Elon Musk’s deal for Twitter raises concern about China’s influence over the platform
As Covid-19 tore through the United States in 2020, Elon Musk, Tesla Inc.’s billionaire owner, described lockdowns in the country as “fascist” and a violation of citizens’ freedoms.
Two years later, amid far more stringent restrictions in Shanghai, Musk has levelled no such criticism of Beijing’s pandemic response.
The contrast reflected what some human rights advocates and US lawmakers consider a too-friendly relationship between the world’s richest man and authorities in China, Tesla’s second-largest market and a key manufacturing hub for the electric automobile maker.
And so, when Twitter accepted Musk’s offer to buy the popular microblogging platform last month, it sparked concerns that the social media giant could become vulnerable to influence efforts by Beijing – both to target China’s critics on the platform and to bolster its propaganda efforts overseas.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is still pending, and there remains the chance it could fall apart.
The takeover came under further scrutiny this week after it emerged Musk had secured part of the financing for the US$44 billion deal from royalty in Saudi Arabia, a country that ranked 166th out of 180 nations in Reporters Without Borders’ 2022 press freedom index.
Human rights campaigners warned that a friendly figure at Twitter’s helm could embolden or enable Beijing’s efforts to obtain personal information about Chinese users of Twitter, citing the Chinese government’s practice of punishing online dissent and its previous appeals for help from foreign tech companies in those efforts.
Yaqiu Wang, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, urged Musk to ensure there were “mechanisms that will be in place to make sure that any decision regarding Twitter is not affected by Tesla’s business in China”.
Zhou Fengsuo, a prominent US-based human rights campaigner, called Twitter a “sanctuary” for Chinese internet users seeking a Chinese-language online space in which to voice their concerns and interact with overseas dissidents.
“Even a slight chance of their information being leaked would just put a big dampening effect on these people,” said Zhou, once No 5 on Beijing’s most-wanted list because of his role in organising the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989.
Zhou himself was targeted by a US tech company at the behest of Chinese officials: in 2020, his Zoom account was temporarily locked by the video conferencing business after the Chinese government objected to a Tiananmen Square commemorative event Zhou hosted on the platform.
At the time, John Demers, then the assistant US attorney general for national security, said that Zhou’s lockout showed that “no company with significant business interests in China is immune from the coercive power of the Chinese Communist Party”.
Zhou also invoked the 2004 case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly stealing state secrets after Yahoo! helped Chinese authorities identify him.
The Zoom and Yahoo! cases are not exact analogies for Twitter’s potential future, since Twitter has no significant market presence in China. The fact that Twitter and Tesla are separate corporate entities was a “mitigating factor”, Zhou noted.
“But that’s not definitely enough to offset the concern that is well-founded and shared by many people,” he said, pointing to Musk’s track record of avoiding public criticism of China.
Numerous times in recent years, Musk has offered effusive praise of China on a variety of fronts, including its infrastructure investments, manufacturing calibre and space programmes.
And while many US companies have scrambled to extricate themselves from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region amid allegations by Washington of “genocide” and forced labour there, Tesla has bucked the trend, opening a showroom in the region in late 2021 – provoking the ire of US lawmakers.
The expansion into Xinjiang reflected Tesla’s deepening reach within the Chinese market, which the company first entered in 2013. Today, its business in China accounts for around 25 per cent of Tesla’s global revenue, according to company first-quarter data.
The Chinese government has denied it would seek to use Tesla to gain leverage over Twitter following Musk’s takeover, with a foreign ministry spokesman last week characterising those concerns as speculation “with no factual basis at all”.
Wang of Human Rights Watch rejected accusations of fearmongering, asserting: “Raising concern is good – sounding the alarm early to make sure that Musk and his team hear [that] people do have concerns.”
Whether those appeals are getting through remains to be seen. Musk, whose own Twitter account has more than 91 million followers, has not addressed the concerns publicly, nor did he respond to emailed requests for comment. Twitter declined to comment.
Given the unknowns, some users are taking a wait-and-see approach.
“We don’t know what changes Musk will enact in Twitter, but we hope that Twitter won’t give our personal information to anyone,” said an administrator of The Great Translation Movement, a Twitter account run by Chinese volunteers around the world that posts translations of nationalistic comments from China’s social media.
Chinese state media have condemned the account as a smear campaign, with one commentary in the state-run Global Times tabloid accusing it of fuelling negative perceptions of China by amplifying “marginal, extreme viewpoints”.
The attention from China’s state media organs has heightened concerns within the group about members’ safety; the account administrator who spoke with the South China Morning Post requested anonymity, citing fears of retaliation by Chinese authorities.
Adding weight to such fears is Beijing’s practice of prosecuting internet users for content posted to Twitter or other social media platforms overseas.
In one prominent example, a court in China sentenced a Chinese student at the University of Minnesota to six months in prison over tweets he posted about Chinese President Xi Jinping while living in the US.
“This is what ruthless and paranoid totalitarianism looks like,” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said of that case.
But some, like US-based dissident Guo Baosheng, were optimistic that Musk would resist potential efforts by Beijing to pressure him to pass along user information.
Guo was more concerned about the prospect that an unregulated Twittersphere – Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist” – could make it more vulnerable to disinformation spread by state actors.
“What I’m worried about is that there will be a large amount of misinformation and rumours if content regulations are relaxed,” he said. “The Chinese Communist Party potentially seeking to take advantage and create its own disturbances: that’s the scariest thing. The current Twitter restrictions are actually pretty good.”
Among its efforts to counter misinformation, Twitter affixed fact-check warnings on Chinese government posts theorising that the US Army brought the coronavirus to China. The platform also deleted thousands of accounts it said were part of a state-linked campaign to promote narratives favourable to the Chinese Communist Party.
And in 2020, it began labelling state-affiliated media outlets and journalists on the platform – ostensibly covering those from a range of countries but in practice primarily targeting Chinese and Russian accounts.
The labels reduce the visibility of those accounts on parts of Twitter and followed an earlier move to ban state media accounts from using paid advertisements to promote content – complicating Beijing’s efforts to use Twitter to expand the global reach of its state media organs.
Among those hoping for a rollback of those labels is Hu Xijin, the recently retired editor-in-chief of the bellicose state-backed Global Times tabloid who is one of the few figures within China authorised to use Twitter.
“Of course I would hope that Twitter [under Musk] could change its discriminatory treatment of Chinese media workers,” said Hu, citing the drop in engagement he said his account has experienced since being labelled.
“But I doubt that Musk will be able to change the discrimination that has already been formed against us,” said Hu, who did not answer further questions about whether he anticipated direct pressure from Beijing on Musk to reform Twitter policies.
In one possible indicator that he would favour a hands-off approach concerning Chinese propaganda, Musk vowed in March that he would reject any calls to ban Russian news outlets from Starlink – the SpaceX satellite internet service he is providing to Ukraine.
“It’s impossible to stop Chinese state media from creating official Twitter accounts, and we also don’t think it’s right to stop them from doing so, because we believe in free speech,” said the Great Translation Movement account administrator.
But expressing support for the continuation of Twitter’s labelling policy, the administrator added: “It’s important for people to know how credible these sources are.” (South China Morning Post)
