Pages

Tuesday 6 December 2022

China would be proud



An unfolding issue, but Salvatore Babones has an interesting Quadrant piece on Elon Musk and Twitter censorship.
 

The Twitter Censorship Files: ‘China Would Be Proud

It’s the story of the year, it’s unfolding entirely in public view, anyone could milk it—and only Fox is covering it. Twitter CEO Elon Musk passed a horde of internal e-mails to freelance journalist Matt Taibbi, documenting the platform’s extraordinary efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and Taibbi returned the favor by publishing the best bits on Twitter. Tucker Carlson jumped on it. The rest of the mainstream media ignored it.


The piece isn't long and is well worth reading, even though we do not yet know how the issue will develop. The paragraph below sums up the problem very neatly.

The leaders of the Western political establishment, from its 99-year-old godfather Henry Kissinger through the Bidens, Clintons, Obamas, and Cheneys right down to the Romneys, Trudeaus, and Arderns, are all scared to death of the potential of social media to shape an information narrative outside of the control of their own particular social class. To a person they admire China’s governance mechanisms, and they are jealous of the media management tools that the Chinese Communist Party has at its disposal. That’s why they’re so comfortable with TikTok. From their standpoint, the more Western social media come to resemble China’s, the better.

Pointers have been obvious for some time - the Western political establishment does see China as a model for social media and the shaping of information. In a wider political sense, Klaus Schwab has referred to China as a model.

7 comments:

Tammly said...

The Western political establishment want to take absolute autocratic power for the good of the people. Where have we seen that before I wonder?

Sam Vega said...

I have heard that Musk is claiming that Twitter was involved in rigging elections. But I've only seen the claim on blogs, which have linked to what looks like Musk's own tweets on the topic. Nothing from the MSM.

Now, what if Musk was saying that Trump was involved?

A K Haart said...

Tammly - it's as if the twentieth century never happened.

Sam - an excellent illustration - a huge explosion of MSM outrage would follow within milliseconds if Musk said Trump was involved.

DiscoveredJoys said...

Whether you are a tribal chief, a senior cleric, an aristocrat, a rebel leader, a senior politician or mercantile combine you regard ordinary people as resources to be farmed or mined. It is the human nature of the elite to think so, and hasn't really changed over the millennia.

But remember the story of the boy who announced that the Emperor had no clothes. He wasn't part of the sycophantic crowd and exposed what was really going on. That is why our current Powers That Be want to control the narratives - they don't want to be exposed as fallible people. Who knows where that would end?

A K Haart said...

DJ - yes that's the problem, they don't want to be exposed as fallible people. The spread of information must expose everyone as fallible in one way or another and the only way to counter that is suppression. Of course, the attempts at suppression are also exposed as fallible.

Tammly said...

AK & DJ absolutely. When ever we are confronted by the suppressing authorities we should ask them, "how are the criminals doing?"

A K Haart said...

Tammly - including the Parliamentary criminals.