"It is an eternal experience that every man who has power is inclined to abuse it," said Montesquieu in De l'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Law) in 1748. That is why some people fear that billionaires will be at the head of major media groups. For the same "augmented" reason, we should all fear seeing them at the helm of social media.
Throughout the US presidential campaign, Elon Musk was the third person in the picture. As a donor to Donald Trump's campaign to the tune of $270 million [€258 million], but also as the owner of the social media platform X, where he shamelessly circulated misinformation and hate speech, and where he put himself on stage.
"Free speech" has become his watchword: He abandoned content moderation and presented himself as the herald of absolute freedom. It is a freedom with variable geometry: He did not hesitate to modify X's algorithm to give more visibility to his own tweets and to the accounts of a few celebrities. Two hundred and fifteen million users now subscribe to his account!
Since Trump's latest victory, it has been the turn of Chinese platform TikTok to be the center of attention. It too has clearly played a major role in this latest presidential campaign. Owned by the ByteDance group, TikTok spent four years battling the American justice system. At the end of his term in the White House, in 2020, Trump passed two executive orders against it. At the time, Trump was at war with China's cultural and economic expansion, and TikTok was the symbol of this strategy of conquest.
The US president suspected the platform of siphoning off American users' data and providing it directly to the Chinese Communist Party. Soon to be banned from the country, TikTok tried one last legal recourse with the Supreme Court, which voted unanimously to enforce the law on the grounds of risk to national security by a foreign company. But it is now the same Trump who's calling for the rehabilitation of TikTok's US subsidiary. Barely elected, he is proposing a suspension of its ban, for 90 days, while the Chinese group decides whether to close it down or sell 50% of its capital to an American firm.
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