at 1:30 Romney says the reason for banning tik tok was their higher incidence of covering Palestine.
https://t.me/LauraAbolichannel/57416Banning TIKTOK for Israel - they’ve admitted to it!
Blinken says Israel’s PR is failing because social media allows people a direct look at what’s happening and it lands with emotional resonance.
Romney then says yes, that’s why we moved to ban TikTok!
YT version. Long.
https://youtu.be/V92PzA6eEyM 15,005 views May 4, 2024 #StateDepartment #DepartmentofState #Diplomacy
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken participates in a keynote conversation with U.S. Senator Mitt Romney at the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona.
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-institutes-2024-sedona-forum-keynote-conversation-with-senator-mitt-romney/...
SENATOR ROMNEY: Why has the PR been so awful? I know that’s not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that, which is, I mean, as you’ve said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It’s like, why are they not screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire and bring home the hostages. Instead, it’s all the other way around. I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here? How have they – how have they/ and we/ been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Look, I mean, there are two things. One is that, look, there is an inescapable reality, and that is the inescapable reality of people who have and continue to suffer grievously in Gaza. And that’s real and we have to – have to – be focused on that and attentive to that.
At the same time, how this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t have a good answer to that. One can speculate about what some of the causes might be. I don’t know. I can tell you this – and we were talking about this a little bit over dinner with Cindy. I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over 30 years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment.
And when I started out in the early 1990s, everyone did the same thing. You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment or your house, you picked up a hard copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. And then if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at 6:30 or 7 o’clock and watched the national network news.
Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t – we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.
The President had also spoken about our commitment to a two-state solution, and a number of people have said to me that’s impossible. And Bibi Netanyahu has basically said that’s impossible. Is it possible to have a two-state solution? What kind of – I mean, I know that’s far from where we are right now. It’s like a whole different realm. But is that essential to, if you will, beginning normalization relations with Saudi Arabia and with others to say, hey, here’s a vision, here’s some steps we might get to? Is it possible, and what would that look like?
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