As the world is up in arms over Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that our priorities have gone slightly awry. It seems the contempt we can marshal for an oddball billionaire far exceeds proportion; and our capacity for misdirecting fury stronger than ever.
Musk provokes staggering ire among those who might usually describe themselves as progressive and liberal. Much is said of his social strangeness, private indiscretions, and vast wealth. Curiously little thought, it appears, is given to his role in making the electric car cool or revolutionising space travel.
Perhaps it is a totally understandable impulse to dislike billionaires and their disproportionate power. But that seems to be less about Musk himself and far more about a general sense of immense global unfairness.
And we may not want a powerful communication platform to be in the hands of a singularly wealthy man. But I have bad news for you if you want to know who owns the Washington Post, to name just one example. And it is not necessarily clear why Musk’s ownership of Twitter is any worse than a cadre of independently wealthy investors whose motives are far less transparent than his.
TikTok might well escape a certain level of scrutiny thanks to severe generational segregation. People who make laws simply do not use it
Nevertheless, Musk’s detractors – and they are legion – are despairing at what this takeover might have in store. Not just for Twitter but for the very fabric of the internet, and political culture itself. Amid all of this, something has conveniently slipped under the radar. Video sharing platform TikTok has announced its plans to set up a €600 million data centre in Ireland next year, adding to the 1,100 it already employs here.
It certainly seems strange to me that scorn for Musk would ever generate more moral outrage in this country than our apparent acceptance of TikTok’s investment.
The site’s parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese. It is subject to Chinese law and, therefore, in the bailiwick of the Chinese government. Concerns should abound already: the Chinese Communist Party has a bit of a track record in quashing dissent and surveilling its citizens. TikTok has already been subject to an investigation over threats it poses to the national security of the United States.
In 2019 the platform suspended a 17-year-old American student for imploring her viewers to research the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighur Muslims. After fumbling around for an excuse the company ultimately claimed this was simply the result of “human moderation error”.
Perhaps. Mistakes happen all the time. But a Guardian investigation just months prior revealed documents addressed to TikTok’s moderators, directing them to censor videos on certain topics: Tiananmen Square and Tibetan Independence for example. And shortly before that the Washington Post noted that videos about the highly recorded Hong Kong pro-democracy protests were conspicuous in their absence on the app.
All of this should be hair raising enough. But the influence TikTok wields should throw these concerns into even harsher light. As of late last year, in terms of internet traffic, TikTok was accessed more than Google. That is reach Twitter could hardly dream of achieving.
But despite this, TikTok might well escape a certain level of scrutiny thanks to severe generational segregation. People who make laws simply do not use it. In fact, both sites operate on totally different dimensions. Twitter is disproportionately occupied by journalists, academics and politicians. But TikTok works more like Facebook. If Facebook is where ideas circulate for those over 50, TikTok does the same thing for teenagers. In light of this, we should once again ask ourselves whether we are directing our opprobrium towards the right target.
We should hold fire on Musk for now. He might just make things a lot better
Of course Twitter has its problems. In fact that is what Musk is seeking to rectify. And these problems are not technical ones that can be smoothed out with better coding and product design. Though, of course, those things matter too.
No, the problem facing Twitter and all social media platforms are philosophical and theoretical. What does free speech mean? How do we honour it as a value? Should this come under the purview of governments, supra-governmental organisations or private companies? Who is allowed to say what?
These are bewilderingly difficult questions that return myriad competing, and often incompatible perspectives. But at least Musk is interested in trying to answer them. What can be said of TikTok?
If the threat of Musk wielding his influence, or imposing his version of free speech, on Twitter has caused more upset than the actualities of TikTok’s gargantuan reach and track record, then we might want to revisit our priorities.
And of course it is possible to care about two things at once. Two things can also be bad in different ways at the same time. Though we should hold fire on Musk for now. He might just make things a lot better.
The difference between the two is so profound and simple. One of these companies is in the purview of a genocidal regime that actively censors its own citizens and disallows dissent. And the other one isn’t. Let’s make sure we’re angry about the right one.