The owner of Iksa, Elon Musk, caused the fury of the British government after he published the comment "civil war is inevitable" on the occasion of the riots that have engulfed the country.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office said there was "no justification" for Musk's comments.
In response to Starmer's statement that his government "will not tolerate attacks on mosques or Muslim communities", the Xx owner said: "Shouldn't you be concerned about attacks on all communities?" In the third post, the billionaire assessed that the police are biased.
British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper criticized the way social networks control incitement and misinformation on their platforms.
"There are some things that are already clearly criminal, where there will be a need for police intervention and action to prosecute those cases," Kuper told the BBC.
"There are other areas where social media companies already have clear obligations to remove criminal material and should be doing so, but sometimes it takes too long. In some areas they have made promises about their terms and conditions that should be enforced, but that is not done."
Britain's technology minister, Peter Kyle, met with representatives of social media platforms including X to remind them of their responsibility to stop the spread of racial hatred and incitement to violence.
Yet despite concerns about the spread of right-wing messages, Britain's tools to compel social media to act appear to be limited.
Multi-city rioting, which has seen attacks on mosques and places where asylum seekers are housed, erupted after the killing of three girls at a dance class in the northern English coastal city of Southampton after fake messages on social media misidentified the suspected killer as an Islamist. migrant.
Agitators are capitalizing on lingering tensions over immigration and, more recently, the growing number of migrants entering the country illegally by crossing the English Channel on rubber boats.
Those problems were a central issue in last month's election, with former prime minister Rishi Sunak vowing to stop the boats by deporting "illegal immigrants" to Rwanda. Although current Prime Minister Starmer scrapped the plan after winning a landslide victory, he promised to reduce immigration by working with other European countries and speeding up the deportation of people who have been refused asylum.
The spread of false information about the murder of the girls last week was helped by fake news channels on Iks.
Right-wing influencers with huge reach, such as England Defense League founder Tommy Robinson and actor-turned-woke activist Laurence Fox, have sent messages to their thousands of social media followers.
Vocap and Telegram were used to organize short-term gatherings, while leaflets organizing specific protests were distributed on Facebook. TikTok was flooded with videos of violence.
However, X in particular proved to be a focal point of right-wing conversations. In addition to Musk's direct intervention, the platform also reinstated Robinson's account. He is currently banned from Instagram and Facebook.
"Ilon Musk's threat to democracy is intolerable. He uses the largest and most influential platform in the democratic world to incite racial conflict and civil unrest - in his posts and what X promotes. Democracies can no longer ignore this," wrote a columnist for the British "Financial" on X. Times" Edward Luce.
Heidi Alexander, Britain's justice secretary, warned social media bosses that they have a "moral responsibility to stop the propagation and dissemination of misleading and openly inflammatory material on their platforms".
Aleksander, former deputy mayor of London, harshly criticized Ilon Mask.
"Those comments are completely unjustified. We have police officers seriously injured on our streets, people looting and burning buildings. For someone with a large platform and a large following to use that power in such an irresponsible way, I think it's actually quite unconscionable. Everyone should be calling for peace right now."
The "Politiko" portal writes that the British government has a powerful legislative tool that it can use, but it is not ready yet.
Under the UK's Internet Safety Act, which has been years in the making, platforms will have a duty to "take strong action" against illegal content. This includes content that incites violence or is linked to a "violation of public order and peace on racial or religious grounds".
Platforms have a duty to prevent illegal content from appearing on their platforms in the first place, and to remove it quickly if it does.
Failure to meet these obligations could lead to UK media regulator Ofcom fining social networks up to £18m, or 10 per cent of their global revenue, whichever is greater.
However, Politiko writes, the provisions of the law on illegal content will only come into force at the end of 2024. And Britain's existing laws on incitement to violence stem from the Public Order Act of 1986, which predates social media by several decades, so police have to comb the platforms for potential offences.
For now, British authorities can only urge tech companies to strictly enforce their own policies, many of which they claim prohibit the kind of content that has been openly present online in recent days.
"There is no need for online services to wait for the new laws to come into force before making their sites and apps safer for users," said an Ofcom spokesman.
"Our role will be to ensure that regulated services take appropriate steps to protect their users," they added. "It will not involve us making decisions on individual posts or accounts."
Britain's existing laws on incitement to violence stem from the Public Order Act 1986, which predates social media by several decades
Sara Khan, who was former prime minister Sunak's social cohesion adviser, accused ministers of failing to heed her 2021 report, which she co-authored with Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley, which warned that certain widespread forms of hate-motivated extremism were not being covered. existing legislation.
"Our rules have not evolved with this growing threat of extremism, there are loopholes in our legislation that allow them to operate, essentially, with impunity," Khan told The Guardian this week.
In the European Union, the equivalent of the Online Safety Act - the Digital Services Act - is already in place and X is facing an investigation by the European Commission for spreading toxic content on the platform.
Meanwhile, social media could have advantages in catching those who break the law. Nazir Afzal, who was the chief prosecutor in the north-west of England at the time of the 2011 riots, pointed out that the videos shared on the Internet will make it much easier to identify the perpetrators compared to 13 years ago, when the main resource was the CCTV camera.
But as the standoff with Musk continues, the British government remains skeptical.
"Some of these cases are about the criminal behavior of individuals and some are about the responsibility of social media companies," said Cooper, the Home Secretary.
"We have to deal with both, because obviously we can't go on like this."
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