Social media CEOs were torn apart on BBC Question Time last night as a panellist slammed the platforms for “promoting extreme content”.
After 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana – who murdered three little girls in Southport in July and injured 10 others – was sentenced on Thursday, the public has started to question how the UK can prevent such horrific attacks again in the future.
Green industrialist Dale Vince said social media was a major contributing factor that needs to be addressed.
Speaking to the Question Time audience, he explained: “I think this guy was radicalised to a considerable extent by content on social media. He got his Al Qaeda from social media, he got his recipe for ricin, he watched violent videos on social media.
“One of the biggest things we can do to prevent this happening in the future is to control social media properly – we don’t do that at the moment.”
Vince then focused in on particular websites, such as X (formerly Twitter) run by Elon Musk, as well as Facebook and Instagram, run by Mark Zuckerberg.
He said: “The platforms run by Musk and Zuckerberg for example are promoting extreme content, extreme views, Musk is trying to interfere in our democracy now through his platform X.”
Musk has repeatedly tried to influence government policy through his posts on X and has even come to blows with PM Keir Starmer over it.
Vince added: “Of course, [Rudakbana] got his murder weapon from Jeff Bezos [CEO of Amazon].”
The Southport killer ordered the knife he used in his attack on the shopping site when he was 17, even though it is illegal to sell to under-18s.
Vince continued: “We’ve got the three tech giants of the world, and we don’t control social media well enough. We talked earlier about how we’ve got to keep pace with AI, we haven’t kept social media.
“It’s a supernatural force, it’s outside the boundaries of our nation but it has a really big impact, and after the event – the terrible event – Musk stoked the riots with content on social media. We shouldn’t allow that.
“He in effect aided and abetted the crimes that took place. That’s where we should go.”
Vince later said that the best way to control the social media giants was to “make them responsible for their content”.
Musk, now US president Donald Trump’s informal adviser, used X to promote the right-wing conspiracy theory known as “two-tier policing” at the time of the riots which occurred after the Southport attack.
He also claimed “civil war is inevitable” over the thuggery which erupted in the summer.
The X boss – who is also the richest person in the world – joined other tech magnates such as Zuckeberg and Bezos at Trump’s inauguration on Monday.