A British grandfather has revealed he may be arrested by police after social media trolls used his face to spread racist bile across the internet.
Nigel Addison, a 68-year-old former councillor from Droitwich, Worcestershire, has unwillingly been the face of a racism-espousing Twitter/X profile that went by the fake name of Barry Stanton since 2017.
The account, which had nearly 115,000 followers before it was suspended from X on Friday, would regularly share anti-Semitic and racist messages with Nigel’s face, often with a crudely drawn Hitler-esque moustache attached to his face.
One viral tweet from 2017 read: ‘Just picked my lad up from school. he tells me he was forced to read the korma in religion class. Bloody outrage.’
Nigel told the Mirror: ‘It makes me frightened for their safety. If people saw that and genuinely believed that was me and then they put that together with the photos of my grandchildren then that can lead people to be abusive toward them.’
He added that he was particularly scared in the wake of countless arrests made during the far-right riots that plagued the UK in August.
Nigel Addison, a 68-year-old former councillor (pictured) from Droitwich, Worcestershire, has unwillingly been the face of a racism-espousing Twitter /X profile
Addison said he was worried that he would be arrested for the tweets (File image)
He said: ‘I can’t underestimate how, scared is a strong word, that I could get a knock on my door by the police saying “you’re under arrest for posting all these racist remarks”.
‘A woman up in Liverpool posted some remark and has now been sent to prison. I think, that could happen to me because of this person who is trying to stir up racial hatred.’
He previously revealed that he was once on the verge of tears as a result of the hatred he was getting for being the face of the racist account.
‘I must have got 30 messages the other night and it was just constant,’ he told Worcester News.
‘It was just so overwhelming I could have cried. I was just thinking what the hell is going on?’
Elon Musk, who finalised the deal to buy Twitter in October 2022, stripped back many of the content moderation systems in place before he took over, leaving racist, sexist and anti-Semitic behaviour to grow on his social media platform.
He has also been forced to apologise himself for endorsing an anti-Semitic theory that Jewish people have been pushing a ‘dialectical hatred against whites.’
He said in response to the post in November: ‘You have said the actual truth.’
In January, he visited Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland to apologise and lay a wreath at the wall of death, before taking part in a short memorial ceremony.