Love her or hate her, Candace Owens put it perfectly recently. While people on the political left seem to revere celebrities, people on the right, at least in the West, seem to fawn just as illogically over dubiously moral technocrats. She was talking, of course, about Elon Musk, current X (formerly Twitter) owner and kingmaker of the 2024 Presidential Election. What if I were to tell you, though, that Elon Musk is a bigger threat to personal liberty in the West than the likes of Xi Jinping are in the East?
Musk’s Long-Term Goal to Turn X Into WeChat
In 2022, shortly after purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk made no secret of his long-term goal to eventually turn Twitter into the equivalent of the Chinese app WeChat. As he then made clear in an internal Tesla meeting:
“In China, you can, like, live on WeChat. Everyone is really like, ‘We live on WeChat.’ You do payments. You do everything. It’s great. WeChat is kickass, and we don’t have anything like WeChat outside of China. So, my idea would be like, ‘How about we just copy WeChat! Copy them!’”
Elon is also 100% right. If you visit China today, one of the first things you will have to do is download WeChat just to be able to function in Chinese society. Without the app, it is inordinately difficult to do even simple things like purchase train tickets or pay for basic goods or services. During the pandemic, it was even impossible to go to work or leave your home without WeChat first generating a health code to allow you to do so.
Make no mistake, though, WeChat isn’t just a payment app. In China, WeChat really is, as Elon Musk calls it, a ubiquitous “everything app.” It’s how you book health appointments, it’s how you access government services. It’s even how the Chinese pay parking tickets and apply for jobs. However, WeChat is also instrumental when it comes to how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) monitors citizens before, if necessary, punishing them for dissent.
The Dark Side of WeChat
At present, Elon Musk’s X doesn’t function as a ubiquitous payments app like WeChat does. However, X-Money is due to launch on X later this year. This is part of a roadmap that Musk himself admits will see X eventually become an “everything app” on a similar scale to WeChat.
Musk has even gone so far as to say that with X-Money, you won’t require a bank account anymore. Instead, you’ll be able to live your entire financial life through X. If this is the case, though, it is imperative that X users are aware of the dark side of WeChat, especially if Musk plans to emulate WeChat so completely.
Let us not forget that WeChat isn’t just a payments app. For many Chinese, WeChat is their de facto gateway to the Internet, similar to how Facebook is for many people in the West. Sadly, this gives the Chinese Communist Party near-total control over how Chinese citizens live their online lives and what media they consume.
- During the largest-ever protests against the CCP in Hong Kong in 2019, Chinese authorities were successful in making sure that almost no one on the Chinese mainland was aware that any protests were taking place.
- Often, when peaceful protests against authorities are made public on WeChat, the CCP reframes these as violent uprisings stemming from foreign (often British or American) interference in local affairs.
- In regions like Tibet, being outspoken against CCP policies, especially those that limit cultural and religious freedoms, can see people incarcerated or simply banned from WeChat. When this happens, people are forced to live in financial limbo, often without access to basic government services.
- WeChat is instrumental to the CCP’s Social Credit Score system. This is a system that punishes citizens for bad behaviors like smoking or being overtly critical of the CCP itself. Punishments can include fines, limits on access to basic services like public transport, and even being publicly named and shamed on an in-app “Deadbeat Map,” which can sometimes show the partial real-world addresses of so-called “Deadbeats.”
- At present, WeChat is incorporating AI to automatically censor user posts, as well as advise users when they might be about to post or message something that the CCP might consider inappropriate. In fact, China is being so bold as to attempt to use AI to erase all knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Thanks to the way the CCP uses WeChat to monitor citizens, Amnesty International ranks WeChat as the worst app for privacy out of all worldwide instant messaging/social media apps.
Elon Musk Would Never Allow Such Government Interference in X – Would He?
On the right, Elon Musk at present has a near Messiah-like following. The very idea that he might willfully create a Western equivalent to WeChat with a backdoor straight to the State might therefore seem preposterous. This is especially true when we consider how, when Musk bought Twitter, he was quick to expose how the U.S. government had previously been able to pressure Twitter to censor news and political views throughout the Coronavirus pandemic. There is just one thing we need to remember.
Regardless of how much people might love Musk, X won’t be Elon Musk’s pet social media project forever. Just like how Musk bought Twitter from Jack Dorsey, someone else will one day be at the helm of X. Moreover, while Musk might champion free speech today, X as an app is just a commercial social media platform that has no constitutional obligation to protect anything like free speech in the future.
Put simply, Elon won’t be at the helm of X forever. Whatever he builds today, even if you believe he has the best intentions, won’t be under his control or even influence tomorrow. – And that will probably be exactly when X becomes an equivalent of WeChat completely.