A major controversy has erupted after Germany’s leading public broadcaster ZDF was forced to retract and remove a misleading segment from a primetime news program that falsely claimed tech billionaire Elon Musk directly called for anti-migrant hunts amid post-attack unrest in Northern Ireland. The incident comes against a backdrop of rising international tension over social media’s role in amplifying divisive discourse around migration, an issue that has become increasingly politically charged across both Europe and North America.
The unrest that sparked the report began in Belfast last week, shortly after a brutal street knife attack left a victim seriously wounded — court documents confirm the victim lost their left eye in the assault. Police quickly took a Sudanese man into custody at the scene, and he has since been remanded in custody on charges of attempted murder. The attack triggered widespread violent disorder in the city, with rioters setting fire to residential properties and vehicles, drawing global media attention to the escalating tensions in Northern Ireland.
Migration has emerged as one of the most polarizing political issues in Germany in recent years, making the Belfast unrest a natural topic for national news coverage. On June 12, ZDF’s flagship live news magazine *ZDFheute Live* aired a segment framed around the question “How Musk is fuelling the protests.” In the opening introduction of the segment, which has since been deleted, the program’s presenter made the unsubstantiated claim: “A brutal attempted murder on a public street in Belfast. 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.”
This claim misrepresents the actual sequence of events. British far-right activist Tommy Robinson shared posts about planned protests on Musk’s social media platform X on June 9, writing that “the whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people.” Robinson has himself denied ever explicitly calling for rioting. Musk did quote Robinson’s post and add his own comment: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” He never issued a personal call to hunt migrants, contrary to ZDF’s original wording.
The false claim was brought to widespread public attention by Julian Reichelt, a prominent German journalist who heads the newer media outlet NiUS, which is often compared to conservative-leaning outlets like UK’s GB News and US’s Fox News. After Reichelt highlighted ZDF’s inaccurate reporting, Musk responded publicly, confirming he was moving forward with legal action against the public broadcaster over what he called “outrageous lies.”
Through his German legal team, Musk issued a formal cease and desist demand to ZDF. In a public statement to the BBC on Tuesday, a ZDF spokesperson confirmed the network had complied with the demand, removing the contested passage from the segment’s introduction. The spokesperson added that ZDF had already added a corrective transparency notice to the broadcast as early as Saturday, before fully removing the inaccurate wording, and acknowledged the original language had been “imprecise and therefore misleading.” In its formal clarification, ZDF confirmed the correct facts of the incident: it was Tommy Robinson who called for protests following the Belfast knife attack, and the post was only shared and amplified by Musk.
This incident is far from an isolated controversy for Musk, who owns not just X but also leading tech firms Tesla and SpaceX, and counts more than 240 million followers on his social media platform. He has faced repeated accusations from political leaders and digital watchdog groups of using his massive online platform to inflame social tensions and spread disinformation around migration. Most recently, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer accused Musk of attempting to “whip up division” surrounding the death of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, who died in Southampton after being stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed he had been the victim of a racist attack.
Musk has forcefully pushed back against these accusations. In a post on X dated June 10, shortly after the Belfast attack, he wrote that it was “murderous migrants targeting innocent people in their home town that is making people angry, not ‘social media!’”
Watchdog groups have continued to criticize Musk’s role in the unrest. The US-based Centre for Countering Digital Hate recently released an assessment concluding that social media played a “significant role” in fuelling the Belfast violence, and alleged that Musk had intentionally “amplified anti-migrant narratives” promoted by far-right actors, extending their reach to millions of global users.