Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

>The owner of the @ElonJet Twitter handle says a Twitter employee told him his account was given limited visibility “to a severe degree."

Then you would expect e.g. his likes to go down significantly, right? He would start not showing up in people's feeds and engagement would dwindle to a halt.

From briefly looking through the history to the beginning of November I see no clear trend of reduced engagement. It seems quite consistent. Afterall it is an account about the plane of a billionaire, not exactly the most breathtaking content on the site. I see no evidence that he has "severely" less engagement then before Musk took over.

>Back in January, Sweeney told The New York Times Musk personally reached out to him over DMs asking him to remove the bot in exchange for $5,000. Sweeney counter offered, saying he would consider deactivating the account for $50,000 or even an internship at one of Musk’s companies.

This also seems bizarre. Does Musk really care about $45.000? Is that the kind of money a billionaire wouldn't spend to make some nuisance go away? Seems ridicolous to be honest.

Now ask yourself why other alleged shadowbans, pre-Musk, weren't so credulously (or at all) reported on. I guess they weren't "newsworthy".

They were reported on.

The difference is that pre Musk this was a known practice used by Twitter.

But Musk has bought Twitter insisting that he won’t be “censoring”. Yet he is continuing the practices he decried but limiting them to people he personally doesn’t like.

Musk buying twitter is a big improvement because now that it is owned by someone that is an acceptable target, the public is finally learning about what social media companies do as an unintentional byproduct of the media lobbing shots at him.

I think this should also be a good lesson in why we can't rely too much on any one company's service or assume it'll always be there. All it takes is one big change in management and suddenly the whole thing goes to hell or becomes untenable for some reason. I was never a Twitter user myself, but many people who were long-time users are now having to find someplace else to go.

It's also entirely possible he realized that it would quickly become whack-a-mole.

Someone can trivially spin up a copycat, especially if it's known (or even suspected) that the former account got a payout.

There would also be lots of extra visibility on it if the account disappeared, I'm sure there would be articles worse than this one waxing poetic about how obviously twitter did it to oppose their new overlord musk, and if not, how obviously musk strong-armed the account owner into shutting it down, and if not, how musk using his exorbitant wealth to hide information is egregious.

I'm sure it just became easier to ignore it and mitigate the actual issues it created (if any) in other ways.

>It's also entirely possible he realized that it would quickly become whack-a-mole.

Why offer the 5k then?

Of course it is a stupid idea, the flight data is public anyway. But why would $45k change Musks mind about the matter?

(FWIW, I agree with your conclusion.)

> But why would $45k change Musks mind about the matter?

One reason might be pride. I could conceive of somebody believing that they've offered something that is "fair" and being insulted when their fair offer is rejected (and especially more so when they're also told that the offer was 10% of "fair"). Anyway, to your point, there's lots of reasons Musk would never even consider making the offer in the first place, so it's a rather dubious claim.

Anybody with a modicum of self-respect wouldn't accept that counter-offer. The $5K offer was a gift, and publicizing a person's flights is sick behavior.

Sick behavior? In what way? It's publicly available information.

"They were so focused on whether they could, that they never stopped to think whether they should"

Putting someone's life in a spotlight without their consent is not much different from being an annoying paparazzi

Paparazzi invade into peoples lives and don’t allow them any sense of normalcy in either public or private. They capture intimate moments, draw focus to people’s bodies, and stir up media frenzies about mundane aspects of being human.

Posting ADS—B data is not anything close to resembling that. Elon Musk claims to have “started” Tesla in the name of sustainability and yet personally is responsible for dumping more carbon in the atmosphere than god knows how much compared to the average person. Pointing out this hypocrisy with publicly available data is not a bad thing, and is nothing like the paparazzi.

> Putting someone's life in a spotlight without their consent

Elon Musk acquired Twitter supposedly in the name of free speech. He then chose to post borderline transphobic thoughts on Twitter because he knew it would stir the pot amongst his ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION Twitter followers. He then chose to go on stage at the end of Dave Chapelle's set in front of a _lot_ of people, and was booed by a large percentage of said people. When someone decided to post a video of this on Twitter, that persons account was banned.

Does that sound like someone who doesn't want to have their life put in the spotlight? Or does it sound like an attention seeking hypocrite who is using his money and power to try to silence people who question his extremely questionable actions?

There are millions of good hills to die on. I have no idea why one would choose to willingly throw themselves onto a mountainous pyre of bullshit.

The rich and powerful do not need bootlickers to defend their shitty actions.

And I say this as someone who until recently thought he has caught a bit too much flak for some of his immature antics.

Then why did he ask for $50K to stop doing it?

Mostly because he could and because apparently stopping it is worth $50K to him. That the counterparty doesn't agree does not in any way oblige him, nor does it reflect bad on him that he set his price different.

Yea, I'm genuinely curious if the people criticising Musk here are also in favour of doxxing people and then publishing the info online? Cause that's effectively what this is.

I'm not sure where I stand on this but I can see why someone of Musk's public stature would be concerned about this.

Hell, I am a literal nobody and of someone did this or something similar to me I'd be paranoid as all hell.

There is no doxxing. All this information is publicly available to everyone.

Almost all doxxing consists of collecting a bunch of technically public information in one place. We still discourage it.

This isn't collecting data from a bunch of places. Its mirroring data from 1 place to another.

When you're one of the richest people in the world, and you're using your power to influence public opinion, having your already publicly available travel information posted online is not at all equivalent to doxxing.

Jesus.

There are accounts that track Russian diplomats and military brass planes, for example. They turn off transponders if they don't want to be tracked.

But the point is, it poses no safety risk to the rich and powerful. It's just a curious thing for the public at worst. If someone was a mark, the perps are not going to use frigging Twitter and go directly to the public source of this data instead.

>doxxing people and then publishing the info online?

His problem if he uses a means of transportation which, in real time, updates its location. The information is public anyway and it applies to everyone.

I really don't see how this is wrong.

In general, I agree. It surprises me that it's possible to follow Musk's whereabouts in this way, and I'd be uncomfortable if someone did this to me. That said, I think there are some mitigating factors here.

Firstly, the account doesn't track Musk himself, it tracks his private jet. If Musk wanted to, he could avoid the issue completely by chartering planes or just (heaven forbid!) flying in conventional airlines. Musk is explicitly making a convenience-privacy trade-off here.

Secondly, I think we do Musk a disservice by pretending that he is an ordinary person like me or you. He is, depending on your accounting, the world's richest person, which obviously affords him incredible luxury that we should bit begrudge, but it also means that he is one of the most influential people in the world. Bear in mind that he has recently bought one of the biggest media platforms in the world.

The problem with this is a principle of democracy is that power requires scrutiny. That's why we usually have a good idea of where our leaders are at any particular time - this obviously makes their lives difficult, but if we are going to hand power over to our presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors, then we should also demand accountability from them. But for Elon Musk, whose power comes solely from his wealth, there is no clear accountability. We have no right to know his whereabouts, or what he's doing with his money, or who he's being influenced by (and who he's influencing). His power is essentially unchecked (at least in the democratic sense) and limited only by the market.

So from that perspective, it seems very sensible and practically democratic to keep track of such powerful people.

Civilian flights have their data published. If I am flying my plane is publically tracked too.

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