COVER-UP EXPOSES RACIAL FAULT LINES

After Robinson showed Silenced in London’s Trafalgar Square last July, he was arrested because it contained the banned libelous accusations. Robinson was also handed a terrorism charge when he refused to give police the password to his cellphone. After being directed to pay over $80,000 in fines, Robinson is serving an 18th-month sentence in complete isolation at Blemarsh, a maximum-security prison. 

Robinson’s camp contends that the U.K. is using strict speech laws to censor information challenging the government’s position on Islamic threats and Muslim crime. 

In December, Musk rose to their defense, asking, “Why are rapists given suspended sentences in the UK, but [Robinson] gets 18 months in solitary confinement, despite doing nothing violent?” 

England has some of the most aggressive speech laws in the West. The 2023 Online Safety Act holds social media companies accountable for material on their sites deemed harmful or illegal by the government. And thousands arrested for violating the Public Order Act 1986 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalizes online posts that intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another.” 

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told The Times government officials said Section 127 was to be used only in “extreme circumstances.” 

“But the problem is ‘grossly offensive’ is not something you should normally be prosecuted for. It’s not showing harm to other people. It’s not showing that somebody is being … attacked or threatened,” he said. 

In 2016, more than 3,300 people were arrested under section 127 for “trolling” and posting allegedly offensive messages on social media, per the outlet. That number represented a nearly 50% increase since 2014.

After British police arrested more than 30 people following unrest last summer for making social media posts deemed illegal, Musk raised his hand in support of relaxing restrictions on speech. “Support freedom of speech in the UK!” he declared in August 2024. 

“The U.K. has become a police state,” Musk continued last November in response to news that a Briton had been arrested for livestreaming a protest.

The demonstrations last year were sparked by three young British girls who were stabbed to death. Immediately after the murders, rumors floated online, initially by a Pakistani-based news outlet called Channel 3 Now, that the killer was a young Islamic illegal immigrant who had recently entered the country. Three days after the incident, the speculation was proven false when the murderer was determined to be Axel Rudakubana. 

Authorities blamed the English Defence League, which was founded by Robinson and is often characterized as Islamophobic and racist, for spreading the rumors and fomenting unrest following the attack. Robinson left the EDL in 2013, citing concerns over the “dangers of far-right extremism,” and saying that while he wanted “to lead a revolution against Islamist ideology, I don’t want to lead a revolution against Muslims.” He was also out of the country at the time of the 2024 riots, but was accused by critics of inciting violence and violating laws against hate speech and disinformation through social media posts.

Robinson suggested the government was trying to downplay the threat of Islamic ideology, and shared videos of “masked Muslim mobs” chanting “Allah is Greatest” to protesters angry over the deaths of the three children.

He further slammed Prevent, the U.K.’s anti-extremism program, after it was revealed Rudkubana was a radicalized Islamist who was flagged to authorities three times before he stabbed the girls. Government agencies had as many as up to 15 “missed opportunities” to stop Rudakubana, The Times reported.

More recently, Robinson’s allies targeted a government review released this week that concluded radical Islamist Ali Harbi Ali crossed Prevent’s radar before he killed MP Sir David Amess in 2021. After the report found Prevent closed its case on Ali in part because “the tool used for identifying an individual’s vulnerability to radicalism was outdated,” Robinson’s X account suggested that the murder occurred because Prevent was “too busy chasing the British, labeling them ‘far right’ for posting memes.”

Robinson similarly accused officials of ignoring pedophile gangs that operated in England for years in part because they were fearful of being labeled racist for targeting the abusers, who were predominantly Muslims of Pakistani heritage. 

While Robinson has been characterized by the British government as a far-right extremist threat due to his positions, Musk has backed him, accusing top U.K. officials of covering up gang rape and unfairly censoring the British firebrand.  

In January, Musk posted a meme arguing that people are more likely to be arrested over a social media post than for rape in England. “This meme is actually real in the UK,” he said. 

Musk’s words come after he said last year that “free speech is only relevant….if you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like because if you like it.” 

The grooming gang scandal, initially detailed in the 2014 Rotherham report, surrounds networks of men who gang-raped predominantly young white English girls around the UK. At least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Abusers also raped children in Manchester, Rochdale, and Oldham, according to inquiries published between 2020 and 2024 that reported serious failures from authorities to protect children from predators. In Rochdale, convictions at the time of the report had only been brought in cases surrounding 13 of the 74 children believed to have been raped and abused.

“So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this,” Musk said in a Jan. 1 post responding to a passage in the Rotherham report saying several fathers who had tried to remove their daughters from houses where they were being raped, were “arrested themselves when police were called to the scene.”

The report stated that authorities often felt constrained from targeting the gangs because they believed doing so might “be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.” 

Officials believed criminal convictions of a handful of rapists in 2010 were an “isolated case and not an example of a more deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls. This was at best naive, and at worst ignoring a politically inconvenient truth,” the review concluded. 

Rape survivors said authorities feared allegations of racism if they investigated suspicions of sexual abuse and allowed concerns to block efforts to help them, according to a 2022 inquiry. One victim said that professionals were so afraid of being called racist that they dismissed her allegations of sexual abuse as “cultural differences.”  Police didn’t crack down on the grooming gangs because they were “frightened of being tarnished with a race brush,” a detective superintendent involved in the Rochdale report told investigators. 

Robinson’s allies say England’s speech regulations make it harder to investigate pedophiles who are Muslim without being criminalized under hate speech and disinformation laws. 

When he live-streamed outside a court where Huddersfield grooming gang members stood on trial in 2018, Robinson was rebuked by Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the head of the English judiciary, for “referring to the supposed religion of the defendants, the ethnicity of the alleged victims.”

Robinson was subsequently arrested and spent nine months in complete isolation for live streaming outside the trial. The activist argued he “simply reported public information” about the case and claimed the trial was going dark because of the gang members’ ethnicity. The court system determined his actions violated prohibitions on media covering the cases before the trials wrapped and stated that restrictions on the press came purely because of legal reasons. 

In January, Musk called England’s Home Office minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” after she rejected a request for a government-led inquiry into the grooming gangs last October. 

Also a target of Musk’s ire was British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whom Musk suggested had been “complicit in the rape of Britain” because he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service during the grooming scandal. 

In the wake of Musk’s comments, as well as growing calls from Conservatives and Reform MPs for a national inquiry into the pedophile gang, Starmer accused his critics of “jumping on the bandwagon” to “amplify what the far-right are saying,” as well as “spreading lies and misinformation” about the grooming gangs.

A special UK counterterrorism unit is investigating monitoring Musk’s X account after his comments about Phillips.