Tucker Carlson to Bring His Show to Free-ish (But Not Really) Speech Platform Twitter

While still under contract with Fox News, Tucker Carlson is going to bring his show, with slightly more editorial freedom, he hopes, to Twitter

Former Fox News megastar Tucker Carlson has announced that he is bringing his show exclusively to Twitter, where he expects to be able to say what he wants to say given that Twitter is the only platform that allows for the freedom of speech. While I would agree that Twitter will allow Carlson more editorial freedom in general than Fox News did, that’s not the same thing as being a platform that objectively respects free speech.

Elon Musk may be an improvement over the previous regime at Twitter, though I would say that that is open for debate at this point, on the issue of free speech, but he censors based on his own personal whim rather than waiting for the FBI to tell him who to censor and why. If Carlson were to critically report on Musk or Twitter itself in a serious manner on his new Twitter program I believe that he would most likely find himself blocked from the platform.

Here’s Elon Musk’s statement on Carlson’s announcement:

On this platform, unlike the one-way street of broadcast, people are able to interact, critique and refute whatever is said.

And, of course, anything misleading will get Community Notes [Took the @ symbol out and made the “CommunityNotes” Twitter user-name two words to avoid potential confusion. - Kevin].

I also want to be clear that we have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever. Tucker is subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators.

And you need only look at what Musk has done to block Substack content from being shared on Twitter even by journalists he was working with personally on the Twitter Files reporting like Matt Taibbi to know that he would block Carlson in a minute if he became critical of Twitter. No one can share links to a Substack on Twitter and Twitter has removed Substack’s access to their API—note my inability to embed Tucker Carlson’s tweet with his announcement video or Elon Musk’s statement regarding Carlson in this blog post.

According to Taibbi, Musk views Substack’s new Notes feature as an attempt to “kill Twitter” and tried to convince Taibbi to leave Substack and post his articles exclusively on Twitter.

I listened to Russell Brand’s discussion of Carlson’s move to Twitter, and there was speculation that Carlson may be using Twitter to stay in the conversation, so to speak, while his contract with Fox, which is apparently still be in effect, runs out. It seems that Fox pulled him off the air but did not let him out of his contract, which means they’re trying to pay him to keep quiet. He obviously wouldn’t be able to compete against Fox under that circumstance, but there must be some kind of loophole where he can say whatever he wants on Twitter since, as Elon Musk made clear, there’s no contract between him and Twitter. We can really only speculate, but this may explain why Carlson is choosing Twitter instead of a platform like Rumble, where Brand hosts his show, or Substack which protects the speech of their users far more consistently than Twitter does. Both Rumble and Substack are in competition with mainstream media organizations like Fox News in a way that Twitter, at least for the moment, is not.

So while it may be ridiculous for Tucker Carlson to refer to Twitter as the only free speech platform left, or a free speech platform at all, frankly, it may simply be that at this time he feels has no other choice but Twitter so that Fox News cannot successfully render him irrelevant by keeping him completely silent. We should just be happy that the only voice in the corporate media that would discuss what a mess the war in Ukraine is for the United States or how bad COVID policy was and is in this country has somewhere where he can still get his message across. He obviously won’t have the reach he had at Fox, but he’s not going to simply disappear either.