German public broadcaster ZDF has removed part of a report that claimed tech trillionaire Elon Musk had called for migrants to be hunted in Northern Ireland.
ZDF conceded its wording was “misleading” while Musk said “legal action is being taken against ZDF for their outrageous lies”.
Violence erupted in Belfast last week, following a brutal knife attack in a street in the north of the city.
Police arrested a Sudanese man at the scene in north Belfast and he was later remanded in custody by a court on a charge of attempted murder.
The victim was seriously wounded and the court heard he had lost his left eye in last week’s attack, which prompted unrest in Belfast and led to homes and vehicles being set alight.
The recent disorder in Northern Ireland attracted widespread international attention, including in Germany, where migration has also been a highly charged issue.
On Friday 12 June, a presenter introduced an edition of news magazine programme ZDFheute Live about the violence in Belfast entitled “How Musk is fuelling the protests”.
“A brutal attempted murder on a public street in Belfast,” she explained in the now-removed introduction to the report. “Someone takes a video which goes viral. Following that, a racist mob is hunting migrants. The call for that came from a British right-wing extremist and tech billionaire Elon Musk.”
Tommy Robinson, a well-known British far-right activist, had shared protest plans on Musk’s social media platform X on 9 June, claiming that “the whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people”. However, he has suggested it is a lie to say that he has called for riots.
Musk quoted the post, saying “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!”
Musk said he would take legal action in response to the post highlighting ZDF’s broadcast by German journalist Julian Reichelt, who runs NiUS, a relatively recent venture that has drawn comparisons with GB News in the UK or America’s Fox News.
In a statement on Tuesday, ZDF told the BBC that Elon Musk had demanded a “cease and desist” declaration, through a German law firm.
“ZDF issued the declaration and removed the passage in question from the introduction,” a spokesperson for the broadcaster said. “ZDF had already added a corrective transparency notice to the broadcast on Saturday.”
Before removing the introduction altogether, ZDF had issued a clarification, saying that the wording had been “imprecise and therefore misleading”.
The ZDF statement added: “Tommy Robinson called for protests after the knife attack in Belfast. The post was shared by Elon Musk.”
The tech tycoon, who also owns Tesla and SpaceX and has more than 240 million followers on X, has faced prior accusations of using his vast reach on social media to inflame tensions or spread disinformation.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer recently accused him of trying to “whip up division” over the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student handcuffed by police as he lay dying in Southampton, after his killer Vickrum Digwa claimed he was the victim of a racist attack.
After the Belfast attack, Musk vehemently rejected allegations that social media had inflamed tensions, saying that it was “murderous migrants“ targeting innocent people in their home town that was “making people angry, not ‘social media’!” he wrote on 10 June.
US-based Centre for Countering Digital Hate said recently that social media had played a “significant role” in fuelling violence in Belfast, and alleged that Musk had “amplified anti-migrant narratives” promoted by others and extended their reach to millions of users.
