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So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?
Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.
did a control-f on this thread for the word "china" and nothing came up, so I'll just point out that before Musk took over Twitter China had no leverage over the platform to censor views they find objectionable, given that Twitter is already inaccessible in China. But Musk has a lot to lose if China were to pull their support for Tesla, since so much of Tesla's manufacturing capacity is located there.
Which means that if China were to, say, take offense at the views of people who are pro-Taiwan or anti-Xianjing-concentration-camps and wanted those views taken off of Twitter, they have a really tempting point of leverage! "That's a nice Tesla business you've got there, Musk, shame if something were to happen to it."
This is definitely the sort of thing that's already happened to other businesses over which China has had leverage-- see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy for when Blizzard fired a bunch of people for being vocally pro-Hong Kong on stream, presumably to avoid China financially penalizing Blizzard in retaliation.
Given that twitter is headquartered in the US, china censoring 'discourse' in the US would be a defcon 1 national security event and something the media of all colors would be all over, elon seeming to be a patriotic american, and china having a similar level of 'influence' with many other executives and companies in america due to the very deep trade ties between us, I don't think this is a large threat. It probably won't happen - and even if it did, the response from the US, including the "sjw bluechecks", would be significant.
This is hardly a one-off-- there was a nearly identical incident with an NBA player (see https://time.com/5694150/nba-china-hong-kong/ ). There was also an incident with Disney putting a pro-Dalai Lama movie out which China took umbrage at, the result of which was that Disney apologized and promised never to do it again: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Disney-s-magical-thinking-won-t-keep-politics-away-from-Mulan . I have not bothered to dredge up further examples, but seems like there's a lot of them, and the net effect is even greater given that the way to avoid getting embroiled in similar scandals is to never offend China in the first place.
They do indeed have that level of financial influence and it is indeed significant in practice; the fact that China's influence is felt in a huge number of other places in the US economy is not a reason to feel better about China having similar leverage over the owner of Twitter.
EDIT: from incidents where China has exerted leverage in the past the response from American politicians has not generally been anything more than worried hand-wringing. I see no particular reason it'll be different for China exerting influence over Twitter, especially if it comes in the form of Twitter algorithmically downplaying stuff China might get offended by.
As ilforte said, the nba and disney things are incredibly minor and unsurprising (compare to disney's desire to make culturally-acceptable movies in the US) compared to politically censoring one of the main social media platforms in the united states. The latter is something that many maintream publications and politicans, even govt or intelligence agencies, have their eyes trained on like a hawk. If china really convinced musk to censor tianmen square 2.0 on twitter, the reaction would be severe.
I don't think there's any evidence to say this. What evidence we do have, says they wouldn't care at all. Yes, the situations aren't perfectly analogous, but they are the best we have to predict what the official government reaction would be.
The closest analogy would be 'russian troll farms on social media', though? It's arguably less of a provocation, since they're just creating accounts and posting, instead of 'censoring', but there was a lot of noise about that.
Even for the china nba and disney thing, we know about them because of "mainstream media" reporting!
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What if it's not full out censoring but a infobox with a warning, or a mild deprioritization?
What do you think would've happened if twitter put a misinformation infobox on a lot of the Uighur concentration camp content a few years ago, or deprioritized it? There would have been massive backlash. Internal whistleblowers, hearings, investigations, etc.
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? Some entertainment workers deleting tweets and so on under CCP's pressure suggests that it's plausible that the world's richest man may turn his company into an asset of a foreign propaganda?
The degree to which Americans accept their untouchability and superiority over the Chinese as the norm, and flinch when this assumption is punctured, is just astounding and unsettling. This NBA story would be a nothingburger, if not for the implicit «wait, those yellow monkeys got an Imperial Citizen to bend the knee?» gasp. (Notably, much greater and more thin-skinned crackdown from locally powerful parties, e.g. team ADL unbanking Kanye West, is received meekly and with nuanced understanding, or kowtowing approval).
Nah, that's pretty much it, a few cases of low-level hysterics.
Meanwhile, some fake news in Bloomberg have become a pretext to wholly eradicate China's premier corporation, and there isn't even a pretext claimed for the current round of sanctions devastating advanced sectors of Chinese economy. All this is accepted matter-of-factly by the entirety of the political class and general population, as the Empire's natural entitlement.
It's okay to approve of this, but please stop the underdog act.
This just sounds like a childish sneer. I'm no fan of the GAE but until recently it was completely normal to believe that your tribe or nation was superior to others. I do think America is better than China in pretty much every way that matters and that American people are for the most part better than Chinese people, mostly because China is so damaged. Applied Marxism and government thuggery really did a number on the (mainland) Chinese. Their culture and morals are degraded. Not just different, but degraded. So yeah, I do find it disgusting when American companies kowtow to Chinese pressure, in the same way one might be disgusted at anyone acquiescing to the demands of the Japanese Empire, or the Nazi State. Perhaps you feel the same about Putin.
Americans can't do this because they haven't woken up to the reality of what China is like. I still hear people tell me about the "huge" "middle class" in China (lmao), how only the government is bad and they're just like us, etc. etc. So they have to invent a story for themselves so they don't feel like they're "punching down." But we are punching down, and we should be. Along with the rest of the West.
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No, you've missed the point entirely. The point is that even if China were to exert influence on Twitter, past events show us that most likely nobody in the government will give a shit.
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Let's make this clear, he's the world's richest man for as long as Tesla's doing well.
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