Elon Musk has 119 million followers on Twitter, the platform which he just bought for $44 billion. That’s more followers than Taylor Swift, whose concert tour ticket sales broke Ticketmaster. Getting similar mistreatment to what Donald Trump has endured for years, Elon Musk is now being bullied by Apple, which controls millions of iPhone users’ access to Twitter. First, Apple pulled advertising from Twitter, and then it started threatening to ban Twitter from its App Store.
Musk tweeted at Apple CEO Tim Cook multiple times requesting an explanation, without success. Apple is perhaps the most liberal company in the world, and presumably it is doing the bidding of its own political sponsors, including China, where iPhones are made. Apple is so tightly bound with communist China that Apple’s stock plummeted on news of unrest in China. A resurgence of a Covid-19 variant there has resulted in a return to tyrannical lockdowns, but the masses are resisting this time.
Unable to express themselves on Communist-controlled social media, Chinese citizens have resorted to waving blank sheets of white paper as the most they can say without being arrested. Such tyranny against freedom of speech here in the United States is not so far off.
Musk further tweeted that “Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” Musk’s question is a fair one to ask. When you make a power like Communist China your primary business partner, it would be hard not to be associated with the regime’s tyranny. The timeless principle that you eventually start to act like the people you spend the most time with applies just as easily to multinational companies as it does to the schoolyard.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter represents a critical crack in Big Tech’s solidarity with the left. Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of Silicon Valley. This fissure will force many in the industry to take sides. Apple may be the first to decide whether they want to side with the free speech of Americans or the tyranny of China. They should know better than to trust tyrants over the free market system that brought them into existence.
