Former top Twitter official forced to leave home due to threats | Hacker News Reader

Former top Twitter official forced to leave home due to threats

cnn.com

33 pointsmhoad17 comments

I don't like the witch hunt culture no matter which direction it goes. This whole situation is cringe.

However, I'm not convinced by the popular argument explaining why Musk is "wrong" - that he has a "responsibility" when speaking to his 120 million followers that is not shared by anyone he mentions in his speech. This seems arbitrarily restrictive at first glance, because it means anyone can speak about Musk, but he can't defend himself by speaking about them.

For example, someone could join a panel on the NYT to accuse Musk of cultivating hate speech. They could nudge a political effort to manufacture outrage as part of a campaign to persuade Apple and Google to remove Twitter from the app store.

Shouldn't Musk be able to respond to those claims with his own megaphone? He's being personally attacked and has the moral right to defend himself - including by attacking the credibility of his opponent.

You can think he's tasteless or classless or even liable to be sued for defamation. But the premise of the argument shouldn't be that he has some extra responsibility not shared by anyone else. He's not an elected official or a head of state. He has the same responsibilities and risk of consequence that anyone else has, relative to the scale where he chooses to operate.

Instead of cooking up hypothetical circumstances in which Musk is a hapless victim, how about we examine the actual situation where he and others are insinuating that this Roth guy was promoting pedophilia (he wasn't), and the fact that Twitter isn't consistently removing obvious and explicit death threats.

Edit: for context, here's a collection of threat examples from a fairly well-known researcher who regularly catalogs botnets and fake follower accumulation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1601681990071521281

Thanks for sharing that link. I do wish people who share tweets from the "far-right mob" would share more context. These looks like bots with zero reach that could've easily been created by 4chan dipshits trying to build a case _against_ Musk, as was the case shortly after Musk took over and we saw a surge in hate speech.

TheNoticing1: Joined November 2022

SoCallFreedom09: Joined November 2022

Ajinkya: Joined April 2017, 20 followers

alec51100718: account suspended

FarCue13%: Joined June 2022

DualityofHan: account suspended

I'm in no way defending what Musk did to Roth and find it despicable. Roth was not promoting pedophilia, and Musk insinuated he was.

The Twitter official wasn't personally attacking Musk. And if your posts have the power to force someone from their home, you do have a moral responsibility to use that power carefully. Musk isn't just saying the official made poor decisions, he's accusing him of far worse.

The idea that speech from anyone should be self-censored because of unpredictable or even predictable responses by others is ridiculous. If that were the standard, no speech would be allowed at all, and even if it was, the rules would be easily gamed and weaponized to prevent people from talking.

"Self-censoring" over the response to your speech and thinking about the impact of what you say is called judgement. People do this all the time, based on context, power dynamics, etiquette, etc.

I have no power to "weaponize" this, but it's entirely reasonable to question the judgement of how someone uses their speech

With great power comes great responsibility. 'Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest' may not sound like a death sentence when spoken by the corner baker but when a person in a position of great power speaks those words they may well become exactly that.

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