Will Twitter—Now X—Morph into China’s Totalitarian Everything-App?

Elon Musk isn’t pulling punches. He’s on the record stating he wants Twitter (now “X”), to become the Western world’s version of WeChat. As a visitor to China in 2019, I experienced firsthand the one app-to-rule-them-all. Spoiler alert: it’s much easier to control people once they must do everything—shopping, buying plane tickets, getting the news—through one platform.

For those unaware, China’s super-app, WeChat, offers all-in-one features, such as financial transacting, social networking, ridesharing, and so much more. Put simply, if you don’t have WeChat in China, you’re locked out of society.

Naturally, proponents of the everything-app idea are quick to point out its superb ease and convenience. (You don’t have to press so many buttons!)

But as readers of the Great Wakeup know, the powers-that-shouldn’t-be always emphasize convenience when they’re busy centralizing control via tech.

Profound dangers are in store for us should Musk get his way. China shows us this. For one, WeChat faces no other competitor. It is the only “official app” of the communist country. All legal documentations (and surveillance), including national identification, along with all financial banking information, resides within the app.

As Journalists Hoskins and Fang reported for the BBC News: “Launched by technology giant Tencent in 2011, WeChat is now used by almost all of China's 1.4bn people. Calling it a super-app is an understatement. Its services include messaging, voice and video calling, social media, food delivery, mobile payments, games, news and even dating. It is like WhatsApp, Facebook, Apple Pay, Uber, Amazon, Tinder, and a whole lot more rolled into one. It is so woven into the fabric of Chinese society that it is almost impossible to live there without it.

Further, China has on many occasions frozen individual citizens’ accounts based on social censoring that the app can monitor in real time. Under the COVID nightmare, the app also restricted people’s movements in China, location-tracking them with results sent to government officials. It got so draconian, the app enabled citizens to be barred from accessing food supplies or medications if they were in “unauthorized” locations.

WeChat also holds the power to connect (or disconnect) calls to family members or friends, and to access personal photos. As Forbes contributor Arthur Herman reports, “In 2020, the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab found that WeChat imposes real-time automatic censorship of chat images through a mix of text recognition, visual recognition, and detection of detecting [sic] duplicate files. Once WeChat picks up an image that’s subject to restriction, it immediately blocks all users from sending that image.”

Is this really what we want in the U.S.?

Trusting Westerners may believe Musk’s (recent) anti-authoritarian stance since buying Twitter means he would never dream of using such powers for evil. But let me remind you of Lord Acton’s famous quote: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Praised nowadays for his anti-woke stance, Musk can’t be trusted. Not because he’s a bad guy. But because this is too much centralized control for anyone to wield. Especially someone who happens to be a WEF Young Global Leader—someone whose grandfather was the head of Canada’s Technocratic Movement.

To quote one more luminary, astronomer Carl Sagan said, “Many of the dangers we face indeed arise from science and technology—but, more fundamentally, because we have become powerful without becoming commensurately wise. The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now require a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us.”

The danger of a super app requires we develop our own superpowers—in the form of greater consideration and greater foresight—before it’s too late.