When Elon Musk opened a Tesla factory in Shanghai in 2019, the Chinese government welcomed him with billions of dollars’ worth of cheap land, loans, tax breaks and subsidies. “I really think China is the future,” Musk cheered.
Published : 30 Apr 2022, 12:33 AM
Tesla’s road since then has been lucrative,with a quarter of the company’s revenue in 2021 coming from China, but notwithout problems. The firm faced a consumer and regulatory revolt in China lastyear over manufacturing flaws.
With his deal to take over Twitter, Musk’sties to China are about to get even more fraught.
Like all foreign investors in China, heoperates Tesla at the pleasure of the Chinese authorities, who have shown awillingness to influence or punish companies that cross political red lines.Even Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has given in to Chinese demands,including censoring its App Store.
Musk’s extensive investments in China couldbe at risk if Twitter upsets the Communist Party state, which has banned theplatform at home but used it extensively to push Beijing’s foreign policyaround the globe — often with false or misleading information.
At the same time, China now has asympathetic investor who is taking control of one of the world’s mostinfluential megaphones. Musk said nothing publicly, for example, whenauthorities in Shanghai shut down Tesla’s plant as part of the citywide effortto control the latest COVID-19 outbreak, even after lambasting officials inAlameda County, California, for a similar step when the pandemic began in 2020.
“It’s concerning to think about what couldbe a conflict of interests in these situations, looking at disinformation thatcould come out of China,” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor ofdigital media technology at the University of Alabama. “How would he, as now anowner of this company, handle that since all of his investments are tied upthere, or most of them?”
Even Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon andone of Musk’s biggest rivals in tech, space and now media, weighed in — onTwitter — to question China’s potential sway over the platform. “Did theChinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Bezoswrote.
Musk has not detailed his plans forchanging Twitter except to promise to free it up as a platform for free speech,while banning bots and artificial accounts that populate its user base. Eventhat simple pledge on bots could irk China’s propagandists, who have openlybought fake accounts and used them to undercut claims of human rights abuses inXinjiang. It is not clear whether he intends to restore accounts or removelabels that identify some of Beijing’s most prominent users as state officials.
Musk did not respond to an email requestingcomment. A spokeswoman for Twitter declined to comment.
What is clear is that China recognisesTwitter’s ability to spread information. The government banned Twitter in 2009amid ethnic riots between Muslims and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the capital ofXinjiang, the western region where the government later started a massdetention and reeducation campaign that the United States has declared agenocide.
Despite the ban, China stepped up its ownefforts to use the platform to extend the country’s sway overseas. Those movesintensified in 2019 when images of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong spreadacross the global internet. China’s state media pushed back with tactics oftenreserved for its domestic audiences, accusing the CIA of orchestrating theprotests and repeatedly broadcasting lurid videos of protester violence whileignoring police brutality against the crowds.
A growing chorus of Chinese diplomats, manyfresh to Twitter, began to echo the harsh tone of state media, shouting downcritics and pointedly attacking countries that offered encouragement. Describedas “Wolf Warriors” after a popular nationalist movie, these officials receivedsupport from a murky mass of botlike accounts. By the end of 2019, Twitter hadidentified and taken down many of the accounts. Facebook and YouTube followedwith purges of their own.
Undaunted, China’s government redoubled itsefforts when the coronavirus pandemic began. Many of the diplomats and statemedia representatives used Twitter to spread conspiracy theories, arguing thatthe coronavirus had been released from a US bioweapons laboratory and callinginto question the safety of mRNA vaccines.
Since then, inauthentic networks of botsposting alongside diplomats and state media have spread videos disputing humanrights violations in Xinjiang; downplaying the disappearance of Peng Shuai, theChinese professional tennis player who accused a top Chinese official of sexualassault; and buffing the success of the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year.
Through it all, Twitter has releasedreports on the networks, often with the help of cybersecurity experts who havelinked them to China’s government or the Chinese Communist Party. The companywas one of the first to label government-backed accounts, and more recentlylinks to government media, as “China state affiliated.”
Even with knowledge of China’s techniques,Twitter has found it hard to stop the country’s information campaigns, saidDarren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who studies social mediadisinformation.
“It doesn’t matter if an individual accountor even thousands of accounts are suspended,” he said in a written response.“They create more at an astounding rate, and by the time the account issuspended (which is often very quickly) the account has already done its job.”
“A lot of disinformation, like what Russiahas done, is about creating or amplifying narratives. A lot of Chinesedisinformation is about suppressing them,” he said.
As Twitter’s new owner, Musk may well faceChinese pressure on other issues as well. They include not only demands from authoritiesto censor information online even outside China’s Great Firewall — descriptionsof Taiwan as anything but a province of China, for example — but also thearrests of Twitter users in China.
In China, Musk’s takeover has raised fearsthat officials will have even more levers to censor their critics, some of whomuse technology to get around the Twitter ban.
Murong Xuecun, a well-known author, wasquestioned for four hours by police in 2019 for two tweets he had posted threeyears earlier. One showed a clearly photoshopped image of a naked Xi Jinping,China’s top leader, on a wrecking ball. The other was a cartoon showing Xigunning down Santa’s reindeer from the sky.
“I think the Chinese government will behappy that he bought Twitter,” Murong said, “and in the days to come, thegovernment will use his business in China to pressure him to control Twitterand help censor those who criticise the Communist Party and China’sgovernment.”
Privately, he said, he and his friends callthe harassment of Twitter users inside China the “complete Twitter cleanup.”Murong estimated that police had questioned tens of thousands, if not hundredsof thousands, of people about their posts in recent years. The punitivecampaign and the growing number of Chinese officials on Twitter show thegovernment cares deeply about what is said on foreign social media, he said,describing officials’ efforts as an attempt to “carry out public opinion andideological wars” abroad.
“This government has done many similarthings and will not stop in the future,” he said. “I don’t know how Musk willdeal with this pressure, but looking at his attitude toward China, I think hemight turn into a big Chinese censorship machine.”
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry ofForeign Affairs, Wang Wenbin, brushed aside questions Tuesday about Twitter andMusk’s investments in the country.
“I can tell you are very good atspeculating, but without any basis,” he replied to one question.
Even Bezos amended his post about China’spotential leverage over Twitter to suggest that Musk could deftly strike abalance.
“Musk is extremely good at navigating thiskind of complexity,” he wrote.
Even so, one likely result of Musk’stakeover will be less transparency. As a publicly traded company, Twitter wasbeholden to shareholder pressure when concerns about disinformation, accountbans and rule enforcement affected its share price. That, in turn, forced theplatform to explain its policies for countering information campaigns, likethose originating in China. With Musk planning to take the company private,there is less prerogative to respond to such inquiries.
“Even if I just take him at what he says —his idea about Twitter as an aspirational tool to help drive more democratic,pro-democratic reforms here and abroad — he has basically created a back doorfor China to come in and manipulate the very thing that he has heralded as astrong defence of free speech,” said Angelo Carusone, president of the watchdoggroup Media Matters for America.
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