Far-right British MP outperforms most world leaders on X

Far-right British politician Rupert Lowe enjoys much greater visibility on X than world leaders including Andy Burnham, Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, underlining the power of the social network’s owner Elon Musk to amplify extreme voices.

Lowe is leader of Restore Britain, which recent polls say is supported by just 3-5 per cent of UK voters.

Nonetheless, only three world leaders have amassed more views on X than him in the first 10 months of this year: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US President Donald Trump and Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese premier.

Lowe’s X presence has been turbocharged by Musk, the world’s richest person who bought what was then Twitter for $44bn in 2022.

Some 43 per cent of Lowe’s 1.7bn views on X in the first 10 months of the year were from posts that were reposted or commented on by Musk.

Posts by Lowe that were quoted by Musk had almost 100 times the number of views of those where the X owner did not interact. Musk has 241mn followers on X.

Posts by Burnham, meanwhile, had about 261mn views, a sixth as many views as Lowe, according to data from communications consultancy Knox Digital that cover the year to the end of October.

Jock McMillan, founder of Knox Digital and a former adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, said the boost to Lowe’s online views by Musk was more valuable than a multimillion-pound donation.

“Rupert Lowe is only relevant in British politics today because of Elon Musk. Musk has pushed Lowe online 121 times since July 2025, generating more X views than Macron, [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni and [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy,” he said.

He added: “Although foreign actors have supported political parties and individuals in the past, this is undoubtedly the most aggressive example of this kind of partisan promotion in the digital age.”

Lowe, who has 900,000 X followers, set up Restore Britain after he was thrown out of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Restore has pledged to deport “millions” of people from the UK, introduce a ban on the burka and bring forward a referendum on reintroducing the death penalty.

Lowe recently posted on social media that “Islam, as practised by millions of Muslims in Britain, is entirely incompatible with our British way of life”.

He told the FT: “Elon Musk has enabled free speech, which under our constitution should be a given here in Britain but, along with court trials, is under threat.”

However, Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said X was a platform that served the interests of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs.

“Our research has consistently found the same trend,” he said. “Musk’s heavy thumb on the scales favours those he believes will give him and his companies free rein to run roughshod over our laws and our own economic interests and punishes those who favour . . . the politics of empathy and decency.”

X and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The CCDH has estimated that when Musk reposts Lowe’s posts they have gone on to receive an average of 15.6mn views.

Farage, who fell out with Musk last year over far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has amassed just a quarter as many views as Lowe despite having 2.5 times as many followers.

Farage’s party also polls well above Restore Britain, with about 22 per cent of the vote.

Posting on the platform has proved lucrative for Lowe, who has declared more than £113,000 in earnings from X since the 2024 election.