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Carlson & Musk: Twuckered Up?

Carlson calls out a propaganda technique then uses the technique on you.
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Tucker Carlson’s announcement of a pending move to Twitter is wrapped within a credible diatribe against the captured mass media. He specifically gives an example of how selective reporting and careful use of language can and does (deliberately) mislead:

If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery… but if I don’t mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you?

Fair question. Carlson doesn’t bother to flag the powerful effect the word “unjustly” has on its own, regardless of the withheld history.

Carlson then uses the same technique he has just flagged against you:

Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter… Twitter has long served as the place where out national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site. Everybody is allowed here.

If we take this on face value, it might sound “correct”. According to Statista, Twitter is 14th of the top 15 SocMed platforms by users, but it’s likely that the data is wrong to the upside and does not account for bots etc.

However, if we accept that as of now, of those 15 platforms Twitter might be the most committed to 1A free speech (for now), up until this year, it literally wasn’t.

Is it misleading to say “Twitter is not a partisan site. Everybody is allowed here,” while not saying that it was (and could in part still be) a key part of the biggest and most complex perception management and propaganda system the world has ever seen, and that it whimsically controlled who and what could use the platform in a totally opaque way (that hasn’t necessarily changed) while being riddled with state agents?

Note, no one has asked Musk if he’s explicitly sacked all the former FBI agents from every level of Twitter and also purged it of all other possible state agents including CIA, NSA and foreign intelligence/security personnel. Also, no one has asked him if all possible code backdoors for such people have been definitively closed as well. Even if they asked and he said “yes,” there would only be Musk’s word to go on.

Carlson is making the case for using Twitter as a platform to originate his show and his version of “news”, free of an existing, captive “news” platform. Fine. The recent public offers he was made have set his value in the market so he will be making equal or greater money from Twitter (somehow) to those offers. VST suspects that a longer game is in operation where he will become invested in Twitter and a manager of some sort, possibly rising to oversee wider “news” content on the platform. It won’t just be about money. Carlson has an ideology and serious misgivings about the current trajectory, as he described at the Heritage Foundation. Twitter under Musk is more than a nightly news slot to Carlson, surely?

Carlson could have gone to Rumble alongside Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Beck, Russell Brand and others, and helped accelerate the publicly listed platform’s growth. Instead he’s doing a private deal with a private platform.

EDIT: There may be a reason that relates to Carlson’s contractual terms and the technique employed by Fox to silence Carlson. If his contract prevents work for other networks, Twitter may sidestep the definition of “network”. A contract that’s six+ years old may not have anticipated the morphing of a platform such as Twitter into a broadcast video service.

Provided that Carlson is able to effectively escape the enforced Fox garden leave and launch on Twitter, the immediate disruption and hopefully massive backlash against the mass media will be welcome.

But be warned: the idea of “one X app to rule them all” isn’t new.

Fast forward 10 years to a time when a single application under control of one corporate board is your gateway to identification, banking, news, chat & comms, biometrics, travel, music, photos, videos and search. That is exactly what you don’t want because it is even more of what you have now: technological monopoly. But it’s what Musk wants. That future app cannot exist without state sanction and connection in order to provide large parts of those functions. It will also likely tie to your vehicle authentication.

Be careful for what you wish for and what you endorse through your subscriptions paid today.

Amazon users were busying buying books at a loss and look what happened to retail, internet services and architecture, surveillance and space. Musk is no different when it comes to the pies he has or had fingers in. His soundbytes about OpenAI that he aired to Carlson are an admission that he played a part in letting a genie out of a bottle in the company of sociopaths, and it is unlikely that the world will be able to catch up with wherever the fascists have gotten to with AI now.

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Ignasz Semmelweisz