Tucker Carlson starts show on Twitter

The controversial conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson, who was a ratings gun on Fox News, was recently fired. But his revenge is sweet.

King’s drama at Fox after painful defeat in court

The dismissal of the anchor from by far the most popular show on Fox News, with three million viewers, came as a surprise to most people. According to insiders, this all had to do with the suspicions that FoxNews spread about the voting machine manufacturer Dominion. As is customary in the US, the ballot box manufacturer filed a lawsuit against Fox News.

In a “settlement,” the conservative news channel agreed to pay Dominion nearly $900 million. Owner Rupert Murdoch also took the opportunity to address the team around Carlson, accused of misogyny and anti-Semitism. Whether Carlson himself resigned, or whether Murdoch fired him, is not entirely clear.

The issue does Fox News no good. The ratings have more than halved.

Twitter as a safe bastion for freedom of expression?

Since the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, the social media site is much less censored than before. For example, several previously banned accounts were restored. Musk has also said in so many words that his goal with Twitter is, among other things, to make the site a bastion for free speech.

That seems to work quite well, not least because Musk had the more than eighty percent of the employees, who were mainly involved in moderation, fired. Their tasks are now taken over by algorithms.

Tucker Carlson as a new crowd pleaser for Twitter

It seems that Musk has succeeded in persuading Carlson to work via Twitter. Twitter has a content creation program, where people can subscribe to you for exclusive content for, say, five dollars a month.

Carlson is quite wealthy with over $30 million in assets, so doesn’t really need the money. But if a million of his fans (he already has seven million followers worldwide) op his Twitter channel going to subscribe, this could be worth more than his job at Fox News (6 million a year – we’re talking about the US here).

Breakthrough for Twitter Blue and content creators?

This development is also interesting for another reason. It promises to be a democratization of information publishing. If hundreds of thousands are going to subscribe to Carlson, they should get a Twitter Blue subscription. And they will probably also subscribe to other services. In Musk’s vision, Twitter becomes an information dealer, where you can watch movies, clips or episodes of TV shows, for example. For a few cents per article, film or clip, you can “order” only the information you want to consult. This is hugely disruptive and something to keep an eye on.