When Elon Musk opened the Tesla factory in Shanghai in 2019, the Chinese government welcomed him with a $ 1 billion cheap land, loan, tax break and subsidy. “I think China is the future,” Musk said happily.
Tesla Road has since made a huge profit, a quarter of the company’s revenue in 2021 comes from China, but not without problems. The company faced consumer revolt and control in China last year due to production defects.
With his Twitter replacement agreement, Musk’s relations with China are about to be strained.
Like all foreign investors in China, he uses Tesla to impress Chinese authorities, who have shown a willingness to influence or punish companies that cross the red lines of politics. Even Apple, the most important company in the world, has approved Chinese demands, including the closure of its App Store.
Musk’s widespread investment in China could be in jeopardy if Twitter disrupts the Communist Party, which has blocked the stadium at home but used it extensively to push Beijing’s foreign policy around the world – often with false or misleading information.
At the same time, China now has a compassionate investor in control of one of the world’s most influential megaphones. Musk made no public comment, for example, when authorities in Shanghai shut down the Tesla plant as part of a nationwide effort to control the recent outbreak of COVID-19, even after criticizing officials in Alameda County, California, for the same action at which the epidemic began. 2020.
“It’s about imagining what could be a conflict of interest in these situations, we’re looking at the possible disinformation that can come out of China,” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. “Now that he is the owner of this company, how could he do so with all the money he has invested tied up there, or most of it?”
Even Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and one of Musk’s biggest rivals in technology, space and media now, has averaged – on Twitter – the skepticism of China’s powerful influence on stage. “Has the Chinese government recently gained power in the city square?” Bezos wrote.
Musk did not explain his plans to change Twitter without promising to release it as a free chat platform, while blocking bots and activity accounts that filled the user base. Even that simple promise to bots can annoy Chinese propagandists, who openly buy fake accounts and use them to reduce claims of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. It is not yet clear if he intends to restore accounts or remove labels that identify some of Beijing’s prominent users as state officials.
Musk did not respond to an email requesting comment. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.
Clearly, China recognizes Twitter’s ability to disseminate information. The government shut down Twitter in 2009 amid racial and ethnic tensions between Muslims and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in the western region where the government later launched a massive crackdown and re-education that the United States had declared a genocide.
Despite the ban, China has stepped up its efforts to use the platform to boost the country’s overseas power. Those measures intensified in 2019 when images of Hong Kong’s democratic protests spread across the internet. China’s state-run media has backtracked on tactics normally reserved for its audiences, accusing the CIA of organizing protests and repeatedly distributing pornographic videos of violent protests while ignoring police brutality.
Tesla cars made in China at a company factory in Shanghai in January 2020. | Reuters
Tesla cars made in China at a company factory in Shanghai in January 2020. | Reuters
A growing group of Chinese spokespersons, many new to Twitter, are beginning to echo the harsh voice of state media, scolding critics and attacking countries that offer encouragement. Described as the “Heroes of the Wolf” after the popular national film, the officials received support from a number of botlian-like accounts. By the end of 2019, Twitter had identified and downgraded multiple accounts. Facebook and YouTube followed suit.
Courageously, the Chinese government repeated its efforts to launch the coronavirus. Many spokesmen and media representatives of the country have used Twitter to spread conspiracy theories, claiming that coronavirus was released from the US bioweapons laboratory and questioned the safety of mRNA vaccines.
Since then, false networks of bots sending close to state officials and state media have circulated videos protesting human rights violations in Xinjiang; undermining the disappearance of Peng Shuai, a professional Chinese tennis player who accused a top Chinese official of sexual harassment; and we are enjoying the success of the Beijing Winter Olympics this year.
In all, Twitter has released reports on networks, often with the help of cybersecurity experts who have linked them to the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party. The company was the first to record government-sponsored accounts, and recently linked with state media, “working with China.”
Despite their knowledge of Chinese strategies, Twitter has found it difficult to stop national information campaigns, said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who is studying communication disinformation.
“It does not matter if each account or thousands of accounts are suspended,” he replied in response. “They build a lot at an amazing price, and by the time the account is set up (which is usually very fast) the account is already doing its job.”
“A lot of unintended information, like Russia’s, is about creating or expanding narratives. Most of China’s disinformation is about repression,” he said.
As Twitter’s new owner, Musk may well face Chinese pressure on other issues as well. They include not only demands from authorities to censor information online even outside China’s Great Firewall — descriptions of Taiwan as anything but a province of China, for example — but also the arrests of Twitter users in China.
In China, Musk’s takeover has raised fears that officials will have even more levers to censor their critics, some of whom use technology to get around the Twitter ban.
Murong Xuecun, a well-known author, was questioned for four hours by police in 2019 for two tweets he had posted three years earlier. One showed a clearly photoshopped image of a naked Xi Jinping, China’s president, on a wrecking ball. The other was a cartoon showing Xi gunning down Santa’s reindeer from the sky.
“I think the Chinese government will be happy that he bought Twitter,” Murong said, “and in the days to come, the government will use his business in China to pressure him to control Twitter and help censor those who criticize the Communist Party and China’s government.”
Privately, he said, he and his friends call the harassment of Twitter users inside China the “complete Twitter cleanup.” Murong estimated that police had questioned tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people about their posts in recent years. The punitive campaign and the growing number of Chinese officials on Twitter show the government cares deeply about what is said on foreign social media, he said, describing officials’ efforts as an attempt to “carry out public opinion and ideological wars” abroad.
“This government has done many similar things and will not stop in the future,” he said. “I don’t know how Musk will deal with this pressure, but looking at his attitude toward China, I think he might turn into a big Chinese censorship machine.”
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Wenbin, brushed aside questions Tuesday about Twitter and Musk’s investments in the country.
“I can tell you are very good at speculating, but without any basis,” he replied to one question.
Even Bezos amended his post about China’s potential leverage over Twitter to suggest that Musk could deftly strike a balance.
“Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity,” he wrote.
Even so, one likely result of Musk’s takeover will be less transparency. As a publicly traded company, Twitter was beholden to shareholder pressure when concerns about disinformation, account bans and rule enforcement affected its share price. That, in turn, forced the platform to explain its policies for countering information campaigns, like those 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 door for China to come in and manipulate the very thing that he has heralded as a strong defense of free speech,” said Angelo Carusone, president of the watchdog group Media Matters for America.