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With Twitter’s gradual shift from chronological timeline to overeager algorithmic shuffle, even if Musk unblocks everyone, users could conceivably not be served a tweet that would fall under SEC regulation based solely on the algorithm deciding they would “engage” more with other content.

> With Twitter’s gradual shift from chronological timeline to overeager algorithmic shuffle .... deciding they would “engage” more with other content.

Ironically, every time I notice a platform I use doing this, it immediate reduces my engagement for it.

I can’t be the only one, can I?

https://mastodon.social/@HackerNewsBot

Mastodon is always chronological.

> I can’t be the only one, can I?

No, but as long as more people go the opposite direction it is a net positive. Considering it's seemingly the natural progression of timelines I am guessing the numbers show that this is the case.

Companies do dumb stuff all the time. As long as the numbers look good in the short term you can end up with stuff like open office plans becoming common even if they are a large net loss.

And tech nerds do dumb stuff all the time too like wanting to nerotically "finish" a timeline of tweets. I think it makes tons of sense that Twitter wants to show its best content to more people than whoever happens to be on the timeline at the exact moment it's posted. It's frustrating sometimes, but you can use TweetDeck and get a firehose anytime you'd like.

It’s not uncommon for someone to give birth outside of a hospital and often without a midwife, so you can just apply for one. http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/19/baby-born-while-mom-is...

I'm not sure I agree. I assume that the SEC is fine if you take out an ad in the New York Times to announce your news, but that requires that people know to read the ads there, that they can afford a copy of the newspaper, etc. There is no such thing as a method of notifying everyone simultaneously. Posting to a public Twitter account is as good as anything else.

There's a difference between you possibly being unaware of where to find such information vs someone actively blocking you.

Well the times allows anyone to buy it, it doesn't specifically block certain people from reading. This isn't a big issue, every other CEO other than Elon Musk has no problem controlling his/her tweets to not contain market moving news. They should make an example out of him and we'll go back to having everyone disclose news in the proper channels. If the SEC does not come down on him it will be the wild west and investors will be worse off.

My personal opinion is that Twitter is perfect for breaking news that should be distributed fairly to the largest audience possible without giving anyone an advance look at the news.

At the same time, people need to understand that there’s a limit to how much (and how precisely) you can communicate in 140 characters, and that means Twitter can alert you to the headline. It’s beholden upon users to take the time to ask questions and fill in the details.

As far as certain user accounts being blocked - the SEC requires announcements are distributed publically, not universally. Anyone can watch Elon’s twitter feed in incognito mode.

The SEC doesn’t require that breaking news show up in every single Twitter feed universally. They simply require that anyone can make the effort to be able to receive the news. If that means following Elon on a separate account where you don’t harass him to the point of blocking you, that’s not exactly a major impediment.

Blocking on Twitter isn’t really blocking someone from seeing the tweet. They can just log out and see the tweet.

Actually does it even prevent someone from seeing it in the first place, or does it just hide the blocked person from the blocker?

It's the former; you have to log out or open an incognito window to see the tweets of someone who blocked you.

In traditional media, there are different rules for public figures than there are for private citizens. I think the same thing should apply to Twitter. Verified accounts should not be able to block anyone.

Oh I like that. Might get Twitter to actually do something about how uncivil they've let the general standard of discussion become if having that precious little checkmark meant it was impossible to block anyone.

In reality, those people would just leave Twitter.

That works too.

In hindsight it is a little weird that blocking exists as a concept at all. When you tweet from a public account you are putting that information out into the public. It seems silly to try to prevent certain people from seeing that content and it is trivially easy for a user to circumvent that block by logging out or creating a new account. Muting seems like the most logical way for people to control who they interact with on Twitter.

Wasn’t it removed at some point? I remember the nature of it changing but then being reversed due to negative responses. At the time I realized people were starting to use Twitter in ways not originally intended.

No, that's terrible, too. The stars of Star Wars, Episode VIII were harassed off social media by a bunch of trolls. No one should be forced off social media by trolls.

Couldn’t blocking just stop those people from communicating with you? You could still read all you want.

Not when they make wave after wave after wave of accounts to assail you with.

Verified accounts are not “important”, they are what is says on the tin: verified. The feature is meant to help people who were impersonated, not famous. That nuance got lost very fast on celebrities who like any pretext to feel more important, but I think we would loose a lot by not understanding what it means. For instance, employee accounts on any platform have a de facto similar role because they can be used to authenticate both company message, and more.

Verified accounts are those likely victim of abuse, and I believe that is it likely that if you suffer from impersonation, you also suffer from trolls. Verified accounts are the most likely candidate for the need for more protection.

Something else that is at stake, and something that you are explicitly asking for – but I think it‘s a serious mistake: the dichotomy between celebrities and commoners. There never were a clear gap, there, but the idea that being on TV, in the press, or owning land made you special has proven dangerous. Having a gradient from moderately interesting anyones, to popular people within their social context, to relevant expert, opinion leader, up to professionally famous people, that “smoothness” of fame is a great, empowering change that the Internet has brought and made visible.

I think we need to understand that, and adapt (currently blunt) disclosure rules to that smoothness: you can make something a little bit more famous than they are, but you can’t shift them by several orders of magnitude because the attention, grief, consequence of that is something that needs to be learnt, understood, accepted.

> Release material information without alerting the exchange to stop trading

This whole incident sort of blows my mind. It seems like this should be Operating a Public Company 101 level knowledge, and the fact that he failed so spectacularly leads me to believe either someone at Tesla or the exchanges screwed up royally with the timing of some preliminary work and Musk didn't make sure it was done ahead of time, or he was drugged out of his mind on Sudafed or something (either because he thought it was okay or thought he could get away with it). I'm honestly not sure what's more likely given how stupidly obvious the error is.

He’s all but admitted that he completely winged it, while driving down the highway to the airport nonetheless.

> and this is the tie in, releasing said information on his personal twitter account. Now this is normally fine based on RegFD but he has blocked people on twitter and RegFD is very clear that information can't not be disseminated in a way that isn't available to everyone at the same time.

How does that work when the account is public and can be read by anyone (presumably including any blocked users) by just not signing in?

Lawyering is fun

If it's a reply, you can't browse their full timeline without signing in.

Was it a reply? I can see the one that says "funding secured" without signing in.

Even for a reply, can't you still read it without signing in starting from the tweet it's a reply to?

if i can access the tweets via twitter without logging in, how can someone block me?

They can make their tweets private.

> he has blocked people on twitter and RegFD is very clear that information can't not be disseminated in a way that isn't available to everyone at the same time.

I thought blocking just prevented you from seeing their replies.

Per this article, but it's super old:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/twitt...

Did they change how blocking works after this?

Yes, I can't speak to when but Twitter displays a very obvious "You have been blocked by this user"-type message instead of their tweets if you attempt to view their profile.

This is pushing it sooo much that makes me wonder if you have an agenda here. Tweets can be viewed without signing in( including replies) so anyone actually has access to them. Additionally there is legal text in the Tesla shares saying "expect updates on social media".

I think one can make the argument that Trump and Musk might be different.

Trump by blocking users doesn't prevent the users from seeing the content (i.e. they can log out and see the content). What it does do is prevent the user from easily engaging with the president (i.e. why its a free speech issue). It's basically saying that users A, B, and C can easily engage, but by blocking D, we are going to put a road block that makes it difficult for D.

In the case of Musk, if one is claiming that blocking is discriminating who can see the content, one can make the claim that this really isn't true, all blocking does is make it more difficult to interface with musk, not to see the content.

>What it does do is prevent the user from easily engaging with the president

They can’t just make another account with which to tell Trump “you suck”? Ah but how will everyone else know _I_ tweeted something at Trump if _my_ handle isn’t attached to it? That’s what these people are mad about. Not that they can’t reply to Trump (they can), but that other people won’t know about that sick burn they once made that was drowned out by 30000 others.

Does Twitter permit multiple accounts for a single legal person in their terms of service? Do they permit creating additional accounts for the purpose of communicating with someone who blocked you on your other account?

Petitioning the government, regardless of how effective a petition it is, shouldn't require violating a contract.

[deleted because I was misinformed, as pointed out by a below comment]

Spicer's statements as press secretary represent neither a legal precedent nor necessarily the opinion of the Justice Department, though. I know you didn't specify "legal precedent", but that's the only precedent that would've mattered here. This is why this case had to be sorted out in the courts.

On the topic of Musk, the SEC has protocols that need to be followed. Even if Musk blocked 0 people, I'm sure he'd be under investigation.

> A potentially crucial difference is that Donald Trump's White House Press Secretary said in a press conference in June 2017 that Trump's twitter statements should be construed as official statements by the president's office. I'm not aware of a similar precedent involving Musk.

Well Tesla has gone on record with an 8-k form that indicates that Elon's personal twitter account is able to speak for Tesla officially.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312513...

Sorry, I should have put this in my original comment so you didn't have to make your comment:(

Can anyone who has downvoted this comment explain why?

The link to the 8-K provided very clearly states:

> For additional information, please follow Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s Twitter accounts: twitter.com/elonmusk and twitter.com/TeslaMotors

Which is in line with what the GP is stating. Various other financial reporting outfits have reported on this same document referencing the same line, and indicated that it may be considered justification as an official channel of distribution.

Whether or not it actually is concluded that way remains to be seen, but I'm not sure what's wrong with @chollida1's comment

If you identify yourself as an executive of a publicly-traded company and make statements that would fall under SEC regulation, I’m pretty sure they don’t care whether or not you identify those comments as “official.”

  has blocked people on twitter

  information must not be disseminated 
  in a way that isn't available to 
  everyone at the same time

Okay, but one needs to understand the difference between an authenticated account being BLOCKED, versus a public account's tweets being accessible to non-authenticated users.

If a twitter account posts public tweets, access to view and read is effectively unrestricted. There is no practical reason a person would be unable to view them, blocked or not, other than their choice to authenticate with twitter.

Being "blocked" just means you can't reply, while logged in as an identifiable twitter user id.

A flow chart of choices available, for how to look at a twitter feed would likely resolve this conundrum.

To argue about this is to say something like: "I could not read the disclosure, because it was on page 39 of the Wall Street Journal and page 27 of the New York Times. It needs to be on the front page, because that's the only page my clipping service sends me."

If you couldn't find a way to view a public twitter feed, how is that different from failing to take the initiative to turn to page 27 of the news paper, that can be perused for free at a news stand?

Where do you draw the line? Does not having internet access count as a restriction? What about not having a twitter account? What about not owning a computer? What about not owning a smart phone? Is making an announcement on a website not a technical restriction by default? Why or why not?