The Owner Amplifier: Musk spreading violent anti-migrant narratives on X

CCDH examined posts from Elon Musk and two prominent anti-migrant commentators, Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe, in connection with civil disorder in Belfast, tracking engagement metrics and reviewing reply content for violent rhetoric.

The analysis found that Musk's amplification of the three accounts' posts contributed an estimated 64 million views to the topic, exceeding the combined organic reach generated by Robinson and Lowe on their own. Across replies to all three figures' posts, researchers identified 3,930 comments containing calls for violence, broken down as roughly 240 tied to Musk's posts, 1,000 to Lowe's, and 2,690 to Robinson's.

The report situates these findings within X owner Musk's reach as an account with more than 240 million followers, and notes that Ofcom has placed X in a compliance program over its handling of illegal hate speech in the UK. It concludes that the platform is failing to meet its regulatory obligations, and that this amplification pattern is linked to the offline disorder that followed.