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Comment by x86_64Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

Why should impersonation be a problem? A true free-speech absolutist would think impersonation and parodying are okay.

This is entirely consistent with free speech. Impersonation and parody are still allowed on Twitter.

Musk was just offering to add a blue check mark to accounts that agreed to certain terms, including identifying impersonation and parody as such.

Why should making an agreement and honoring it be so hard?

Of course he should have known that there are a lot of trolls who wouldn't honor the agreement, and that's on him, but it's disconcerting to see so many people cheering the trolls on.

A lot of people were doing a lot of work on hard things, Musk showed up insisting they were actually easy and those people were incompetent for not having solved them before, or maybe weren't even really trying. ("just ask people to make an agreement and honor it" is your solution, really?) So people are pleased to see Musk get a comeuppence there.

> ("just ask people to make an agreement and honor it" is your solution, really?)

It's not my solution, it's Musk's, and I agree it was naive. (But to be fair, that was only part of his solution - the other part was that Twitter was enforcing the agreement.)

I'm just saying that getting service terminated for failing to honor the agreement is not a free speech issue.

Impersonating someone in order to defraud is a crime. Even if supposed to be funny or revelatory, you can be jailed. Look at the David Daleiden case in California

Who's being defrauded? How are the parody accounts taking receipt of anything that is intended for the people they are parodying? And David Daleiden did a whole lot more than just make a parody Twitter account[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daleiden

"Eli Lilly Dives After Fake Twitter Account Promises Free Insulin; Takes Novo Nordisk, Sanofi With It" - https://www.investors.com/news/technology/lly-stock-dives-ta...

Daleiden was charged with impersonating someone. Not on twitter. In real life. Twitter is real life too, last I checked. It's still subject to the law.

The hate boner for Musk on this website has become ridiculous. Be better.

Having a real person / entity tied to the posts seems pretty reasonable to me and doesn’t have much to do with free speech.

I don't hate Musk, I criticize his actions. Especially when he proclaims a strict ideological reason for those actions and vacates that strict ideology whenever it's inconvenient.

Free speech absolutism does nothing to fight spam, impersonation for sake of parody, or bots. So whatever he says, this ain't free speech absolutism.

We won't stop criticizing Musk. It's our right to criticize him. With great power comes great responsibility, and he's completely failing at responsible stewardship of the alleged "town square" that he just bought. I've lost count of how many times he's changed course on verification in the, what, two weeks since he bought it? He's earned heaping disdain and ridicule.

And two of my friends are getting fired because they live in cities without a twitter hq to drive to. Yeah. People hate that for some reason. Weird.

Are you speaking for Elon? He's made it pretty clear what his intentions are for Twitter, which is much closer to free speech absolutism than "being reasonable", which is what Twitter was before he bought it. If anything you should be asking Elon to "be better".

Spammers and bot writers are real people. Parodists are real people. I wonder if Musk hasn't really thought very deeply about what he means by free speech.

No. They are not “real people” in the sense of a “town square.”

Yes, they are. You can distribute flyers, solicit donations, panhandle, parody, and impersonate in a physical town square. You can also hire agents to do all of that for you. And thanks to the (highly questionable) doctrine of corporate personhood, you can even do all that as a corporation and it's all protected speech.

Here's a whole gallery of people exercising free speech through impersonation in physical town squares across the country:

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/trump-impersonator.html

Twitter doesn't allow that. Why?

The bots are real people, and the parody accounts are backed by real people too. This isn't a hate boner, but more of me acknowledging that what's happening is what everyone said would happen. Which is absolute free speech on such a platform would run head long into reality and require the business to pull back. Which is exactly what they are doing.

Perhaps less whining about being “cancelled” when what is really happening is that a person is being a tool, then complaining that THEY are the real victim here, and then immediately doubling down on detestable behavior.

Who is whining about being cancelled? Who is complaining about being the real victim? Who is doubling down? Did you respond to the wrong thread?

Did you just wake up from a coma?

The wanky trend of saying "xxx better" is pathetic. Do better.

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