The alignment of major tech companies with political figures highlights a troubling convergence between private interests and state influence.
It is 2024, and the global order is dominated by giant American and Chinese social media platforms. However, these supposedly modern information vehicles operate much like the media did in Africa between the 1960s and the start of the 1990s.
We got here via a long and winding technological highway. The world’s population today is estimated to be around 8.2 billion people. As of January 2025, the total number of people worldwide using social media is estimated to be 5.22 billion—63.66 per cent of the global population.
The biggest of them is the messaging app WhatsApp, which today has around 3.14 billion users. Second is Facebook, which has approximately 3.07 billion monthly active users (MAU). Next is YouTube, with about 2.85 billion MAUs.
Third is Instagram, which has approximately two billion MAUs. Of these four leaders, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram are owned by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook, which later acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta was set up as the mothership for these social media platforms.
After the US elections, with a victorious Donald Trump set to take power, Zuckerberg joined many tech billionaires and the ultra-rich, throwing his lot in with the American president.
He donated one million dollars to Trump’s inauguration and aligned Facebook’s policies with those of the Republican leader, including dismantling its fact-checking operation. Meta became soft state social media, albeit in privately owned robes.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet through its subsidiary Google. Though it didn’t align with Trump as closely as Meta, it contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Fifth among the social media giants is TikTok. TikTok has about 2.14 billion users and is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. In sixth position is WeChat, a messaging app with approximately 1.48 billion MAUs, owned by the Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent. South African technology and multimedia group Naspers, owners of MultiChoice which owns DStv, holds about 28.9 per cent of Tencent through its Dutch-listed investment subsidiary, Prosus.
Seventh, but it might as well be first, is X (formerly Twitter), the most colourful. Since April 2022, it has been owned by South African-born American Elon Musk, the world’s richest — and easily its most controversial — man today.
Musk went over the top for Trump, contributing more than $250 million to his election campaign and turning X into Trump’s megaphone. Musk and X have been credited with clinching the victory for Trump, and he has now been dubbed “co-president”, with a job as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
TikTok has been in the news recently as American leaders have railed against it for being a national security threat, as it is (or could be) manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
In the last weeks of President Joe Biden’s term, US lawmakers passed a bill banning TikTok if it did not sell at least 50 per cent of its shares. That deadline passed the day before Trump was sworn in on Monday. One of his first actions was to sign an executive order giving TikTok a 75-day reprieve to comply.
TikTok has never existed in mainland China nor does it operate there. It is owned by TikTok LLC, a company incorporated in Delaware, USA, and based in California. However, TikTok LLC is controlled by TikTok Ltd, registered in the Cayman Islands and based in Shanghai.
That firm is ultimately owned by ByteDance Ltd, a privately owned technology giant, also incorporated in the Cayman Islands and based in Beijing.
So, what is the source of the Americans’ gripe?
As a report on CNN noted, “Like most other Chinese companies, ByteDance is legally compelled to establish an in-house Communist Party committee composed of employees who are party members.
“Zhang Fuping, the vice president and editor-in-chief of the company’s Chinese operation, serves as secretary of the committee. The committee often holds sessions to study the party and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Also, like its competitors, ByteDance has had to allow the Chinese government to take a so-called ‘golden share’ in one of its key subsidiaries.”
Because WeChat is subject to the same rules, it is fair to say the Chinese have the possibility to exert influence on the two companies, or already do so.
So, here we are. First, with Meta and X going the way they have, there’s now a convergence between American and Chinese social media. Their relationship with their governments, even if they are private businesses, is like that of state-owned and controlled media in Africa until after 1990, when the end of the Cold War led to political liberalisation and an explosion of independent media on the continent.
Still, today, there are hardly any heads of African state-owned media, or of pro-government private media, who would do what Musk has done and get away with it. We are living in truly interesting times.
The author is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". @cobbo3
