Who is James Clayton? BBC reporter interviews Elon Musk, gets called out over hate speech on Twitter question

In an unexpected late-night interview, Elon Musk called out a reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC, James Clayton, for lying about the amount of hate speech on Twitter.

After taking control of Twitter, Musk has been making a number of changes to the platform. And one of the most recent ones included him labeling the BBC as a “government-funded media” outlet. Although it is no surprise that the BBC charges taxpayers an annual licensing fee, the media house did not particularly enjoy being labeled by Musk as such. Twitter later changed the label to ‘publicly funded.’

Soon after this controversy, Clayton, BBC’s North America tech reporter, bagged an interview with Musk. The impromptu interview was conducted at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and broadcast live on Twitter Spaces. While Musk answered a number of questions, mostly revolving around Twitter, one particular question seemed to have thrown him off.

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Clayton asked the Tesla founder to respond to claims that hate speech had become rampant on Twitter since his takeover. Musk challenged and asked if he had seen more hate speech himself. Clayton changed his phrasing and said that he had come across ‘hateful content’ which included ‘slightly sexist’ remarks. At this, Clayton was asked by Musk to give him an example of the offensive content that he claimed that he had seen. Clayton failed to do so.

Musk replied: “I say sir that you don’t know what you are talking about… because you cannot give me a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. You claimed that hateful content is high. That is false, you just lied.”

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Who is James Clayton? 

James Clayton is based out of San Francisco, California. He was appointed as the North America technology reporter for BBC in April 2020. Prior to that, he was the correspondent for BBC Newsnight.

He has over 22,000 followers on Twitter and his Twitter ID is @JamesClayton5. He does not have an Instagram account. As a reporter, Clayton has covered some big stories including Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower, Twitter labeling ‘good’ bot accounts, the Haiti earthquake, a US gunshot-detection firm, and so on.

Not much is known about his personal life. According to online reports, Clayton makes ranging from $20,000 – $100,000.