How far have we come in 30 years? We’ve gone from viewing adultery as a disqualifying factor for seeking the presidency to being on the precipice of normalizing the biggest sexual taboo our society has, Tucker Carlson said in his second Twitter episode since his dismissal from Fox News on April 24.
Carlson’s monologue came one day after The Wall Street Journal published the results of an investigation by the paper and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst that found Instagram’s algorithms allow pedophiles to effectively communicate with one another like no other social network does.
“Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities,” the Journal reported Wednesday. “Its algorithms promote them.
“Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.
“Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale.
“Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as ‘little slut for you.'”
The report noted that Instagram parent company Meta “said it has in the past two years taken down 27 pedophile networks and is planning more removals.”
“Since receiving the Journal queries, the platform said it has blocked thousands of hashtags that sexualize children, some with millions of posts, and restricted its systems from recommending users search for terms known to be associated with sex abuse,” the Journal said. “It said it is also working on preventing its systems from recommending that potentially pedophilic adults connect with one another or interact with one another’s content.”
This is disgusting stuff — and, as Carlson noted, Instagram’s response was indicative of just how far down into the sewers our society has sunk.
Not only that, he said, but this was all intentional, noting that if “you wanted the power not simply to control people’s behavior, but to control how they think, not just their bodies, but their minds, as a God would. … You’d need to take charge of the society’s taboos.”
“A taboo is something that by popular consensus is not allowed,” the former Fox News host said. “A taboo may not be illegal, but it doesn’t need to be. Over time, social prohibitions are more powerful and more enduring than laws. Societies are defined by what they will not permit — as are, famously, religions.”
Our taboos are changing fast, Carlson said, and that’s something that is “not happening organically.”
Take, for instance, the first campaign of our 42nd president.
“As recently as the 1992 presidential campaign, adultery was considered disqualifying for anyone seeking higher office. Bill Clinton was very nearly derailed in the New Hampshire primary by his affair with Gennifer Flowers,” Carlson said. “Clinton went to elaborate lengths to lie about the relationship because he had no choice.”
But, by the time of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, he said, any questions about a character’s personal life were off the table. And more and more taboos began to fall off the table, too: drug use, stealing, shameless hypocrisy and “taking other people’s money for not working.”
“All of these things used to be considered unacceptable in America,” Carlson said. “Not anymore. So it probably shouldn’t surprise us that the greatest taboo of all is teetering on the edge of acceptability: child molestation.
“A generation ago, talking to someone else’s children about sex was widely considered grounds for a thrashing. Touching them sexually was effectively a death penalty offense,” the former Fox News host said.
“When Jeffrey Dahmer was bludgeoned to death in the bathroom of a Wisconsin prison in 1994, the Milwaukee district attorney had to caution the public not to turn Dahmer’s killer into a folk hero,” he noted. “Jeffrey Dahmer had molested and murdered children. People felt justified in celebrating his death.”
Yet, as Carlson noted, when one of the men shot and killed in self-defense by Kyle Rittenhouse, Joseph Rosenbaum, was revealed to be a child molester himself, “the media cast [him] as the victim of the story. Kyle Rittenhouse, meanwhile — an underage boy fending off violence from a child molester — was denounced as the villain. Ultimately, he was indicted for murder.
“One of the things that this tells us is the people who run our country no longer see child molesters as the worst among us.”
While one could argue there were shades of gray in the Rittenhouse case due to the Black Lives Matter movement automatically making a martyr out of anyone it deemed a soldier for its cause, no matter what their past transgressions were (Rosenbaum was convicted of having sex with a minor in Arizona in 2002), there was no moral middle ground in the Instagram matter — or there shouldn’t have been, anyway.
As Carlson pointed out, the algorithm on the Meta-owned social media site was recommending the phrase “incest toddlers” to users, among other heinous, despicable things.
“By the way, no one at Instagram denied that any of this had happened,” Carlson noted. “Nor did Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company. The Journal story was accurate. It was all pretty shocking — but not as shocking as what happened next.”
In fact, what happened next was a whole lot of nothing — no investigations from the Department of Justice or Congress announced immediately, no firings, nothing.
The man who runs Instagram, Adam Mosseri, still has his job. And while he didn’t tweet anything about the Journal’s report, what’s interesting is what he did tweet on May 31 — and what he’s kept pinned to the top of his Twitter account. It explains how the algorithm works — and, given the content of the Journal’s story, it doesn’t make him or his employer look good.
How the “Algorithm” Works ?
– “The Algorithm” (or actually algorithms)
– Ranking Stories
– Ranking Feed
– Ranking Reels
– Ranking Explore
– “Shadowbanning”
– How to Grow Your AudienceMore details here: https://t.co/AzFTwRCp6e pic.twitter.com/ZUJDT37aaD
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) May 31, 2023
“We’ll often talk about ‘the algorithm.’ But there is no one algorithm for Instagram; there are many algorithms and ranking processes we use to try to personalize the experience to make it as interesting as we can for each and every person who uses Instagram,” the Instagram head said in the video.
“We believe in this idea of personalization — what you’re interested in and what I’m interested in is different, and so your Instagram and my Instagram should be different.”
Right: “You’re interested in children,” Carlson said. “That’s why you’re getting all the incest toddler posts. It’s a highly personalized experience.”
“Of course, everybody at Instagram — in fact, everyone everywhere in authority — will still claim to think that child molestation is bad,” he continued. “But the tone has changed unmistakably.
“When they say it’s bad, they mean it in a kind of abstract way, bad like a civil war in central Africa is bad. You wouldn’t prefer it, but there are reasons it happens. That’s why we now refer to pedophiles as ‘minor-attracted persons,’ because honestly, who can judge?” Carlson said.
“These people are a sexual minority, so pause before you attack them. And in any case, it’s not like pedophiles are barging into the Capitol building to sit in Nancy Pelosi’s chair or asking uncomfortable questions about the last election.”
Ep. 2 Cling to your taboos! pic.twitter.com/45AeVdtwOu
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 8, 2023
Meanwhile, as the former Fox News host noted, President Joe Biden was giving speeches about how “white supremacy” was the greatest threat to America — although neither he nor anyone else wants to define what “white supremacy” really entails — and violating the unspoken code of wokeness could lead to dire consequences personally, professionally and legally.
This slippery slope, Carlson said in closing, is why we desperately need to hold on to our taboos and not let the left redefine them.
The non-wokeness taboos, he said, “were organic. They derive from collective experience and instinct, the two most reliable guides to life. They evolved for a reason. They still do.”
“Our job at this point is to protect them, despite the hectoring, the nonstop hectoring, from the people in charge,” Carlson said. “You know the outlines of right and wrong. You’re born knowing them.
“So don’t let them talk you out of what you can smell. Don’t let them rationalize away your intuitive, moral sense. Cling to your taboos like your life depends on them — because it does. Cherish and protect them like family heirlooms. That’s exactly what they are.”
Well, talk about being unchained; Carlson isn’t tied to Fox News anymore — and fans are loving it.
We’re so back ??????
— Joel Valdez (@realJoelValdez) June 8, 2023
Aside from that, though, he’s right about clinging to our cultural taboos like our lives depended on it. If we don’t, we’ll continue down the slippery slope we’re on now.
School libraries and major corporations will continue to sexualize children. “Minor-attracted persons” will continue to be a phrase more and more of us use until it replaces “pedophile.” And one day we’ll wake up and, poof, the taboo will have been basically engineered away.
In 1992, Bill Clinton had to lie about adultery to get elected. In 2024, it could be revealed that every candidate had committed it and hardly an eyebrow would be raised.
Consider that when you think about how important the Instagram algorithm revelations really are.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
