Elon Musk's online attacks on former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown over grooming gangs draw on a baseless claim about a Home Office memo supposedly issued 17 years ago, research by BBC Verify has established.
A wave of social media posts - including some amplified by Mr Musk - allege that a 2008 Home Office document advised police not to intervene in child grooming cases because victims had "made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour".
But BBC Verify has carried out extensive searches of Home Office circulars issued across that period and found no evidence that any document containing this advice exists.
Brown - who was prime minister in 2008 - has called the allegations "a complete fabrication" and the Home Office says there "has never been any truth" to them.
Social media posts referencing a memo and using either the phrase "informed choice" or a variation like "lifestyle choice" have circulated for several years with some gaining traction.
But that intensified dramatically since the start of the year, with posts repeating the claim generating tens of millions of views in the past week after Mr Musk amplified several of them on his social media platform, X.
In one post, which has received over 25 million views, Mr Musk alleged that "Gordon Brown sold those little girls for votes" while reposting another user, June Slater, using words that were apparently a variation of the memo claim.
The original unfounded claim about a Home Office...
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