Late last week, Jonathan Freedland, one of the U.K.’s top political commentators, wrote an article in The Guardian calling out billionaire Elon Musk as a cheerleader for the pogrom-like anti-immigrant riots then sweeping the country. “He is surely the global far right’s most significant figure,” Freedland wrote of Musk, “and he holds the world’s largest megaphone. As he may put it, a battle to defeat him is now inevitable — and it has to be won.”

A few days later, Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter vice president for Europe, called for Musk to be indicted for incitement. He also called for implementation of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act of 2023, which was designed to protect children while they are online and to detail a set of responsibilities for social media companies, to be rolled out faster, and for the legislation to be updated to make it easier for the government to prosecute top-tier social media executives who either skirt their responsibilities to tame the spread of misinformation or actively take part in that misinformation game. “The question we are presented with,” Daisley wrote recently in The Guardian, “is whether we’re willing to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the U.K. coastline and take potshots at our society.”

The outpouring of calls to tackle Musk’s outsized and destructive role in shaping popular discourse has been triggered by the business tycoon’s relentless spreading of misinformation in the wake of the horrific killing of three young girls in the Northern English town of Southport two weeks ago. Arguably, no social media platform, and no social media owner, has done more to facilitate the seeding of far right lies about the events in Southport than has Musk and his X platform.

In an intervention both blitheringly ignorant and reckless, even by his own increasingly debased standards, Musk suggested “Civil war is inevitable” as the far right protests gathered steam after the killings in Southport.

To be clear, there is no sense of imminent civil war in the U.K. at the moment, and the vast majority of communities around the country have stayed absolutely peaceful in recent weeks. In fact, for all of the violence of the rioting, the U.K. —........

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