News

Tory MP hit with fake news that he'd resigned and Elon Musk couldn't care less

Tory MP hit with fake news that he'd resigned and Elon Musk couldn't care less
Biden says Elon Musk's ties to other countries should be 'looked at'
Video

A Tory MP who had fake news spread has called on Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk to tackle it on the site but the billionaire seemed less than bothered.

Daventry MP and Northern Ireland secretary Chris Heaton-Harris claimed that someone had sent an email to press outlets wrongly informing them that he had resigned from his roles.

In a tweet, he tagged the new Twitter CEO Musk and said he hopes the billionaire will “eliminate” fake news on the website and make it a priority to do so.

He wrote: “Hello Twitter! Someone has sent a fake e-mail to press outlets saying I’ve resigned. This is totally untrue.

“I hope one of @elonmusk first moves is to eliminate fake news on Twitter… Very exciting I know, but complete and utter tosh.”

But it would seem the tweet didn’t have the intended effect, as Musk’s blasé reply totally ignored the main issue as he instead asked what “tosh” was.

Musk responded, asking: “What does a tosh look like?”

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

It seems Heaton-Harris didn’t garner much sympathy in the comments either as some Twitter users said they wished he had resigned.

One person said: “Call their bluff and resign!”

Another asked: “When are you going to resign though?”

Since Musk took over Twitter, he has slashed almost half of the workforce and implemented a new paid verified service that allows almost any user to get a blue tick for $7.99 per month.

Rather unsurprisingly, the so-called Twitter Blue subscription service was almost immediately manipulated and saw verified parody Twitter accounts of Tony Blair and George W Bush joking about the Iraq war.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The Conversation (0)
x