For as long as anyone can remember, the media didn’t just report politics. They shaped it. News anchors decided what was newsworthy, often ignoring stories that did not fit their narrative. Newspaper columnists fed us opinions. Politicians, to be successful, found they needed to cultivate the media in order to get a fair hearing. Conservatives were demonized. When digital media first emerged twenty years ago, I wrote a book about how this might change. Rather than being spoon- fed our opinions by an Ivy League elite, we might see a democratization of opinion forming.
Tragically, big tech spent most of the past decade colluding with government and the old media to
clamp down on the digital revolution. Algorithms were programmed to suppress ‘wrong’ opinions.
Twitter banned people for saying there are only two genders. They even took down the account of a
sitting US President. Facebook closed the accounts of people who questioned the effectiveness of Covid
lockdowns. Rather than dispersing knowledge, for a while it looked as if bad actors would be able to use
digital tech to centralize control, China-style.
Then Elon Musk bought Twitter/X – and fired the leftist activists that had been censoring it. This is
perhaps the most significant political event in decades, even if few yet realize it. Twitter/X is now the
number one news source in most Western countries and growing rapidly. Able to host video and live
broadcasts, Twitter/X is forcing other dishonest digital platforms to change their ways, or lose audience
share. YouTube no longer feels so hostile to conservative views.
We saw the immediate impact of this during the recent Presidential election. The legacy media and
corrupt digital platforms could not suppress and misrepresent the way they used to. Attempts to distort
what Trump or JD Vance had or had not said no longer worked. Instead of relying on brazenly partisan
news anchors to cross question candidates, candidates could go on long form shows, like Joe Rogan, and
set out in detail their stance. Fifty million people watched Trump on Rogan alone. For decades,
politicians have been able to get away with speaking in meaningless soundbites. Talking in soundbites
no longer pays when you are doing deep dive interviews on a podcast.
Team Trump understood this. Long form podcasts were a key part of their election strategy. Kamala never engaged to the same extent and came second. Here at MCPP, we like to think we have been ahead of the curve on this. While we don’t have the resources of a Rogan or Patrick Bet David, we do produce a weekly video and podcast in our humble studio, which gets tens of thousands of views a month. So far this year, what MCPP has posted online has been seen by MILLIONS (YouTube 200,000 plus, Twitter 22 million) – and that doesn’t include content we produce hosted by other platforms, like PragerU and others. The counter reformation by the tech elite has failed. As Elon Musk says, we are the media now. Opinion forming is being democratized. Conservative think tanks have an unprecedented opportunity to win the battle of ideas. 2025 is going to be awesome! Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. MCPP sponsored this post.
29 comments:
This appears to be full of outright lies. Twitter is bombing, advertisers hate having their ads next to Alex Jones calling murdered school kids actors. With the lack of ad money, it’s been turned into a real money pit. If Elon intended to kill twitter, he succeeded. Bluesky is the winner in this epic collapse. It’s growing rapidly and users seem to love the interface and not having Elon’s immature trolling fed down their throat. If you want to have a social media platform to views trolls, twitter is still your jam.
Douglas, congrats. You are at the cusp of a great new period. It was a close call, for sure, but with a couple of good years and and truth we will make it back.
2:03 sounds like someone that can't live outside a moderated content platform that doesn't reflect their bubble world view.
Twitter is not bombing. Bluesky is growing but, Jack Dorsey, who co-founded both platforms, said in May that he decided to leave Bluesky because it was becoming too much like Twitter and was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter made — namely concerning content moderation, which Dorsey said is largely at odds with how a decentralized platform that is not owned and controlled by one colossal tech company should run. Post twitter X is running close to 50 50 left and right. Currently Bluesky just echoes your leftist denials of reality.
Was part of the “conservative media revolution” plan for Fox to pay $.75 BILLION for lying about a “stolen” election?
If so, these dudes must be playing 4-D chess.
This entire post merely highlights that scores of people can be made to believe and think anything they are told. This was demonstrated when foreign entities created fake sites which ended with thousands of nitwits showing up for a rally which was not even organized by a real group in the U.S. Just pitiful.
December 6, 2024 at 2:03 PM
Lol. Lmao even
You do realize Twitter wouldve been broke in a year or so. It was going totally under.
Bluesky refugees certainly are working overtime to shout that they've found the promised land. Tantrum theatrics.
2:08 and 3:32, Xanax works try it. Then again, I think you may need Thorzine.
Wow 2:03.. You must have shaved your head and sworn off sex for the next 4 years. X/twitter has saved this country from the likes of you... MAGA
people have always , and will continue to think that if its on television , its entitled to instant credibility.
"Whoever Controls The Media, Controls The Mind"...Jim Morrison
Go to Bluesky and make your audience even smaller. Yeah, that makes sense.
Liberal Media? Conservative Media? Both are biased Media. If not it would simply be objective media in which neither side has a monopoly. This ain't it.
10:20, can you provide a few examples of this "objective" media you speak of? All I can think of is "Southern Living" or USA Today.
USA Today is owned by Gannet - leans Left you ding dong....and sometimes - waaaaay Left.
The media is an arm of the Democratic Party. Always has been.
It has only been actually just been a couple of decades since newspapers were bought out by large corporations headquartered elsewhere and extremely wealthy men. At first you saw this with Hearst who started buying up newspapers. The family owned newspapers in cities and town across the country disappeared. Of course, most papers focused on their concerns and interests and those are not the same in every state. One shoe doesn't fit everyone. During most of my life, the disappearance of a child in Podunk Iowa, wasn't national news. But, we saw those awful crime stories reported everyday, we think the problem has increased dramatically when it statistically the same. One sick predator in one place gives out bad candy and Halloween is spoiled for children everywhere in the country. Crime actually goes down but we aren't reassured. We are making mountains out of mole hills everyday and worse, passing unnecessary laws that make create new bureaucracies.
Crime statistics for every community and state are available and all you have to do is compare the number of crimes with the increase or decrease in the population where it occurs.
Our worst problem is that we can't contain and treat crazy people until they hurt themselves or someone else. Once their families and communities could step in. Political parties know fear opens and wallets and causes us to knock on doors for them. GROW UP!
Twitter is not growing, look at the numbers. Elon made one of the worst business decisions on pure money lost in the history of humankind. Name a bigger money loser.
Elon can't spend all the money he has in his lifetime. What he wants now is political power. He's already the richest man in the world.
I think most of you just can grasp billions and trillions. But, think of powerful kings of European dynasties. We will all become serfs and if we have enough millions , maybe local lords and ladies ...those with a billion might be Dukes.
Our ignorance of history and economics has doomed us. I am glad I won't live to see the worst of it and my children and their grandchildren have made millions but oh Lordy, it will still be a life of pleasing the King instead of making their communities better places to live.
At the moment I'm writing this, Kingfish, it seems possible your post is the only one by a human - or, at least, the only human writing from Mississippi.
@10:36 Do not under estimate Elon Musk. 10 years ago you would have told him to not bother with satellite internet. HughesNet and IridiumSatCom have that market locked ina duopoly. Now Musk is poised to put them both out of business. And they are likely to pay him to launch their next communications satellites.
And HughesNet is named after Howard Hughes. Elon has long eclipsed Howard in Power and Wealth. And Howard's bribe to Nixon to stop nuclear testing is what lead to Watergate.
I've reached the point that anything I hear from the American MSM and the Government (but I repeat myself), I don't believe it.
Twitter is not growing, look at the numbers.
Bluesky is still a midget. Look at the numbers.
Please remember that Musk bought Twitter to ensure transparency by (somehow) positively identifying users and thus their posts. Liar. Drama sells.
He’s another lying manipulative billionaire politician who wants gazillions more militarty money for Starlink and SpaceX.
@8:44. You’ve apparently never heard of Newsmax, Fox, al-Jazeera, BBC, et. al.
Get out of Mississippi once in a while.
@4:35 PM I can’t tell if you are ignorant or a liar. He is selling merely Blue Checks for cash since it was pointless gatekeeping before. He’s cur down on the botnet by requiring you to be verified and pay to use bots and scrapers. The most inportant verification that Musk added was community fact checking. Now whenever someone of any ideology posts some nonsense, everyone can add context. Nothing gets buried or censored. There is no moderator to decide what fan’t be seen.
@4:38 PM That is a troll. Only leftists call democrats “democratic” because there hasn’t been anything “democratic” about democrats since Bernie Sanders gave up the DNC nomination a week before the convention despite having a clear lead over Hilary and Biden. And let’s notbget started on the anti-democratic nomination of Kamala.
Leftist Democrats, especially the white liberals Malcom X warned about, can’t win the debate. Their hypocrisy has no boundaries, especially the Democrats living behind protective gates, or in the Republican controlled burbs. Is it true Mississippi Today won’t even locate their office in Democrat controlled Jackson?
One must be corrupt, or not possess the brain area required in order to believe much of the Democrat insanity, so open discussions, i.e. debate, is not something leftist Democrats can tolerate.
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