On Monday’s episode of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Carlson spent a lot of time ranting about Twitter and Hunter Biden — and during his rant, he made some claims about the concept of misinformation being misinformation itself. were at the limit.
You can watch the full clip above (Via Kat Abu.)
We mention this because of “The Twitter Files,” a controversial inept attempt by Elon Musk and former journalist Matt Taibbi on how Twitter treated the Hunter Biden scandal during the 2020 election. Specifically, Tabby and Musk have attempted to dishonestly portray their handling of Twitter as a form of government censorship, falsely asserting that Democrats controlled the government at the time — and also claiming that private The companies have no right to moderate the content.
The two also attempted to misrepresent some of the tweets about the case that were removed by the Biden campaign: the tweets in question were pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, making those posts a form of revenge porn, which is illegal in the state. In addition to being illegal Twitter is based in (California), it is also a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.
Or, as TheWrap’s Benjamin Schwetki put it, “Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Are Turning Hunter Biden’s Gender Into a Constitutional Crisis. No Kidding.”
Anyway, back to Tucker Carlson. He cited one of the exchanges included in the set of documents Musk handed over to Taibbi where the Washington state secretary of state flagged “two tweets with possible misinformation about the election.”
This really set Carlsen off. “Now, remember, misinformation is a new word. It’s been around in the intel world but it was never used in general conversation until recently. And the difference between misinformation and lies is that misinformation Can be true. It doesn’t have to be false to be censored.
Both these statements are not true at all. First, misinformation, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “false or misleading information.” It differs from “disinformation” only in that misinformation is a form of intentional deception and misinformation can be the result of people in good faith yet sharing false or misleading information without realizing it. Suffice to say, “false” and “deceptive” are both words that do not describe “true” things.
Second, while it is true that the term has become more frequently used since social media became an extremely efficient means of disseminating misinformation, it does not actually mean that it was obscure or unknown. There are thousands of examples (you can google it) of it being discussed in journalism, academia, and other forums long before 2018, when The Washington Post declared it the word of the year because of how bad the problem is.
Also, and more importantly, The term has existed since the 1500s,
Coincidentally, although Carlson has been focusing on the Hunter Biden scandal for years, in 2014 he asked Biden to help my son get into georgetown,