Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomguy0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com