Hacker News Reader

Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

There’s an account called Elon Jet which uses publicly available information to track Elon's private jet and post take off and landings. Elon offered 5k to the owner to take it down[1]. He has blocked loads of people for mocking or disagreeing with him.

Are those actions evil or wrong? Not really, but I also don’t think they’re the actions of an ardent believer in free speech which this thread is making him out to be.

Saying you believe in free speech and acting out a belief that everyone should have an equal right to say their piece without fear of being silenced are two different things.

1 https://www.techtimes.com/articles/271211/20220130/elon-musk...

View on HN

Offering money to take down a twitter account seems totally reasonable. If you're saying that Elon would've terminated the account if he owned Twitter, I don't think there's any evidence to support that.

No, there's no evidence.

But it seems trivially obvious that, if Musk owned Twitter, that account and ones like it that target Musk will disappear.

As much as I like Tesla and respect SpaceX, I do note that Musk rarely misses an opportunity to benefit himself.

The whole crypto market manipulation event is one obvious example; what abstract ethical behavior was driving that debacle? I say there was none and that it was a transparent attempt to make money while trolling the crypto community.

Not that I actually fault him for doing that. It just points out how broken the entire cryptoverse is. But my point is that he is prone to doing things for his own benefit and/or without regard for the consequences.

What I haven't seen is evidence that he would take some kind of high moral position on free speech absolutism against his own self interest. To me it's more a question of "prove that he won't do it" than to prove he will.

If he ends up buying Twitter, we'll find out either way.

That is entirely baseless. I'm fairly certain that whole affair was just some social media assistant offering money to someone for Musk to have slightly increased privacy and PR(since private jet use is really bad for the environment). They offered like $5k to take itf down which to Musk is literally like giving a homeless person a couple quarters. All flight traffic is public though. Banning a Twitter account would do nothing as all that information is already public record. You can track whoever you want on sites like Flightradar. I really doubt Musk cares that much at all, if he was ever actually even aware that the Twitter account existed.

In 2016 Elon personally cancelled a bloggers Model X order because said blogger roasted a Tesla event.

I'd say it sounds totally plausible.

That's not what free speech is about. Free speech protects your opinions from the state. Someone offering you money to take down public information about them is just a transaction between citizens. Nothing to see here.

And any moderation that twitter does is between a corporation and a person, it doesn't involve the government so it's not about free speech.

You're confusing free speech with the First Amendment.

To be fair, I'm a European citizen, so I'm not too familiar with the first amendment. I believe the basic princies hold true on both sides of the pond, though.

What would you say free speech means?

Free speech is just the ability to speak your mind without fear of reprisal or censorship.

It is not something we technically have here on HN or on twitter or in other such places.

Most governments that claim to value the concept of free speech usually have it said somewhere in their governing documents that the government will honor this concept.

Right, but censorship can only happen at the state level. The New York Times not letting Alex Jones write a column is not censorship or reprisal, it's an editorial decision. Same for Twitter or HN. The Douma deciding to ban certain words like "war" or "invasion" in relation to Ukraine, or the executive arresting bloggers on planes, that's censorship.

However the law has to put boundaries on free speech, because it can easily infringe on someone else's basic rights, so there is no such thing as completely free speech in practice. Even within the circle of your best friends, there would be limits to what you can say, wouldn't there?

I do believe we agree. I'm merely trying to be precise in my use of words like censorship, lest they become meaningless.

>Right, but censorship can only happen at the state level.

False. Censorship can and does happen at the twitter/facebook/youtube/reddit/wikipedia level all the time. It's the main reason there are alternatives to all of them. They tend to call it "content moderation" but that's just newspeak for censorship. Real content moderation would be limited to spam removal and child porn. What all the big tech companies do is censorship.

censorship can happen at all levels, its just that speech rights only protect you from censorship by the government. The censorship at other levels can still exist, and be meaningful.

Yes, you can block malicious actors and still be a proponent of free speech.

Does everyone consider Elon Jet a malicious actor? Who determines what a malicious actor is? I guess soon it could be Elon!

That's an interesting question. I have been thinking about how social media might be run in a way that allows for such filtering, but without a centralized filtering authority.

Maybe you could rate actors. And you could also refer to actors' ratings of other actors. Weighted by the rating of the actor.

No doubt it's been done. But maybe something like that.

Can’t really call yourself a free speech absolutist at the same time though unless you’re comfortable with blatant lies. Malicious/manipulative speech is still speech

Can Twitter block malicious actors and still be a proponent of free speech?

Publicizing the movements of people in real time is not a good faith example of free speech. Banning such accounts is reasonable under any framework of ownership, public or private. There is no good faith need for anyone to know private information like this.

Blocking people from interacting with you on twitter is an exercise of free association, also a right embodied in the first amendment of the US constitution.

Freedom of speech is not the right to an audience, nor is it a right to stalk.

Stalking is not free speech

“Stalking” is doing a lot of work there, it's publicly available information. The account isn't literally tailing his jet.

If you're a billionaire and buy a private jet you naturally have less privacy than other people and that's the breaks. If you go on SNL hold wild press conferences you will have even less privacy. That's the cost.

You cannot be rich, ostentatious, and private. Gotta pick just two.

>it's publicly available information

Irrelevant distinction. Most doxxing is just collecting publicly accessible information. Stalking and intimidation is still stalking and intimidation whether you use public information or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com