I am a Canadian and politically independent.

As a Canadian, I have been watching many on the left cheer as the top 5 biggest tech companies killed the right-wing social media app Paler. Apple and Google removed the app from the app store. Twitter and Facebook removed their social media accounts and Amazon turned off their cloud hosting.

The left touted this as a significant win “for the good guys”.

Let’s talk Alibaba

Alibaba is one of the biggest tech companies in China. The brainchild of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, it operates 3 primary brands Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com. It’s online marketplaces generated about $280B of revenue.

Like Google and Amazon, Alibaba invests heavily in AI, ML and other bleeding-edge technologies. In fact, their AI is so sophisticated that they can predict customer purchases with incredible accuracy. Singles day is the biggest shopping day in China. Weeks before the 2018 singles day sale, Alibaba employees began boxing predicted future customer orders and employees claim the predictions were 80% correct. Alibaba also claimed to have facial recognition software that can distinguish minorities.

Similar to Amazon AWS, Alibaba operates a large global cloud platform called Alibaba Cloud.

Jack Ma is also the founder and owner of the Ant Group. The Ant Group is the world's largest mobile and online payments platform.

We are now hearing that China may nationalize both Alibaba and the ANT group. Regardless of nationalization, we know that all Chinese companies must help China if asked and if deemed beneficial by the CCP.

Back to Parler

If none of the American or European cloud service providers agree to host Parler, it may choose to move to the Chinese cloud. The Alibaba Cloud may host the site and Alipay can process payments. What would happen if the most popular US right-wing political website was hosted on a Chinese company platform that also owns incredibly advanced AI models? And what if that company were nicely asked by the CCP to help advance Chinese political aspirations?

What could China learn by analyzing all that right-wing political information? What would happen if they decided to secretly change how posts are shown? What if the CCP decided to weaponize the platform with the aim of further destabilizing the US political space?

As a security professional with a deep understanding of China, I just want to urge a little caution. This short term gain may have serious and long term repercussions if it pushes Parler towards the Chinese.

The most likely outcome is that they will try to build their own infrastructure but this is dependent on other American companies selling them products and services (e.g. switches, servers, connectivity, etc). If they are unable to acquire the needed gear, they will either have to choose Alibaba Cloud or agree to disappear.