Elon Musk has shared a post on social media that wrongly claims 150,000 people took part in anti-immigration protests in the Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane, despite police confirming the real total of those in attendance was 21,000.
Musk shared a post from an X user showing a video of a protest held in Sydney on Sunday, under the banner March for Australia.
The original post claimed: “50,000 in Brisbane/ 100,000 in Sydney/ Not bad for an ad hoc protest without any MSN [sic] promotion. X proved again [it] is the only media now”.
Musk shared the post, with the caption: “𝕏 is the media now because you are the media now”.
However, New South Wales police confirmed that an estimated 15,000 people – just 15% of the number in the post shared by Musk – attended the protest in Sydney.
Queensland police confirmed that about 6,000 protesters came out in Brisbane for the protest. In Melbourne, police estimated 5,000 took to the streets, but this included the protesters and antifascist counter-protesters.
Victoria police said there were an estimated 3,000 people representing the March for Australia, 800 people from the Rally for Palestine group, and the remainder of people from joining as part of “multiple other groups”.
March for Australia was asked for its own estimates of attender numbers, but did not reply.
Scuffles broke out between the anti-immigration and antifascist camps at the Melbourne protest, with police using teargas and riot shields to keep them apart.
Twelve people were arrested in relation to the Melbourne protests, including seven who were expected to be charged with assault police, resist police, attempted robbery and fail to follow police direction.
The March for Australia protests were promoted by neo-Nazis, as well as anti-lockdown figures who came to prominence during the pandemic, and other fringe groups. But no group publicly claimed responsibility for organising the protests.
The event was condemned as hateful by the Albanese government, with the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, saying: “There is no place in our country for people who seek to divide and undermine our social cohesion.
“Nothing could be less Australian.”
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The government says Australia’s net overseas migration figure is actually down 37% from a recent peak.
Some politicians attended the rallies, including One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson and senator Malcolm Roberts in Canberra and Katter’s Australian party federal MP Bob Katter in Townsville.
Musk has been sharing anti-immigration content from the UK and Australia, including videos and posts with anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The billionaire, who owns the X platform, also reposted a post from British far-right activist Tommy Robinson about the Australian marches, in which Robinson posted: “The natives across the west have had enough of forced population replacement as anti immigration protests hit Australia”.
In addition to the protests that occurred in Sydney’s capital cities, there were some smaller gatherings in regional centres organised under the March for Australia banner, including one in Newcastle in NSW with 500 attenders, one in Echuca/Moama in NSW with 600, and a march in Wodonga in Victoria attended by 250 people.
NSW police said that there had been plans for a protest in the Coffs-Clarence police district, which takes in Coffs Harbour, but “no one turned up”.
