The complainant argued Mr Clayton “lied” when he said there was more hate speech on Twitter, and, on being challenged by Mr Musk, when he claimed he had not personally been on Twitter for a while. He also objected to the statement that the BBC is not state funded.     

The ECU noted that Mr Clayton did not provide examples to support his suggestion. But analysis by a number of monitoring organisations had identified the return of previously banned Twitter accounts, in some numbers, which were shown to include offensive comments.

Mr Clayton’s explanation to Mr Musk as to why he had difficulty in providing examples, was that he had recently stopped “using a feed” from Twitter. BBC News explained this was a reference to a feed powered by Twitter’s algorithm that suggests content ”for you”, the absence of which had restricted his exposure to general content on Twitter. As stopping such a feed would not have prevented Mr Clayton from viewing Twitter, the ECU did not accept what he said to Mr Musk was materially misleading..

The BBC is funded through the licence fee which is paid individually by viewers. The description “state funded” or “government funded” is therefore misleading and it was appropriate to refute that claim during the interview.

Not Upheld