WAR 101: Secure the Local Media and Control the Narrative
And no, this has nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine
Putin controls the Russian media, Kim is probably credited with every article written in North Korea he has such control of the media and if you think Ping lets people speak freely in China, you’d be dead wrong.
Whether you are trying to maintain control, recently invaded a foreign land, or ousted a democratically elected president, you need the support of the local media if you want to keep control. That’s first-day, first-class, first 20 minutes of the first lecture of WAR 101.
In the olden days, you stormed the radio, newspaper, and TV stations as soon as you took over a city. You installed who you wanted to start broadcasting what propaganda you wanted to be disseminated. It's basic protocol.
But it’s not 1900 anymore and with social media, just taking control of Radio Free Kyiv isn’t going to get the job done. And if there is a guy taking advantage of the evolution of media better than Elon Musk, I’d like you to point him out.
In what is a fairly obvious power move, Elon recently purchased almost 10% of the public shares of Twitter. He also didnt disclose this purchase for 20 days, which is a slap in the face of the (SEC) law requiring disclosure by anyone buying 5% or more of a public company within the first 10 days.
Seemingly not a big deal, but… yeah, there are a lot of reasons why that law exists. Not the least of which is the possible $100,000 a day fine Musk may have to pony up. Of course, Elon could either throw it on a credit card or send the SEC the penny jaw he has in his kitchen when they fine him.
Not only will he not miss it, he’ll most likely get a lot more than a million in publicity once he spins it.
WHO CARES, TWITTER HAS LESS THAN A BILLION ACTIVE USERS?
Twitter is special.
Although Friendster<MySpace<Facebook<IG<TikTok is a neverending trend you’ll be able to set your watch-by until global warming fries your grandkids, Twitter is an outlier.
A blogger and all-around quote machine, Owen JJ Stone once said, “Twitter doesn’t need to grow, all the smart people are already there”.
And that is the best way to explain it. If you write for the New York Times or Der Spiegel you most likely have Facebook, IG and Tiktok, but they aren’t the first place they go when you first hear about something happening either locally or on the other side of the world. Twitter is. Conversely, if you like to read a writer’s work you could care less about their Tiktok, you follow them on Twitter.
And if you think about it, it’s the only social media that the better-educated use daily. Let me rephrase, it’s a place the intellectually curious can find a fix 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
News cycles are gone, we all know that. Twitter has less than a billion active users, but 90% of those people will go to Twitter first if they heard about a massive earthquake on the other side of the world, or if they question reporting they came across from a questionable source.
When Will Smith slapped Rock, instantaneously it started trending and it became a globally shared experience solely because of Twitter.
Twitter is obviously not Utopia, arguably Trump’s victory is partially due to his use of Twitter. They do not censor people and you can find both Neil DeGrasse Tyson and hardcore porn on Twitter. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing of information.
People can get away with saying stupid things on IG. You are rarely taken to task by the IG community in a meaningful way. However, (sometimes to a maddeningly extreme) opinions are shared quickly and aggressively on Twitter.
This leads me back to Auric Goldfinger. (Didn’t know his first name did you?) I mean Elon…..
Credit where credit is due, Elon Musk is a genius. Dude lands rockets on a floating barge and has grifted almost $5billion in subsides. Genius in action. Recently he realized opinion was moving away from his silly games and he was starting to take shit for the selfish egocentric bullshit he does. Like the brilliant fucker he is, he quickly rectified and adjusted his actions accordingly.
When attacked for not paying taxes, he paid a few billion (using a Twitter vote to see if he should, I might add) and made a hell of a show of it. When attacked about world hunger, he addressed it, then donated some funds. To his credit, he never gets caught ‘over his skis’.
But because I respect him I don’t underestimate his mastery of 3-dimensional chess. He bought the largest stake in Twitter to make a few small changes and position himself to never be discredited by being frozen or the like.
Say what you want about Trump, but he was an artist with Twitter, and when he was tossed from the platform it made him far less relevant. That’s now off the table no matter what stupid shit Elon says or does the next time he ‘burns one’ with Joe Rogan.
That is not worth $9.2 billion, however. So the mind wonders, what can this man be up to?
*ANSWER TO PICTURE QUESTION*
They all are.
