Elon Musk’s war on the SNP was on no one’s bingo card this year – but the animosity has ramped up after First Minister John Swinney waded into the row. The SNP leader is the latest UK politician to take a pop at Musk, blasting the tech billionaire for allowing Twitter to become a ‘platform of the fomenting of hate’, adding that the language used by the Twitter boss was ‘not only reprehensible, it’s baseless’. Ouch.
Honest John has gone so far as to suggest that the US businessman hadn’t removed racist posts from the social media platform because he agreed with them. Scotland’s FM fumed:
I think it tells us all we need to know about the degree to which [Twitter] is essentially being used as a platform for the fomenting of hate within our society. Ofcom reminded social media companies of their obligation to take down material that incites hatred or racism or violence. That’s not been followed by [Twitter] and the comments by Elon Musk I think perhaps evidence why that’s the case. I want to make sure that people like Elon Musk are held to account and they aren’t able to propagate the hatred and the tension which has unfortunately been part of our lives for far too long.
The SNP leader’s tirade follows the ongoing battle between Musk and Swinney’s predecessor, hapless Humza Yousaf. After the flailing former First Minister of Scotland dubbed Musk ‘one of the most dangerous men on the planet’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last week over his ‘amplification’ of disinformation, the billionaire hit back hard. Referencing a speech Yousaf made in 2020, Musk slammed the ex-FM for being ‘super, super racist’. In a follow-up tweet, the Twitter CEO wrote that ‘legal discovery will show that however big a racist he’s been in public communications, he’s vastly worse in private communications’ – prompting concerns that Musk may even have access to users’ private Twitter messages…
After the latest intervention from the SNP, will Musk now turn his guns on Swinney? Watch this space…
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