Happy Nice Mall

SAN FRANCISCO — 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 the future is China,” Mr. Musk cheered.

Since then, Tesla’s path has been lucrative, with a quarter of the company’s revenue in 2021 coming from China, but not without problems. The firm is facing consumer and regulatory rebellion Due to manufacturing defects in China last year.

With the deal to take over Twitter, Mr. Musk’s ties with China are about to become even more strained.

Like all foreign investors in China, he operates Tesla at the whim of willing Chinese officials. influence or punish companies Those who cross the political red lines. Even Apple, the most valuable company in the world, China bowed to demandsIncluding censoring the App Store.

Musk’s extensive investments in China may be at risk if Twitter annoys the Communist Party state — which has banned the platform in its home country but widely used it to propagate Beijing’s foreign policy around the world — often with false or misleading information.

At the same time, China now has a likeable investor taking control of one of the world’s most influential megaphones. Mr. Musk, for example, said nothing publicly when authorities in Shanghai closed Tesla’s factory as part of an effort to contain the latest Covid-19 outbreak. He scolds officials in Alameda County, California.for a similar step when the pandemic begins in 2020.

“It’s about looking at the disinformation that might come from China and thinking about what the conflict of interest might be in these situations,” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. “As the owner of this company now, how is he going to handle this since all or most of his investments are tied there?”

Even Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of Mr. Musk’s biggest rivals in tech, space and now the media, weighed in on Twitter to question China’s potential dominance over the platform. “Did the Chinese government put some pressure on the town square?” Written by Mr. Bezos.

Mr. Musk did not elaborate on his plans to replace Twitter, other than promising to release it as a free speech platform while banning bots and artificial accounts that populate its user base. Even this simple commitment on bots could offend China’s propagandists. Openly purchased fake accounts and used them missing claims related to human rights violations in Xinjiang. It is unclear whether Beijing plans to restore or remove the tags from accounts that identify some of its most prominent users as government officials.

Mr Musk did not respond to an email asking for comment. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

What is clear is that China recognizes Twitter’s ability to disseminate information. The government banned Twitter in 2009 amid ethnic riots between Muslims and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the capital of the western province of Xinjiang, which the government later initiated. mass detention and re-education campaign The United States declared genocide.

Despite the ban, China has stepped up efforts to use the platform to expand the country’s overseas influence. These movements intensified in 2019 when footage of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong spread across the global internet. Chinese state media retreated with tactics He accused the Central Intelligence Agency of orchestrating the protests and repeatedly posting horrific videos of protester violence while ignoring police brutality towards the crowd.

A growing chorus of Chinese diplomats, many of whom had just taken to Twitter, began to echo the harsh tone of the state media, shouting at critics and sharply attacking countries for encouragement. Later described as “Wolf Warriors” a popular nationalist movie, these officials received support from a dark bot-like stack of accounts. At the end of 2019, Twitter detected and downloaded most accounts. Facebook and YouTube followed suit with their own purges.

Fearlessly, the Chinese government redoubled its efforts when the coronavirus pandemic began. Most of the diplomats and representatives of the state media used Twitter spreading conspiracy theoriesarguing that the coronavirus was released from a US bioweapons laboratory and questioning the safety of mRNA vaccines.

Since then, fake botnets posting alongside diplomats and state media have circulated the controversial videos. human rights violation in Xinjiang; underestimate The disappearance of Peng ShuaiChinese professional tennis player who accused a senior Chinese official of sexual assault; and polishing The success of the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year.

Twitter has published reports about the networks, often with the help of cybersecurity experts who associate them with the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party. The company was one of the first to tag state-sponsored accounts, and more recently described its ties to state media as “affiliated with the Chinese state.”

Darren Linvill, a professor of social media disinformation at Clemson University, said that even with knowledge of China’s techniques, Twitter finds it difficult to stop the country’s information campaigns.

“It doesn’t matter if an individual account or even thousands of accounts are suspended,” he said in a written response. “They create more at an astonishing rate, and when the account is suspended (which usually happens very quickly) the account has already done its job.”

“A lot of disinformation, as Russia does, is about creating or amplifying narratives. A lot of Chinese disinformation is about suppressing them,” he added.

As Twitter’s new owner, Mr. Musk may face Chinese pressure on other issues as well. These include not only requests from authorities to censor online information even outside of China’s Great Firewall – for example, Taiwan’s identification as anything outside a province of China – but also arrests of Twitter users in China.

In China, the takeover of Mr Musk has raised fears that authorities will have more leverage to censor his critics, some of whom are using the technology to circumvent the Twitter ban.

Murong Xuecun, a well-known writer, was questioned by the police for four hours in 2019 for two tweets he posted three years ago. One featured a photoshopped image of China’s greatest leader, Xi Jinping, nude on a wrecking ball. The other was a cartoon showing Mr. Xi shooting Santa’s reindeer from the sky.

“I think the Chinese government will be happy that he bought Twitter,” said Mr. Murong.

Privately, he said he and his friends called the harassment of Twitter users in China “a complete Twitter cleanup”. Mr. Murong estimated that the police had questioned tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people regarding their duties in recent years. The punitive campaign and a growing number of Chinese officials on Twitter show that the government cares deeply about what is being said on foreign social media, describing the authorities’ efforts as an attempt to “wage public and ideological wars” abroad.

“This government has done a lot of things like this and it won’t stop in the future,” he said. I don’t know how Musk will deal with this pressure, but given his attitude towards China, I think he could turn into a big Chinese censorship machine.”

Wang Wenbin, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tossed aside questions on Twitter and Mr. Musk’s investments in the country on Tuesday. “I would say you are very good at speculating, but it has no basis,” he replied to a question.

Even Mr. Bezos has altered his post about China’s potential influence on Twitter, suggesting that Mr. Musk could strike an ingenious balance. “Musk is extremely good at handling this kind of complexity,” he wrote.

Even so, one possible consequence of Mr Musk’s takeover would be less transparency. As a publicly traded company, Twitter has faced shareholder pressure when concerns about disinformation, account bans and enforcement of the rules affected its share price. This forced the platform to reveal its policies to counter information campaigns such as those originating from China. Mr. Musk is less privileged to answer such questions as he plans to take the company private.

“Even if I just took it for what it said – the idea that Twitter is an enthusiastic tool to help promote more democratic, pro-democracy reforms here and abroad – it basically created a backdoor for China to come in and manipulate the latest situation. Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said it was heralded as a strong defense of freedom of speech.

Steven Lee Myers reported from San Francisco and Paul Mozur from Seoul. Claire Fu contributed to research.