Twitter Suspends Kathy Griffin After She Changed Her Handle to ‘Elon Musk’
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This norm seems to have been summarily overturned. I thought that Twitter was going to keep the status quo with moderation and make changes through a moderation council with diverse viewpoints.
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
Here is the policy archived from January of this year.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220108193314/https://help.twit...
> The account name (note: this is separate from the username, or @handle) should clearly indicate that the user is not affiliated with the subject of the account. Non-affiliation can be indicated by incorporating, for example, words such as (but not limited to) "parody," "fake," "fan," or "commentary.” Non-affiliation should be stated in a way that can be understood by the intended audience.
So the requirement goes beyond your handle, it must be clearly indicated in your display name that it is a parody. Kathy did not do that. She changed it to just "Elon Musk".
So Musk is enforcing a policy that existed way before this takeover.
Also from the page you linked:
> When we receive a valid impersonation or trademark report about an account that is not in compliance with our Policy, we may give the account owner the opportunity to bring their account into compliance and we may temporarily suspend the account. Accounts with a history of repeated violations may be permanently suspended.
Musk’s decree is clearly a break from previous policy.
The policy's wording gives leeway for Twitter to enforce it in different ways. I wouldn't say that this case is a break from previous policy. He's may be changing the way it was being enforced previously while still remaining in policy.
That's all to say he hasn't changed previous policy, he has changed enforcement of it.
If people think that's a jerk move, fine. I don't think so. Breaking the rules is breaking the rules whether enforced or not.
If he actually changed previous policy (i.e. changed wording/meaning/essence) or went outside the policy to punish Kathy, then I would agree that would be a jerk move.
I think the actual account is: https://mstdn.social/@stunning_and_brave
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IVCAOs... (archived: https://archive.is/MdSyK)
The display name states it is Elon, but the unique handle is @kathygriffin (which is linked from her official website www.kathygriffin.com).
But you know all that and somehow decided it's funny to pretend you don't.
https://twitter.com/mattwallace888/status/158950888646969753...
Is this going to fix it? No, one of two things will happen: (1) Musk will end up with a gigantic tax write-off when he sells what’s left of Twitter to Verizon for 140M two years from now. (2) Musk will turn it into something that is successful by some definition but isn’t Twitter and no longer commands the same attention from the world at large.
The handle is the id, not the display names.
Plus, Twitter could easy make the check mark link out to a profile page explaining who the person is.
To "Elona" https://www.newsweek.com/why-elon-musk-changed-his-name-elon...
To "Lord Edge" https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/11/08/elon-musk...
...and probably some others.
Yup, they were warned and they done it anyway and now they are crying over that suspension. So this over-reaction isn't newsworthy.
Rules should just be changed to be completely clear about that. Impersonating equals ban.
Unless only certain people are allowed to be assholes with their speech.
Understandable, but without impersonation.
i.e. Don't put words into other's mouths.
He demonstrated his high-minded principles by reinstating the account of his friend who had been banned for anti-Semitic speech.
But parody accounts that criticize the new owner are somehow a step too far.
The unifying principle appears to have nothing to do with what is legal under the U.S. Constitution, but instead whether the new owner personally wants to amplify or suppress the speech.
Hard to believe that all that talk about the wisdom of the founders and the value of unrestricted free speech was just bullshit.
Elon claims she was suspended for impersonating a comedian not Elon. She later changed it to Elons name but the original report she was banned for was someone else. Saying this is only about protecting the boss doesn't really hold up.
Having rules again Impersonation isn't wrongthink. Thats a big stretch and sounds a bit desperate.
I also highly doubt the new rules are "everything goes except what is illegal". They haven't even announced what the new policy is but there's no way it's going to be a free for all for prominent accounts (random accounts were always given more leeway because there are simply too many of them).
Twitter went hardcore in one (highly inconsistent) direction. You could significanty pull back from aggressive moderation and still not be an "illegal or all" scenario. Which is far more likely to be the case given pressure from advertising and because it makes sense as a product descision.
People didn't care about Twitters moderation until they went hardcore. The solution doesn't need to be hardcore in the other direction to be a big improvement.
And we all immediately understood those accounts were parody and not really Musk provided that you had more than a room temperature IQ.
Maybe. The problem is that unless it's made explicit, I am going to assume that someone WILL get confused.
>Absolute means Absolute
Absolutely. But not using my name. It's your speech, not mine.
This was the original point of the blue check marks, which is the point of the parody.
And you're making an argument which is adjacent to everyone needing to use "/s" because some people can't figure out sarcasm or irony on their own (also adjacent to the "think of the children" argument).
Personally, I think there should be all kinds of exceptions when it come to "free speech". But in particular, I don't think that "No exceptions, except this one that just occurred to me" is a sound position.
And person 2, a person who thinks that any criticism of the government should be banned, then you think that these two people are the same?
That would be ridiculous.
Support of free speech is on a spectrum. And yes, some people support free speech more than other people, and not everyone is the same.
Some people support more free than others, even if everyone wants death threats banned.
Be awfully nice if everyone wanted death threats banned.
There are people who make excuses for death threats under the logic that none of them are serious so people on the internet should all just grow thicker skin.
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.[1]
I think she only wanted publicity. The timing and action is questionable, but now everyone knows her name.
I think he is funny from time to time, but I believe he is an asshole as boss. Sometimes you have to be, but there are ways to go about that. There was a weird instance where he fired an allegedly incompetent engineer on the fly, but I don't know the details anymore. It seemed impulsive and random. Still, my opinion somehow improved lately. Maybe it is just his marketing team, but I prefer an asshole who is direct, instead of one that tries to hide it. Musk has enough self-reflection to know that he is an asshole. At least some points here...
There's nothing more obnoxious than a p̶h̶y̶s̶i̶c̶i̶s̶t̶ rocket company CEO first encountering a new subject.
I will say there is a definite pandemic of “Elon Musk derangement syndrome” going around now that I find entertaining as hell, as I watch normally sensible and smart people check their brain at the door as soon as his name is mentioned. That condition has prompted me to defend him a few times.
Elon has no idea what he bought.
Elon cannot post, despite desperately wishing he could.
Elon has done the worst thing you can do if you are being trolled online ("mooom the Internet is being mean to me!"), which harkens back to #1.
He's rapidly pissing off the reason why many people are on Twitter in the first place.
All while laying people off and then sending them messages with, "wait, no, please come back".
...
It's like watching an any% Speedrun of "destroying one's own company".
> Before Musk took over the site, Twitter had already planned broad layoffs, which would have affected up to a quarter of the staff, according to people familiar with the plans. The Post reported previously the company’s board was planning to cut thousands of jobs as part of an effort to save $700 million in labor costs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/03/elon-mu...
And I don't understand why you think Parag would have allowed impersonations (himself or others). It's just bad for the platform overall.
The answers are all no.
The question presents her impersonating Parag as a given hypothetical situation and asks what would Twitter have done in that situation. The essence of the question is would Parag have allowed for impersonation of accounts?
Your comment is a non sequitur.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220108193314/https://help.twit...
> The account name (note: this is separate from the username, or @handle) should clearly indicate that the user is not affiliated with the subject of the account. Non-affiliation can be indicated by incorporating, for example, words such as (but not limited to) "parody," "fake," "fan," or "commentary.”
Kathy Griffin's name change did not indicate it was parody as stipulated above, it was changed to just "Elon Musk", a clear violation of this rule that existed way before Elon got involved.
So you're saying Parag would for some reason just ignore this rule. I find that hard to believe.
P.S. You also said pre-Musk Twitter probably wouldn't have had a massive layoff. They were planning to.
I believe when this happens to less-sympathetic parties we chalk this up to "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", right? I mean, few people are actually going to defend a right to misrepresentation. Depending of the circumstances it could actually be libel/defamation, right?
This is the point I am not sure Elon Musk would have agreed with you about before aquiring the platform.
These "impersonations" are flimsy paper masks of Elon's face with the eyes cut out so you can see through.
This whole enforcement change is nothing more than Elmer Fudd throwing a tantrum because he bought a website full to the brim of bugs bunnies.
Debatable. If I go on a major Mastadon instance and impersonate an admin or a top celebrity there will I get banned? If I do, should I expect much sympathy if I accuse the relevant admins of throwing a tantrum? Can I go on a major Mastadon instance and pretend to be a politician up for re-election and start making claims in hopes of damaging their electoral prospects?
It just strikes me as implausible that the people who are accusing Musk of being thin-skinned here actually believe that this sort of impersonation is defensible behavior. I guess it's reminiscent of the people who pearl-clutch about political violence but also were okay with Griffith doing a photoshoot posing with Trump's bloody decapitated head.
Problem is Kathy didn't change her name to something that clearly indicated parody. She just changed it to "Elon Musk" a clear violation of Twitter policy that existed way before Elon got involved.
The people doing Bitcoin scams are impersonating Musk, fine, ban those if you want. But it's patently absurd to call changing your handle to Elon Musk "impersonation".
Again, if someone were impersonating say the White House and making outrageous statement I doubt people would just be like "it's obvious, just let them have their fun."
And again, this can't be called impersonation in the first place anyway because it's merely a well-known meaningless free-form text field of no actual value or consequence.
The display name is not the actual identifier.
They aren't trying to say, register a new account that appears to come from a whitehouse.gov domain email, supply the SSN of a real whitehouse employee, etc. Or Elon in this case.
It's just a free-form text field that can be changed at any time to any thing, and so is no more than a decoration.
And importantly, everyone knows this. It's not some new hack that someone discovered that was not an intentionally designed part of the ui.
For example, if that field were meant to be taken literally and seriously, then why did Twitter write it as a free-form field, and allow people to write literally anything in there, as in, animals and random objects and words, and unpronouncable strings in any language? They wrote their own ui, they could have made that a static value if they wanted.
"Your argument is invalid"
Do they though? I mean, I'm open to being convinced but just asserting this isn't very compelling. Why were there pre-existing rules governing the use of this field if this behavior was completely harmless? Saying "it's a free form field therefore no one should ever trust it" as a general principle seems like a stretch. Lots of web services separate display names from underlying IDs and allow flexibility in using the former, with some reasonable restrictions.
And yes, I omitted that they also changed their profile picture. But their @id is still stamped right on top of every tweet.
More pathetic is Elon trying to publicly upsell Stephen King on the subscription at $20, then immediately backing down to $8[0].
[0]https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/elon-musk...
Anyway, King said: "It ain’t the money, it’s the principle".... what, the principle of paying for a service?
I bought a few King books as a teenager, and even though I was broke, I don't recall saying anything like "f--- that I'm not paying for books". King thinks his Tweets are like his books! That's funny, they are not. His account serves his promotional needs more than it does the needs of people who like his fiction.
>I bought a few King books as a teenager, and even though I was broke, I don't recall saying anything like "f--- that I'm not paying for books".
Yeah... but Stephen King didn't suddenly decide you had to pay a subscription to keep the book after you already bought it, did he?
>King thinks his Tweets are like his books! That's funny, they are not.
Pretending you can read someone's mind then disagreeing with them doesn't make a compelling argument.The value his account has brought to Twitter - for free - is worth far more than the shakedown cost for keeping his blue checkmark, and Twitter needs him more than he needs Twitter.
>His account serves his promotional needs more than it does the needs of people who like his fiction.
It doesn't. I guarantee you Stephen King doesn't need a Twitter account to promote himself or his work.
He tweeted yesterday: "I don’t care what you do with the blue check as long as you VOTE blue."
Sounds like he needs a Twitter account to promote his politics, his dislike of republicans, dislike of Twitter, re-tweets of Biden, and personal jabs such as "It’s amazing how much Kayleigh McEnany looks like a Barbie doll.".... Wow, he should stick to far-fetched fiction.
> "...after you already bought it, did hey?"
Who already bought what now? Nobody bought anything! That's the point. That's why Twitter is losing money. King didn't buy anything ever.
Nothing wrong with finding revenue opportunities. Think of it as a price increase from zero to a new amount. No different to any other price increase we see from one amount to another.
It's amazing the breakdown of reason and logic when people are politically motivated in their replies.
Without someone to say "Falcon 9 isn't good enough" when its already crushing the launch industry and all the competition is racing to catch up to its capabilities, which could take as much as a decade for slower moving companies like ULA (partial reuse goal is years away) or ArianeSpace, and regardless of the timeline often requiring significant efforts to develop reusability technologies that fit existing designs, whole new rocket design programs to add reusability, or fleeing to niches where such reuse is not viable (rapid schedule (in terms of calendar days between purchase and launch day) in the hope of holding onto some market share...
SpaceX without Elon would quite possibly turn into Blue Origin, who's glacial schedule is moving so slowly, the largest customer they have signed is for their engines, and due to widespread rumours those engines wont happen on time, the customer made a very big deal about showing off that they do indeed finally have some engines they can use to build their first test rocket.
Regardless of his many faults, personal and professional, he as CEO of a privately held company who gets to make the big decisions about what does and does not get built, has been responsible for pushing forward the space rocket business in a way that hasn't been seen in nearly half a century... The Apollo era saw companies push designs and innovate and resulted in actual test hardware programs with such experiments as Aerojet's 260, a 6.6m diameter solid rocket motor with 16 MN of thrust, equivalent to the entire Saturn 1 first stage. The funding cuts post Apollo shrunk the industry into just relying on the R&D from the Military Industrial Complex side of the aerospace companies and so we got decades of slow incremental progress mainly off the back of maintaining the fleets of ICBMs.
> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
So Babylon Bee and The Onion is secure as long as they don't pretend to be actual news like the rest of the media. Excellent. :)
Not sure you'll stay a single digit millionaire for very long flying first class nilly willy tho, a million dollars ain't what it used to be, amirite old sport?
Twitter seems to be on the same path to oblivion. Microsoft offered $44 billion for Yahoo in 2008, which in a strange coincidence is the same amount that Musk actually paid for his Yahoo/Waterloo.
Are these people trying to impersonate Elon Musk, or are they parodying Elon Musk on their clearly-marked "not elon musk" (due to the handle) accounts?
I'm inclined towards the latter.
Don't be verified and pretend to be someone else. Or just don't pretend to be someone else regardless. Seems pretty straightforward...
I was referring to the fact that the US Library of Congress has archived every tweet since 2006.
What difference does this make?
Maybe someday they'll leverage deep fakes to achieve something that is indistinguishable from the real person if you miss the minor details, at which point there will no doubt be calls to end what they are doing, but until that day comes...
I find it stunning that anyone would suggest that the @id isn't a core and obvious part of someone's Twitter identity.
You can find it if you're looking for it, but it is not something someone scrolling through casually is going to take notice of, especially since the first three components observed have been considered enough to verify identity until now.
Which, indeed, is Griffin's implicit statement – that the blue badge is becoming meaningless when anyone can buy it for $8 – but that's also why there are holdover efforts to maintain the badge as a form of identity through banning of those trying to impersonate others.
Maybe you think the @id should be the most visible piece of information so that this isn't an issue, and maybe you're right, but it most certainly is not. Reality doesn't care about your feelings towards things, it only deals with what is.
I would understand your argument if it was in any way not obvious and centered alongside the posters name.
Sure, maybe some non Twitter users won't understand, I'll grant you that, but impersonation and parody are so common everyone looks at the @.
Just like I said. Proof right here that readers shortcut over content that doesn't seem necessary.
> You'd have to stop reading mid-line to not see it.
Which the average user would being that there is only so much time in the day and you've already identified the poster leaving it to be a waste of time reading further during casual use.
> but impersonation and parody are so common everyone looks at the @.
The blue badge used to indicate that the account was a legitimate person using their legitimate real-world identity, and anyone who violated that was at risk of being banned, so impersonation has never been expected. And since the badge comes first...
This was Twitter's policy long before Musk got involved.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220108193314/https://help.twit...
Throughout the pandemic, I witnessed people questioning the science behind lockdowns and government overreach being banned, censored, de-patformed from social media sites and the common response in the media being "start your own platform"
"The shoe on the other foot" is such a bad place to find ourselves as a society, it speaks to us being incapable of reconciling our differences for a common good.
Since the 2016 election, the US has gone batshit insane it feels like. It was crazy before, but its incredibly hard to have any sort of a conversation about touchy issues these days without an overwhelming negative, non-critical response in the form of downvotes, aggressive bucketing into political buckets, pariah treatment etc.
I hope, at least on HN, we're able to hold discussions on political topics without such tribalism.
But I've also had some great discussions here with people who listen, trade book recommendations, and at least try to learn before writing me off.
A lot more of the former these days, unfortunately.
If both of those things are true, then I would guess that at least 90% of people in the world are simultaneously capitalists and communists.
Buckle up; the next decade is going to make the 1960’s look pastoral.
Finding out that, apparently, there were under the table "You get a blue check for $15,000" schemes going on will make things ... super-interesting, if any forensics can find out a goodly percentage of the culprits. And I wonder exactly what overlap will be with this crop of sudden whiners.
When she switched her name and picture to Elon, she broke an existing rule about no impersonation.
In effect, when both of these combined she was publicly spreading election misinformation by making it look like Elon Musk was recommending to vote democrat. Also against the rules.
This is not the first time she has broken the twitter rules; she must be surprised they got enforced this time.
Hacker news does not skew left. Not right. It's simply not a monoculture and it tends to emphasize data first and foremost. Anything even remotely politically charged will draw out all sorts of arguments.
Which makes sense as it was founded by venture capitalists and is essentially used as a vehicle to promote their ideology.