ElonJet – Account Suspended | Hacker News Reader

ElonJet – Account Suspended

twitter.com

372 pointsstefan_413 comments

Musk a month ago:

> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456?s=46...

...and people believed him! Hopefully this goes on FB, Reddit, and every other social media thing it can.

No worries, this is already coming from reddit.

> .. even though that is a direct personal safety risk

The data is public, jesus christ. Though Musk-fans will eat this up.

I’m convinced people don’t like/ read messages closely. They just like sentiment.

So they’re happy to embrace what they think of as say a concept like freedom, even if it is the opposite.

To be fair, public is not the same as easily accessible.

It's easily accessible. Here you go: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/

I don't see Elon's plane marked.

It's not in the air right now.

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af

Ok, so now that you gave me the callsign, it IS effectively marked.

Publishing someone's personal jet callsign should be treated similar to publishing someone's license plate number, phone number, or home address.

And an organization like Twitter should have clear policies on that.

The Senate Majority Leader's phone number is (202) 224-6542. Biden's home address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Should posting those be actionable?

Musk is a public figure, using public airspace, with a legally required ADS-B device that broadcasts its location, altitude, etc. to the public.

The Federal Aviation Administration publishes this data openly. So, no.

https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...

Interesting. I am surprised there is a "name" field. It has some random holding company ... but if you're an individual not playing the shell game, are you required to put your actual name there? Or is there an option not to?

If you own an aircraft as an individual then your actual name must be listed.

Wow, ok. You really can search by people's first name and last name, and tail numbers come up. I'm surprised. I just assumed it was like license plate numbers; my bad.

Yikes, people. I didn't say twitter should ban posting license plates and airplane tail numbers, I was just saying those things are pretty equivalent and there should be a clear policy on it that is followed consistently.

And now I realize they aren't equivalent, because FAA publishes owner names for tail numbers, unlike license plate and VIN numbers. I'm surprised.

How do you know which of those 10,000 airplanes is Elon Musk's jet?

I've searched for "Elon Musk jet callsign" but apart from the mentioned twitter account, I couldn't easily find out which one it was.

> apart from the mentioned twitter account

The one covered in the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/technology/elon-musk-jet-...), Musk has publicly tweeted about (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456), offered $50k to remove (https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker), and of a plane registered to "Falcon Landing LLC" at "1 Rocket Road, Hawthorne CA" (https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...)?

C'mon. We know it's his jet.

> C'mon. We know it's his jet.

Yes, we know. Because of the twitter account.

My point is that it would be much harder to know which airplane is Elon's jet if it weren't for the twitter account.

Which goes to the gp's point that even if the data is public, making it easily accessible increases Elon's personal safety risk.

That said, the NYT story does seem to make my point a bit moot. In any case, I wasn't aware of that story, and it didn't come up when I searched for "Elon Musk jet callsign".

Although I would guess a determined attacker could find it out given sufficient research.

> Although I would guess a determined attacker could find it out given sufficient research.

You don't have to be determined; a college freshman on a lark found Musk, Gates, etc. and made Twitter accounts. This information is intentionally public; you can browse recent plane registrations at https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/RecentRegist..., export it to CSV, with full name and address of each owner.

I get a text message whenever my dad is seen in the air.

@elonjet isn't the problem here. (IMO, there isn't a problem.)

Amplifying/republishing public data can lead to an increased security risk, whether you like Musk or not.

This idea is widely acknowledged, with key example being the EU's "right to be forgotten". Which upon request removes personal information from search results, whilst it typically does not remove said info from the underlying individual websites. The very principle here is that a republication (search result) very much can be a security/privacy risk.

It still feels dirty to do it secretly

There should be a banner on the account or tweets with a justification or at a minimum an explanation for shadowbanning. Otherwise it's easy to abuse.

Why would he care if he abuses it?

Sure I guess. But the line Musk himself drew was that he wouldn’t ban this or any account unless it was doing something illegal. It’s clearly not. So according to free speech absolutists like Musk, the banning of this account is a violation of the 1st amendment rights of the poster.

(I don’t agree with that, but I spent weeks arguing with Musk supporters about this very fact. Now all of a sudden they are saying “it’s his right to do whatever he wants with Twitter”, which I agree with. But then why did Musk buy Twitter in the first place? Well now we know: to do whatever he wanted with it, not to champion free speech rights! Which is exactly what people were worried about! It’s all so frustrating…)

> it’s his right to do whatever he wants with Twitte

The obvious response to anyone who says this is that the previous owners (and hence management appointed by said owners) similarly had that right… so why be upset about them - ha because their decisions didn’t align with you. Juts be careful, while Musk’s choices today might match your world view you should know that he only looks out for himself and will do whatever is his best interest and so the projection of being fundamentally pro speech is a mirage.

The thing is that people are cherrypicking quotes and dropping conclusions without any regard for the facts on the ground.

Right now, you conclude that this was a personal vengeance by Musk himself. Whilst this conclusion isn't verified at all. We don't know why the suspension is there. It's in fact unlikely a personal action as Musk has reinstated some of his biggest enemies before.

The "free speech absolutist" quote is bullshit. It's a random interview quote taken out of context, that never applied to running Twitter. You can be a free speech absolutist as a person whilst not applying this to Twitter. For the simple reason that you can't. It doesn't work with advertisers and is downright illegal in some jurisdictions, like the EU. Musk has readily admitted that and aims to "piss off both political extremes equally" whilst "elevating the silent 80%".

> It's in fact unlikely a personal action as Musk has reinstated some of his biggest enemies before.

He's also refused to do so based on personal feelings. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/21/tech/alex-jones-twitter-ban/

> Musk has readily admitted that and aims to "piss off both political extremes equally" whilst "elevating the silent 80%".

Sure. He's also claimed "funding secured" to bring Tesla private before, which was found in court to be a lie. I'm not sure why you'd take his statements at face value.

Funny you say that, as you yourself take an earlier quote about free speech at face value and then re-apply it wherever it is convenient and makes the narrative work.

The next thing you do is to make him guilty by association. Something was done before (in a different context with different circumstances) hence that is evidence that this case is exactly the same. Which too is speculation and narrative.

Eternal damnation is also a way to build narrative.

It's all narrative and zero facts. I never said that I take his statement at face value. I said that I would refrain from judgement until the reason for the suspension is given. Which is very basic human courtesy.

> you yourself take an earlier quote about free speech at face value

No; I knew he wouldn't actually do that. Its value is to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Musk's approach so far.

> The next thing you do is to make him guilty by association.

With whom did I associate him?

> I said that I would refrain from judgement until the reason for the suspension is given. Which is very basic human courtesy.

The more times someone lies to you, the less you should "refrain from judgement" on new claims.

> I said that I would refrain from judgement until the reason for the suspension is given.

And if it's never given? Are we to just refrain from judgement forever?

This line is pretty commonly used to cover for "let's just stop talking about it until it's old news"

So Elon Musk understands the concept that certain kinds of speech can be dangerous because they increase the security risk to someone.

Yet, he consciously chose to suppress the speech which very marginally increased the security risk for the richest man in the world, who can probably afford to hire every security firm in the world at the same time, but considers the act of Twitter not promoting such speech which targets marginalized people most of whom couldn't afford any private security, a huge affront to free speech.

"Yet, he consciously chose to suppress the speech"

We don't know this. The reason for the suspension is not given. It may as well be part of the big bot purge.

Other than that, I very much agree with you that Musk as well as any account with an enormous amount of followers should very carefully pick their words. Even opinions within the limits of free speech that you and I could express, have a way different effect when you have a 100M followers.

We don't know this. The reason for the suspension is not given. It may as well be part of the big bot purge.

Why give Musk the benefit of the doubt in this way? The @elonjet account was a properly registered automated account going through the Twitter API, it should never be caught up in a bot purge of inauthentic accounts.

I give everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt by principle. It's fine to be skeptical, but that's different from hysterically dropping to conclusions without knowing the first thing about context.

There is plenty of surrounding context here, you're just choosing to selectively ignore it.

The relevant context is the reason for suspension, which is unknown.

That sounds rather farfetched. The "right to be forgotten" is mostly useful for politicians who want to censor scandals from votes doing a quick google search before deciding who to vote for. Someone who wanted to carry out an attack would be willing to spend 10 minutes extra to find the information, or they would never be able to follow through with their plans anyway.

It's not far-fetched at all.

It has become increasingly common on social media where a post that does not directly call for violence, still triggers all kinds of real world harassment. Musk himself is guilty of this too.

The right to be forgotten is not designed for high profile public figures, quite the opposite. Public figures in a way are always screwed from a privacy/reputation point of view.

Instead, the right to be forgotten is to protect common people. Maybe as a teenager when drunk you posted something stupid on social media. Which shouldn't haunt you for the rest of your life. Maybe a nude photo got leaked. Maybe you made a mistake at work, and don't want to be unhirable for the rest of your life.

A key principle of the right to be forgotten is that no one should be perpetually burdened by a past they have shed.

Hard to see how that applies to future flight plans for a private jet!

The original point of discussion was whether republishing data that is already public can be harmful. My answer to that is 100% yes.

You make people aware of data that they may not have been aware of before. Do this to a large audience and it only takes 1 to be triggered into a harmful idea.

You could make the same argument about news articles on current court proceedings, professional licensure records, or even Amber alerts, but you would almost certainly lose in court if you sought prior restraint of such speech.

Restrictions on republishing data always have limiting principles (at least in US and EU law).

The only point of principle Musk is standing on is that this affected him personally, so it has to go (a principle that new Trust and Safety head Ella Irwin is evidently happy to go along with). And, of course, this is the guy who’s handing out internal e-mail and Slack logs, complete with PII, to do hit pieces on former employees, so let’s not pretend Musk cares a whit for privacy and safety for anyone other than himself.

The right to be forgotten does not apply to current or future actions, so it feels like very much a stretch to use that as an informative example here.

Republishing public flight data is closer in spirit to retweeting a public hearing announcement. Usually, at least one party to a hearing would prefer that it be secret, but that data is public for a reason

Your street address is public data too, but you probably don’t want it on Twitter.

A private citizen's home address is definitely not public record.

Perhaps you're thinking of home purchase records? Real estate title transfers are public, so if you buy a house in your own name, there will be a public record of that. But you can move, and AFAIK there is no annotation in the record of whether you intend to inhabit or rent out the purchased property.

Typically a mortgage will require the buyer to intend to use the property as their primary residence. If you want a loan to buy a house you intend to rent, you get a rider on the mortgage to that effect. So it is in the public records, if you used a purchase loan.

Unless a home is purchased through a corporate or private trust laws around this vary by state, the homeowner is listed on a public state government database. Each state has their own unique system and each state has different bits of data. Some make it harder to reverse query by name rather than plot number, varies by state. There are some sites that index this data making reverse searches by name easier.

If the private citizen is a renter there is another database used by rental companies that operates similar to a credit rating system, the name escapes me, but it's open to a large number of people to query. That system shows all current and prior residence of renters as well as missed payments and even has notes for problematic renters including but not limited to late payments, evictions, property damage, etc...

If you own the home, then it'll be public through the county GIS. But you'd probably need to know the state/county first to find it.

You may be too young to remember...

Several years ago I hear a guy on the radio telling people to be very careful. There was a place where people could get your name, your address, even your phone number, all for free... if they knew where to look.

Listeners called in, some incensed that the MC/DJ whatever was even talking about it.

After a few minutes, he exposed the secret. It was... the phone book.

It's entirely possible the account posted different content beyond tracking the jet. It's also possible a mistake was made and the account will be restored.

When Kanye was banned for posting a swastika, people spread a rumor that it was for posting a picture of Elon looking fat.

So we have a history of there being more to it here.

Maybe we should actually find out what the account has posted recently, or see if it was a mistake, first?

Waiting to find out more details is antithetical to the internet outrage machine.

Inventing imaginary details to justify hypocrisy is bread-and-butter of the internet outrage outrage machine.

The @elonjet account hasn't posted anything outside the norm; I was a follower. Anyone who'd like to provide evidence otherwise is welcome to do so.

assuming there’s more to it when we have a history of there not being more to it seems similarly foolish

Well I personally have nothing to gain or lose from waiting for at least the account owner to comment (no tweets as of this moment) https://twitter.com/jxcksweeney let alone something from Twitter

I don't expect it to stop others though

He has tweeted. And guess what, it looks like just what everyone has been saying! Who woulda guessed?!

We already knew his account was suspended… That’s all he said.

I was talking about an explanation. Usually Twitter tells them.

The Web Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20221213074257/twitter.com/elonje...

Seems like the account runner hasn't tweeted anything?

https://twitter.com/jxcksweeney/status/1602354433807061070?s...

The last thing they said was Twitter backtracked on 'deamplifying' his account. I guess maybe something changed.

> Maybe we should actually find out what the account has posted recently first?

Yes, because Elon has certainly earned all the benefit of the doubt.

Also, what did "we" find?

Well yes, exactly - the last time time someone said Musk had banned an account, it turned out it was because someone pasted the symbol of a group that murdered a few million people on the basis of their race, not because they insulted Musk.

I'm glad you understand the history here.

So if it turns out Elon lied, you’ll change your opinion of him?

Yes I will. Though it would be uncharacteristic if he did - he made a point of keeping Elonjet alive, and not deplatforming people because Twitter staff dislike them - assuming the account content remained the same, it's likely someone at Twitter made a mistake and the account will be restored.

Will you change your opinion of Musk if this ban turned out to be a mistake?

Did you change previously your opinion of Musk the last time "Elon bans someone because they insulted him" turned out to be untrue?

1. We don't have any information yet, whether this was an automated ban, or something else. Due to the high profile I imagine we will find out soon, so all the hysteria in this thread is a bit premature

2. Ironically, what this account is doing is basically doxxing, whether the data is publicly available or not, it certainly makes it easier to track someone who has plenty of enemies.

3. If it was banned under Musk's instructions, that is pretty hypocritical after his tweet 2 weeks ago, but I still think it's a bit ridiculous to cite free speech issues being violated here when this is easily argued as a doxxing case.

Thank you for your service. Please send your CV to elon+pr@twitter.com

Thank you for your ad hominem attack reply, it added nothing to the conversation.

Elon offered the owner of the account $5,000 to shut up. The owner counter-offer was $50,000, after which Elon cut off all communications.

Then he spent $41 billions to buy Twitter, and proceeded to silence and suspend the account.

This doesn't qualify as money well spent IMHO, but what do I know.

Perhaps he might have bought Twitter for reasons other than closing down Elonjet?

It's possible, yes. The evidence for that is scarce, though.

Not really, in court filings there are text messages with him pretty clearly discussing his rationale.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison...

Elon Musk:

EU passed a law banning Russia Today and several other Russian news sources. We have been told to block their IP address.

Actually, I find their news quite entertaining

Lot of bullshit, but some good points too

--- Wow...

Also looks like he's great friends with Larry Ellison. That explains a lot.

> Also looks like he's great friends with Larry Ellison. That explains a lot.

Don't forget Peter Thiel.

Whooosh!

No chance. Elon's incompetence is vital to my worldview.

It seems as though the main reason he bought Twitter was that he was legally compelled to by the Delaware Court of Chancery.

It didn't even get to that point, did it? The twitter board was suing to force the purchase and he agreed to it to stop the lawsuit - makes me wonder what there was that might've come out in discovery that would've been worse for him than blowing 40-odd billion on twitter.

Don't forget that one of the first things he did as the CEO of twitter was ask about striking rules against misgendering.

Definitely didn't have anything to do with his trans daughter disowning him or his ex dating a trans person at all.

What a petty man.

I have an honest question. Why do you care? Why does anyone even bother following his life details.

He has literally zero impact on your individual life.

The rule being sticken happens to affect me. And also most of my peer group is now spread out between cohost, splintered fediverse servers (who blocks whom? it's a mystery!) and somehow some are still on Twitter despite it clearly being an increasingly unsafe place for the likes of me. (Especially considering who got access to the backend moderation service to "investigate" now).

So I'd say his fits had a pretty severe effect on me.

You've posted this elsewhere.

If this is an honest question, an honest answer for you: he's the most powerful person on the planet. He can shape the world in ways that no other human can.

It's reasonable to be concerned about his behavior. The potential for him to change society is astronomical.

Is Musk seriously that unhinged that he publically commits to allowing the account to tweet what it does and then a few weeks later he nukes it?

Does anyone know the reason for the suspension? Perhaps a false positive on the ML behalf?

I'm just guessing here, but I assume Musk realised what Trump did some years ago:

> “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he said.

A large percentage of Musk's followers are devoted to him and to whatever he says his cause is on any given day. He can move the goalposts and they'll cheer him for it.

I think Musk will have a lot more trouble with that logic than Trump did.

People who like Trump like his usual behavior, with all its crassness.

People who like Musk mostly liked his former behavior: building electric cars, launching rockets into space and talking about saving humanity, and tried to sweep his public behavior under the rug as much as possible. That's no longer working very well. People who'd formerly be proud to own a Tesla are now starting to have second thoughts.

My second thoughts on buying a Tesla started a few years ago now when following a car crash involving a Tesla, they would start to publicly blame the actions of the (sometimes dead) driver (aka “their customer”) based on their “logs” - when there was a clear incentive for them to find the first possible thing that they could point to, to indicate driver error rather than, for example, an autopilot error.

Even if they were technically right in some cases, this just seemed to be in such poor taste, often impossible to verify, and just felt wrong on so many levels. And poor PR and a disproportionate focus on Tesla in the media is not a good enough excuse. I can’t help thinking that it’s another example of Elon’s reactionary thin skin mentality driving company policy.

His antics with Twitter has definitely changed the public perception of him, even on Hacker News. It's much, much more negative and the uncritical adulation of the wonder boy is almost non-existent these days. The cheering section is shrinking every day, and it's entirely his own doing.

The thing that changed perceptions of him was that the media that spent all of its time praising and adoring him for being rich, suddenly called two-minutes hate after he took control of a Democratic Party and administration aligned media outlet and threatened to loosen that control.

I can't stand billionaires and would smile if Musk died in a fire, and I resent the government-fueled blackshirts that are forcing me to constantly defend him. Musk is this week's Hitler for the wealthy upper middle-class center-left and their stupid children.

But the cheering section does have a floor, just like Trump. It literally doesnt matter his behavior, that cheering section will still sell out.

Anyone can see he’s pathologically disingenuous and dishonest, so if you’re a fan of his at this point one more betrayal of supposed core values is unlikely to change anything. The true core value they admire is narcissism, cruelty, and unrepentant, shameless lying, and that hasn’t changed.

It’s like getting excited about a politician. These politicized public figures are almost always a huge disappointment.

Usually you just end up having to take whatever gains you can get. A long sequence of lesser evils. Hoping each will be a net gain among a series of bad ideas.

If Elon tries to defend this he’s going to lose a big chunk of the free speech crowd. This one is very hard to defend even by diehards. Regardless of intent like all censorship it will rebound with a Streisand effect hard. So pointless if it was intentional.

Yes he is. I saw what kind of a person he was 4 years ago after I started following TSLAQ on Twitter and got exposed to information about him that was never surfacing the media.

It's possible that the account was "reportmaxxed", i.e. some people mass-reported the account and triggered an automatic ban. Since the goal is to cause a fuss and this ban has done that, it's not entirely unreasonable.

It's also very possible that Elon just changed his mind and decided that nobody would really care if he banned ElonJet, because everyone has made up their minds about his Twitter policies anyway. I wouldn't put it past him for a second.

I assume that the next reporter he talks to will jump at the chance to grill him on it, so we won't be wondering for very long.

Wake me when Twitter starts showing which users have been de-amplified:

> Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal [1]

That's the real story. This suspension is transparent and relatively uninteresting compared to the vast amount of moderation that we can't see.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16010421251303710...

They showed a few (all prominent Republicans), but mostly unsurprising ones. I really want to know what fraction of accounts end up automatically being de-amplified.

It would be great to have all of that data. Even just being able to see the status of your own account would be interesting.

It wouldn't fit the narrative if they just gave out the data...

I bet £20 that this was due to the anti-bot purge and not a direct action from Elon. Good odds it'll be reinstated.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of readers will not hear about it if it is and thus the negative sentiment about Musk continues to accumulate as the myths and partial storied live on...

This was not an inauthentic account pretending to be a real person, which is the type of bot you want purged, it was a properly registered account using the Twitter API in a way that said it was a bot.[0] So it makes no sense for it to have been caught up in an anti-bot purge.

[0] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tutorials/how-to-creat...

Fuck up seems more likely than conspiracy. It'll be interesting to see if Elon brings it back though, at the end of the day he's already getting booed in public, at this point he bought the company he might as well get something out of it. No one in the demographic he's appealing to will hold it against him.

A conspiracy involves several people doing things in secret. A direct order from a megalomaniac that results in something very public doesn't fit that definition.

Welp, first person to reply gets to name the charity I donate £20 to.

RivieraKid Foundation

The Internet Archive

Meanwhile:

"Twitter has stopped paying rent on offices and is considering not paying severance packages to former employees, among other measures."

https://archive.vn/iGZH3

The grand irony of Elon Musk forcing formerly-remote employees to work from an office whose rent he refuses to pay for.

What? Why?

You can’t run a business like that for very long. 1-2 years max. Then all the law suits will eat you up.

Deliberately not paying may lead to criminal charges too.

Certain individuals like Elon might have acquired a not completely unfounded belief that “rule of law” in fact does not apply to them personally.

You'd think he'd be disabused of that notion when he was forced to buy Twitter after trying to back out of the acquisition agreement.

but he wasn't forced... he could've been but we will never know.

He spent months publicly attacking Twitter and damaging the platform while trying to weasel out of the contract he foolishly signed. To suggest that it was all an act and that he willingly had a change of heart after being taken to court would be beyond credulity.

Bankruptcy was already a high likelihood from the deal terms, though I expected later in ‘23. I see the non-payment news as evidence it may come sooner.

Well, Twitter was a zombie company already. It almost went bankrupt in 2016, they offered to sell but nobody wanted it. Trump and the media explosion to follow bought them some time.

Twitter cannot grow because it is unappealing to the masses. Where every other social network has skyrocketed in recent years, Twitter is stagnant. Well over a billion people have signed up for Twitter, but over 75% immediately abandon it. Which is not true for Instagram, Tiktok, the like.

Of the few accounts that are sticky, most never post anything. The vast majority of Twitter activity is a tiny elite group of politicians, journalists and celebrities posting hot takes which are then passively consumed or retweeted (which Twitter conveniently counts as a new tweet).

Before the Musk take-over there was already a plan to do 800M in cuts, the company was already in existential trouble and very poorly managed throughout its life.

Bottom line is that Musk paid a top price for absolute junk.

Gonna take these kinds of stories with a pinch of salt and wait a few months to see what happens. A lot of journalists are extremely unhappy with Musk atm so there will be many many negative articles written, even if the evidence is dubious.

Even odds the "three people who are close to the matter" are wrong.

The real story is how vindictive journalists have been just because he was going to lower the value of their bluecheck marks.

No one other than Musk and a small cohort of very online conservatives actually care about the blue checks.

Do you have any actual examples of this? Because all the journalists I've seen on this topic have gone to great lengths to point out that for them the bluecheck wasn't a status symbol - it was a feature for twitters users to know who was verified. Swisher has ranted about this a few times - she couldn't give a shit about her bluecheck it's valuable to twitter, not her, and she was supportive of Musk until the homophobia.

Details about ElonJet:

- Website: https://grndcntrl.net/falconlanding/

- Git repo: https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify

- Author's Twitter: https://twitter.com/JxckSweeney

His other jet tracker SpaceXJet is also suspended on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceXJet

Really disapointed,

Also small rant: on most websites you get suspended but without transparency on the exact infrigement, that's awful. You have to appeal and even then you are not sure of getting the exact reason.

I remember some of the funniest memetic images being screenshots of exactly why people were banned from 4chan. Exceedlingly detailed. Seems like the culture of providing reasons for bans has been largely chucked. Can't imagine that being the case for irl things like traffic tickets, but could imagine it being the case for say hotel bans.

The "No Fly" list is an IRL example, people who were erroneously on the list had no idea until they tried to take a flight and finding out why and getting it fixed is a nightmare.

> Really disapointed, Also small rant: on most website you get suspended but without transparency on the exact infrigement, that's awful. You have to appeal and even then you are not sure of getting the exact reason.

One of the most significant innovations from social media/advertisement companies that spread through the rest of the internet: ban for undisclosed reasons, putting critics and Nazis on the same bag, making understanding harder, etc. Bonus points when they hide behind automated systems and use this as an excuse in the event they get some bad PR fallout.

And people wonder why I'm willing to endure a year or two of DSL until a local fiber provider lights up the town where we're buying a house. Sure, starlink is an option, but I'll be just fine knowing I'm not sending any of my money into his pockets.

This is it, this is the whole reason he bought twitter.

My personal favorite is the Geneva Dictator Alert [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/gva_watcher

Some context: https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-shadowban-elonjet-private-jet-...

From your link:

>"Sweeney, a first-year student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, says he uses publicly available transponder data from Musk’s private plane to track its location. That data, which includes the plane’s altitude, latitude, longitude, and heading are then fed into an algorithm he created. The @ElonJet bot then takes that information and Tweets out when Musk takes off and lands."

I hope that this individual makes his bot code publicly available so that others can just keep putting up @elonjet clones on Twitter and elsewhere. This could so easily be put up again somewhere else outside of Twitter. I think a Kickstarter campaign for a site called something like "Free Speech Jet" would likely be very successful just on principle alone.

He already did.

https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify

> Musk addressed the issue in early November, saying he would ban the @ElonJet account due to free speech principles.

>“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk said in the Tweet.

Looks like the author / editorial team at Gizmodo missed a negation there?

Musk is now to Twitter as Murdoch to Fox News. A billionaire owner in favor of "fair and balanced" media.

Musk censoring an account that tracked and broadcast his movements makes him pretty much the same as Murdoch and Fox news.

Not looking to accuse anybody. But why is this thread not on the first page anymore? It was there a second ago, and it's still actively being upvoted and commented on.

I’ve seen this before. The best I’ve been able to come up with is that if it gets enough downvotes it’s considered controversial and gets ranked lower, even if the overall score is high.

Probably the occam's razor explanation

Tld’s available:

Elonjet.lol (£3 for first year with Gandi)

I am not affiliated with Gandi.

I'm not sure why anyone expected twitter not to be run like another of his other companies. This freedom of speech play will always be secondary to Elon's whims.

Notably, as best as I can tell none of the other automated aircraft tracking bot accounts have been suspended. Just this one.

Pretty much all aircraft data is publically available. This is probably it:

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n628ts

It's very likely filtered out of the FR24 data. Use https://globe.adsbexchange.com instead and you will get everything, including Elon's jet.

This one?

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af

AFAIK Flightradar and some others provide a VIP service for blocking flight data. Elon's Jet is blocked there, too. Ironically, the owner of the elonjet account even told Elon how he could hide flight information on these platforms...

> Last week, Sweeney noticed he couldn't locate Musk's jet, and realized Musk was attempting to hide his flight patterns from the @ElonJet using the blocking software Sweeney had recommended to him.

Source: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-college-student-tracks-e...

what is so frustrating about this is, musk recognizes that when this account sends out his location (while it is publicly findable) that this information could potentially elevate a threat to his safety.

he recognizes this threat and takes steps to mitigate. but it almost seems like he enjoys watching elevating threats to other people, and even worse he gloats and declares they are unreasonable if they ask for mitigation to help protect themselves or their group.

i hope this guy finds his empathy for others.

...and there it is

Casual reminder that:

- Elon Musk was never a free speech extremist, he just wanted to bootstrap his money pit rocket company off of both sides of the Ukraine-Russia war.

- Elon Musk has always been hostile to the kinds of things the hacker community really appreciates, such as Free software, right to repair, and so on. This was way before he got into vice signalling to the far-right.

- Elon Musk did not found Tesla, he just pushed the founders out and erased them from the company history.

- The Boring Company will never solve traffic because the solution to traffic is to stop building roads and start putting houses on top of businesses so people can walk to work.

This is not about freedom of expression. Freedom of speech is the ability to express yourself. It is not about the publisher publishing you. You can create your own paper/website/communication and distribute it.

No one is obligated to publish you.

Musk asserted free speech gave him precisely that obligation last month. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

Does the account apply a delay?

With the number of crazies out there, it probably would be less of an issue if there were a delay longer than average staying time.

Also, this information will still be on Twitter through the Streisand Effect

Wondering aloud, what if someone were to write something that will attach Elon jet's location as an email signature?

It could be that the account was auto-suspended along with many other bot-accounts they suspended recently. So, algorithm?

I think the rubicon was crossed when the acquirer insinuated that an executive who went to bat for him was a pedophile. The executive has had to go into hiding.

There are lines that we shouldn’t cross in a civil society. Supporting blood libel adjacent claims is at the top of the list.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy79wm/elon-musk-yoel-roth-t...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/12/musk-tw...

Elon Musk also accused an emergency rescue worker of pedophilia during a deadly rescue mission. He double-downed on the claim by elaborating on his reasons for thinking that the rescue worker was having sex with underaged Thai boys.

Elon wanted to completely destroy the rescue worker as punishment for insulting his high tech submarine solution over social media.

Because the rescue worker rightly said it was a waste of valuable time, of which there was little left, to try Musk's sub idea.

Nah, because the rescue worker said he could shove his sub where the sun don't shine.

Note that the chief of the rescue operation did ask Musk to continue working on the sub.

Thanks for adding some more detail. You are saying the diver who was in the middle of risking his life to save children was an asshole that deserved to be called a pedophile by the richest may on earth. I haven't learned anything new about the diver or Musk, but I know something about you now.

> You are saying the diver who was in the middle of risking his life to save children was an asshole that deserved to be called a pedophile by the richest may on earth.

Um. Did you read a different comment to mine or do you simply bucket comments into "pro" and "anti" and assign meaning based on that rather than their actual content?

I never said he was an asshole.

I never said he deserved to be called a pedophile. He certainly didn't in fact.

As a side note, the diver called a pedophile was not actually any of the ones going into the cave and thus was not risking his life (he knew the cave and gave advice to those who did go in). So I guess you DO get to learn something new.

I'm not a robot so I understand what someone is saying without them having to spell it out for me. Be brave and own your words and if you can't then think about why that might be. We both know Musk was in the wrong in that episode, that'd you'd pop up and choose to defend him on THAT speaks volumes. Musk even apologized to the guy for fucks sake.

To help diffuse the tribal part of one's brain: yep, Musk should not have called him a pedophile or kept claiming it so.

Now:

> I'm not a robot so I understand what someone is saying without them having to spell it out for me

Ah, I see. You're one of those people who tries to look at "what motivated this person to say this?" rather than looking at what they actually said, right? Someone more concerned with what "side" someone is on/pushing than on actually transmitting an accurate model of reality?

So if I said something like "the Ghost of Kiev is just a fairy tale" you would assume I'm pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine and if I say "climate change is very unlikely to cause human extinction this century" you'd assume I'm a climate change denier?

I think the thing you're missing is that people are different. While a lot of the people you interact with are, indeed, like this, some will be more like this: https://xkcd.com/386/

And if you don't understand that other types of people exist you're going to expose yourself to needless conflict. :/

Musk's legal defense in that case was he had made a joke. This defense worked, but it's worth noting that the plaintiff's lawyer was Lin Wood.

That was ugly. Musk should have lost that defamation lawsuit.

"Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis"

That is definitely not insinuating he was a pedophile and claims to the contrary are outright lies. More insinuating he was advocating for Bad Things that let children be harmed.

It's a low blow and a stupid one, but it's nor an allegation of pedophilia.

He deliberately trivialized the thesis and posted an out of context excerpt in order to make it as inflammatory as possible and insinuate that Yoel wants to sexualize children. Musk’s fans took that to mean pedophile because that is the normal Musk playbook.

How the heck do I respond to a post that contains such a mix of statements? Maybe:

Agreed.

No basis given.

Agreed with caveat that its a small minority.

Relies on particular world (well, Musk) view, too complex to discuss in limited space. Insufficient evidence.

If Musk wasn’t insinuating that, then why did so many people interpret it that way and send death threats? Also, why hasn’t Musk corrected the record and apologized (he hasn’t right?) if that’s not what he meant?

Or maybe that’s exactly what he meant, and the result of the person getting death threats was what he intended to happen?

Maybe if this were the first time Musk weaponized accusations of pedophilia and had apologized for past and current behavior I could give him the benefit of the doubt. But he hasn’t, so I can’t.

Because people are idiots.

Possibly because Musk has a thousand things people are trying to bring his attention to and no one has succeeded in bringing this to his attention and making it seem worth his time.

Maybe. But the alternative explanation of attention deficit also explains the facts.

Do you think people buy any of these disingenuous arguments or are you making these arguments more for yourself than other people?

You're responding to somebody who is making an argument with no argument, just a declaration that they're being disingenuous, followed by an accusation of being mentally ill.

Do you think people are convinced that you're on the right side of the issue when they see you argue like this?

Ok, so let's deal with this in order of priority. I did not accuse anyone of being mentally ill. Are you willing to openly admit that?

Hey SilverBirch, kinda curious about your viewpoint but think it best discussed over a more long term communication medium, can you drop me an email at dyth68 at yahoo dot com?

>I think the rubicon was crossed when the acquirer insinuated that an executive who went to bat for him was a pedophile. The executive has had to go into hiding.

Musk's antics notwithstanding (which will blow up in his face, in all kinds of ways), Yoel Roth is a public individual coming out of a high-profile role, who played a very consequential role in events surrounding 2020 election and January 6th. Musk's antics and trolling isn't great for anyone, but there is a slightly different standard at play here when it comes to attacking a public individual versus a nameless engineer.

In this case, Musk dishonestly defamed Yoel Roth, but did not call for violence against him.

>There are lines that we shouldn’t cross in a civil society.

The current culture war is all about what those lines are. This isn't an easy answer.

And this notion of ascribing danger to speech that doesn't call for violence is itself .. well .. dangerous. When Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017, that followed weeks of Democratic post-election messaging that Trump and Republicans will cause thousands to die if Obamacare was repealed (Trump was vocal about repealing Obamacare). Was that dangerous language? Was that a line that was crossed? If you truly believe that a political action will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, do you not take matters into your own hands? Or maybe we should have a standard where speech that doesn't call for violence, isn't a call for violence.

>Supporting blood libel adjacent

This entire 'adjacent' business is lazy at best, and dishonest at worst. We're all just 6 degrees from Kevin Bacon, so everyone is adjacent to everyone else.

You should know that Musk, even though he positions himself as politically central/right (depending on your frame of reference) and espouses free speech, is neither of a particular political conviction nor particularly cares for free speech (unless it is his or that if others who say things in his interest).

He is ultimately only looking out for his own interest and will say and do whatever he considers in the moment to advance his own goals.

Fans who think he is anti-woke or pro-free speech are naïve to think he stands for rock solid principles… he is only projecting those characteristics to manipulate to get what he wants.

The Galaxy brain thing is to realise that’s true of literally all of them.

That's the attitude that creates things like the Russian government.

People are all over the place morally/politically/how they treat people, even within non-random groups like billionaires. Better to differentiate between the good and bad behaviors specifically so people strive to do better.

It's easier to get into a position of power, wealth or fame if you act like this, so people like this are overrepresented in those we see in the news and media. Even more so because those people have more reason to make their voices heard. But infering from that that it's common or generally accepted outside of very specific circles would be a mistake.

To put a fine point on it, he believes in naïveté: People will argue about over what is said (regardless of contradictory behavior) because the general populace will spend their effort supporting their belief system for/against the argument than acting on the contradictory behavior.

Recognizing his actions are contradictory requires a higher level of abstraction.

If he was actually this conniving then he wouldn't have bought Twitter in the first place. He's going to lose billions of dollars on that deal.

It seems obvious to me that he's a standard very online right-wing reactionary. People don't want to believe it because he's the electric cars and solar panels guy, but the new reactionary right doesn't care about climate change denialism anymore.

People will put forth these hot takes for the usual reasons: a desire to seem smarter, to look like they see through the bullshit. It’s upscale conspiracy theorism.

14 year old edge lords on 4chan are also into rockets, electric cars, solar panels and flame throwers ...

I don't understand the confidence that people have when talking about the internal states of celebrities they follow.

I bet if we take the absolute value of level of hate or love that someone has for any given celebrity, it will strongly correlate to the inverse of their IQ.

Assume best intentions. Don't attribute anything to an immutable aspect of one's character.

Motives are unknowable (irrelevent), it's only actions that matter.

I'm no fan, but this does pass the 'would probably do this too' test. As, I could see this being a recommendation from one's personal security team.

Not to mention a doxing that is my understanding violation of T's policy. But yes, you then have to ban Gatesjet, Puinjet and so forth.

The free speech argument is kinda stale for me at least, it's easy to virture signal 'in the interest of free speech', but obviously there will always be some speech that is not acceptable (ie.. doxing, illegal)

> Not to mention a doxing that is my understanding violation of T's policy. But yes, you then have to ban Gatesjet, Puinjet and so forth.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

Twitter's policies define doxxing as the posting of private information that was not made publicly available by the owner. They also specifically allow "sharing information that is publicly available elsewhere, in a non-abusive manner".

ElonJet and all of the other similar bots tracking interesting aircraft are using information that is broadcast unencrypted by the aircraft itself to anyone within radio range (sometimes hundreds of miles) who has a compatible receiver (including the famous $15 RTL-SDR) and publicly shared through multiple aggregators like ADS-B Exchange, FlightAware, and FlightRadar24.

This data is legally required to be broadcast, so it's definitely not private, and it's definitely publicly available elsewhere.

Elon would probably argue that it was abusive, but that's a lot more subjective. As far as I'm aware the account never tweeted anything but the facts of his jet's movements.

> Twitter's policies define doxxing as the posting of private information that was not made publicly available by the owner.

Musk didn’t make the data available so we can discount that.

> They also specifically allow "sharing information that is publicly available elsewhere, in a non-abusive manner".

Yes. Sharing information to make people track a person’s movements could be considered abusive.

I suspect this is a mistake though and Musk will have twitter re enable the account.

> Elon didn’t make the data available so we can discount that.

Did you miss the part where this data is legally required to be broadcast openly? This isn't private information, so whether or not Elon wants it to be shared is irrelevant.

> Yes. Sharing information to make people track a person’s movements can be considered abusive.

The account isn't tracking Elon's movements. It's tracking his jet's movements, which again are legally required to be publicly broadcast by the very jet being tracked. Aside from the time he's actually on the jet, the extent that this allows a person to track his movements is "he's probably somewhere within the general region served by whatever airport the plane is at" which is not exactly a significant privacy issue nor unusual for anyone of sufficient celebrity.

He always has the choice to not fly everywhere by private jet, which I believe was the entire original point of this bot. Making a note of the carbon impact of his choice to fly all over while promoting himself as a leader in reducing carbon footprint. There was a whole thing for a while with calling out a variety of celebrities for the same thing, just Elon was the only one who took it personally.

> I suspect this is a mistake though and Musk will have twitter re enable the account.

Given that the head of the company has a known public vendetta against this particular account and it was just the other day publicized that direct Musk subordinates were involved in "shadowbanning" it, and we know for a fact that Twitter has systems to flag accounts for special treatment such as Musk's previous promise to not ban it, this really doesn't pass the smell test.

What's more likely, that after all that they somehow accidentally banned both this account and later the operator's account, or that Musk got angry and changed his mind?

Well this is a surprise turn of events, at least at this time the ElonJet account is back (though the author's personal account and his other interesting aircraft tracker accounts remain suspended at this time).

https://twitter.com/ElonJet/status/1603166460746104833

Twitter has changed their policies to not allow posting of same-day location information even if it's from public sources.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1603165959669354496

That seems to confirm that this was intentional and one of two things happened:

1. Someone jumped the gun and started enforcing the new policy before it was public, entirely coincidentally only enforcing it against this specific user's accounts before realizing their error but doing nothing to undo or even acknowledge it for hours after. 2. Someone in a position of substantial power made an arbitrary move and then changed the policy to justify their actions after the fact.

I know which one of those two I'd bet on.

And they banned it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992412

It’s not arbitrary. A car with his child in it was attacked. The account was already against the old ToS if you define it as abusive use of public data, the new policy is clearer, and it applies to everyone equally. I’m not sure what you’re complaining about.

> Did you miss the part where this data is legally required to be broadcast openly?

No, I specifically pointed out the first part mentions data not shared by the person in the first case. You missed that.

> The account isn't tracking Elon's movements.

It’s literally called Elonjet. It’s not about anyone else except Musk.

> which again are legally required to be publicly broadcast by the very jet being tracked.

Again, abusive use of public data is against the Terms of Service. Please read the Terms of Service.

> No, I specifically pointed out the first part mentions data not shared by the person in the first case. You missed that.

In what universe is "the person's aircraft is actively broadcasting this information" not data shared by the person? Just because they don't want to share it and are legally compelled to do so doesn't mean they aren't sharing it. That policy is about data not normally, legally, or intentionally shared.

> It’s literally called Elonjet. It’s not about anyone else except Musk.

It's literally called Elonjet. It tracks Elon's jet. Not him personally.

The bot posts when the aircraft takes off and when it lands, so even if he is on the aircraft at the time that information is almost immediately stale. The moment he leaves the airport it's nothing more than "There's a reasonable chance Elon is somewhere in the same metro area as his plane"

> Again, abusive use of public data is against the Terms of Service. Please read the Terms of Service.

The bot is not abusive, it's there to make a point about Elon's carbon emissions versus his public claims of environmental concern by displaying his use of inefficient private jet travel. That was a thing for a while with a lot of celebrities, but only one of them threw such a fit about it that it remained in the public's attention.

Remember that this bot was up for ages, with Elon publicly whining about it, Elon fans reporting it regularly, and I have no doubt he was bringing it up in private conversations with Twitter higher ups once he became involved. Are you telling me that you honestly believe this account and all of its related accounts were posting content that blatantly violated ToS that entire time and was allowed to remain open just because?

Note as well that the final banning came along with a (notably after the fact) change in policy to explicitly ban these sorts of accounts. If it was so blatantly against the ToS why would that be needed?

I imagine he lives a very lonely life in most ways that are important. Like a king of old. EVERYONE is an antagonist that wants something from him and his motivations run very self centered.

I dont see any sites over facebook tracking Zuckerberg's jets..

Hey Elon… What was that about freedom of speech … I can’t quite hear you over the hypocrisy alert airhorn.

Edit: Note for readers. I’m a political centrist not living in the USA and big Space fan and thus a big SpaceX fan. Elon is responsible for some cool shit happening that I really like… but it’s also incredibly hard to avoid seeing obvious negative behaviour he’s engaged in related to twitter and with everyone more angry at him than ever his attempts to be liked in public (the Chappell show thing etc) … I’d like the Elon of a few years ago back, he seemed more focused on just getting stuff done and less interested in reacting to the public perception of him personally…

Also billionaires are a symptom of a broken society. No one needs more than 999 million even with current inflation rates eating up its real world worth it’s still more than anyone could ever use and we should probably just tax net worth over a billion at 100%.

Kid is not expressing any idea.

He's just promoting geo-stalking/gps tracking Elon.

But he can still do it on Mastodon so his rights are not curtailed.

> his rights are not curtailed

Nobody is saying that they are. They are saying, however, that this is a serious about-face from what Elon has claimed in the past. He rode into twitter on a high horse and has walked back pretty much everything he's said since.

How is this different then doxing?

Because airports have a giant security ring around airplanes, so you can’t physically get close to him with this information. And it’s transient, so you can’t lurk and wait to strike. It’s like a comedian doing a planned show.

Plus, the tracking is on Elon's jet, not Elon as a person. So nothing is preventing Elon from sending his jet to NY, while flying, charter or first class, to Miami.

A stalker could easily watch the exit for the suites (where private jets go from) at the airport.

not different from a celebrity doing a planned appearance

People's personal movements are not promotional activities.

this is not tracking Elon Musk personal movements, this is tracking 3 corporate airplanes owned by Space X. There is some overlap, but it's the same as loitering in front of one of his companies HQ might help you find him.

It’s literally called Muskjet. The purpose is to track an individual. Loitering in front of his company’s HQ would also be stalkerish.

I wonder what changed for him since last month when he explicitly said he wasn't going to ban @elonjet.

A stalker doesn't need @elonjet. They can just go to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/.

> How is this different then doxing?

Because it's public information that's literally broadcast to anyone listening by every aircraft above a certain size/speed. This isn't information that is considered secret or even that one needs to dig to expose, the aircraft is actively transmitting regular messages containing its location, heading, and speed to anyone within radio range which can be tens or hundreds of miles depending on altitude.

Many types of doxing are free speech

> He rode into twitter on a high horse and has walked back pretty much everything he's said since.

Rather like Keir Starmer and the UK Labour Party.

Sorry, I'm a dumb American and don't understand this joke.

It's not a joke, just an irrelevant (though accurate) comparison that doesn't belong in this thread.

Starmer is leader of the opposition party in the UK, he was elected leader by Labour party members after making ten pledges, all quite socialist / left wing, but since becoming leader he's basically reversed every previous position he's claimed to have and is now taking centrist and even right of centre positions - upsetting many who voted for him (while others, though not me, say it's needed to attract more center/right votes in the next election).

It was sort of a joke - a wry aside that's true, and was meant to make the right kind of people smile. And you're quite right, it doesn't belong in this thread. Sorry.

Not a joke sadly. The Labour membership is quite left wing (understandably) so Starmer's leadership campaign was structured around 10 left wing pledges, promises about nationalisation, the EU, unity and continuation of the 2017 Corbyn era manifesto. He has since abandoned the majority of pledges, waged an illicit war against left-wing candidates, kicked the previous leader out of parlimentary party, appointed a centre-right front bench and frequently says appalling anti-union, anti-migrant and authoritarian crap. He is one the most dishonest politicians in the UK but given a free pass by the press because punching left is celebrated by our media class and never considered a fault.

I can still bookmark Elon’s plane on FlightRadar or ADSBExchange… this doesn’t stop anyone “geo-stalking” … it just stopped one guy tweeting it. Oh and also hurt Elon’s free speech debate credibility.

> Hey Elon… What was that about freedom of speech … I can’t quite hear you over the hypocrisy alert airhorn.

Here's what Musk said about ElonJet six weeks ago (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456): "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk"

> even though that is a direct personal safety risk

Is he worried about his haters getting a hold of anti-air weaponry or something?

Laser pointer is more than enough to endanger an aircraft.

For some fairly absurd definitions of "endanger", yeah.

It's enough to force an emergency landing, yeah. And that endangers the whole air traffic around by putting it into non-standard situation, yeah. You have some fairly absurd definition of "absurd".

It's really not enough, no. There are literally videos of pilots blocking the light with a piece of paper.

As long as we're talking about regular laser pointers, at worst this mildly inconveniences the pilot.

There have been tens of recorded cases of this every day for decades in the US alone, but not a single recorded accident.

The idea that someone could meaningfully endanger Elon by pointing a laser pointer at his private jet is pants-on-head crazy. What next? Oil slicks on his driveway? Perhaps slowly poison him by idling a car in front of his house? Second hand smoking?

True, by the way do you have some sort of alert or just happened upon this thread? (Re: the topicality of your username)

He created it for the thread.

I am not sure, but the people he points the finger at are getting death threats for doing their jobs:

https://www.thewrap.com/yoel-roth-twitter-elon-musk-death-th...

I legitimately wonder if there's a limiting principal the modern Supreme Court would accept to ban private ownership of a MANPAD.

I'll tale one of those Gepard AA tanks, once Ukraine doesn't need them anymore. You can drive one those to Walmart for weekly groccery shopping! And you propably din't need a concealed carry liscence.

Edit: I once saw people live firing WW2 anti-tank artillery somewhere in Nevada or some similar, desert-ish place. So, if a modern Gepard is out of the question, maybe a WW2 8.8 flak cannon would qualify as a historical collection piece?

Tangentially related, the Washington department of transportation has M60 tanks used for avalanche control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZLfboCceGA

A MANPAD would already be classified as a destructive device and I doubt you could even find licensed dealer who has one. Since it needs a stamp from the ATF and a licensed dealer needs to handle the transfer, they are effectively already banned.

> they are effectively already banned

And do you think that is consistent with an originalist view of the 2nd amendment?

Depends on how you interpret the 2nd amendment. Different originalist justices will interpret it differently. The current court in their most recent 2nd amendment ruling indicates that their new test will allow many current gun regulations to stand.

If the current conservative justices believe any weapons at all should can be banned (which they said they do—of course they could always be lying) then you have to think they believe a MANPAD can.

> Different originalist justices will interpret it differently.

I detect some irony.

But I will say I'm not trying to be clever here and ask some sort of leading questions - I really just wonder what limits there actually are now. I doubt any of the federal weapons laws of the 20th century could be passed and deemed constitutional here in the 21st. But if they make full-auto small arms as easy to buy as semi-auto, I'd definitely pick something up.

Suppose you manufactured/assembled one yourself.

I know you can’t manufacture an automatic weapon without a license from the ATF. I don’t know specifically about destructive devices. It is illegal to manufacture explosives, and you can’t transfer explosives to an unlicensed person.

So my guess is no, not without a license that you aren’t going to get unless you have a legitimate business interest, e.g., manufacturing them to sell the the military.

No, Musk only said that in an effort to make himself look like a tough guy with principles. But in the end he's merely a hypocrite.

By freedom of speech, musk means the freedom to post misinformation and antisemitic conspiracies, not the atrocity of publishing curated public information.

> not the atrocity of publishing curated public information.

I'd extend that with:

- Anything that makes fun of Elon.

- Anything that calls out Elon or rebukes Elon's statements.

> and we should probably just tax net worth over a billion at 100%

The reason people put these high limits is they think it will never concern them. But the reality is we should just tax net worth over a million at 100%; or maybe forbid wealth altogether. Or at least we should discuss that, instead of billion limits that may only affect a few people -- people who will never be part of the discussion in the first place.

„If being rich is outlawed, only outlaws will be rich.“

– roughly after Phil Zimmerman

Thanks, I don‘t like that future.

Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m all for progressive and _way_ higher taxes, but this extreme would do the opposite of what you want.

Maybe. But my point is that it's that we should discuss this, and not super high limits of over 1 billion that 1/ only affects very few people, 2/ none of which are likely to be part of the conversation and 3/ would still leave them extremely rich by any reasonable standard.

I don't even understand your point. 1. A billion is 1000x more than a million. It is many times higher wealth and far beyond what could be considered required for a family to survive on for generations. 2. A million is not even enough to come close to retirement, it is way too low of a number, so it is not even enough for one person in one lifetime in the US (which we are presumably discussing since the billionaire in question is taxed here). 3. The affect on publicly available funds from taxing the 1% of the 1% would be equal to or more than taxing the 99% of the 1%.

So regardless of what you consider the right answer to the question (it's pretty tough to support without major caveats in my opinion), they are not at all the same and it actually comes across as an subtle attempt to reduce any potential support by muddying the waters, regardless of what you were actually trying to do.

How exactly? You can still be rich - but there will be a cap on power. That's like saying "if amazing dictatorial power is made illegal, only outlaws will amass dictatorial power". No, in fact, sometimes systems do what they are supposed to achieve, especially when it comes to things like power where we can have a conversation that the ultra-rich are usually already engaged in morally and legally questionable behaviour (Bill Gates anti-trust skirting and various anti-competetive antics, facebooks whole business mode centered around tracking users against their will,so much of Elon Musks skirting and flat out ignoring of labour and safety regulations and other recent antics...).

I'm not saying a hard cap on wealth is the best way to achieve this or that achieving any form of control of private power that doesn't turn authoritarian is possible, but in general, I'm against using these types of "you can't make the thing we do regulated, because then only criminals will do it" argument. Beer, recreational weed and medical services tightly regulated and we don't see massive crime rings build on top of them. If we regulate wealth to such a degree that most people feel like it's fair, it'll be difficult to establish proper crime syndicates around it - the question of how to keep a state that can do this effectively from being authoritarian is a much better question to raise

Well, now they pay 0% so I don't think you need to worry about the other extreme yet....

Do you think if Elon Musk was able to own as much wealth as he wants (which I assume is all the wealth of the world), he would use it to increase the freedom of the average person, or do you think he would use it to work his will on them?

Is that even a question? He's on the record as wanting to run a whole planet. Sorry guys, we have to make this work somehow, oxygen is now $8 Elon Dollars / month...

How would that work? It's not like most millionaires have $1e6 sitting on a bank account.

For example, many (most? all?) farms are worth more than a million, who should own these?

If one wants to start a new venture that requires more than $1e6 to start (say a new factory), how would funding work?

How would that work? It's not like most millionaires have

Don't expect a cogent, sensible answer to that question.

Just like any other tax enforcement works.

It’s leg work, forensic accountants and laws that demand accountability. If the government thinks your cheating your taxes people are tasked to investigate… if the government suspects your cheating the 100% billionaire tax they would assign people to the task and investigate.

I don’t know why people pretend this has to be special… like billionaires are supervillains with unbelievable power to conceal their globe spanning networks and operations.

I didn't mean how would the tax work.

I meant how would ownership of companies work? If a company is worth 100 billion ($1e11), does that mean you need 100 000 people who together own that company (and nothing else)? If it has a good month and becomes worth more, you need to find more people?

Capping wealth at a billion has a couple of icky practicalities, but I can definitely understand why you would want to do this. There are less than a thousand billionaires in the USA right now, if we can radically improve wealth equality by affecting that many people it seems like a good trade, and those people are still filthy rich at the end of the process.

But if you cap it at a million, I start to see things that require millionaires. Starting large companies and family owned farms are two of them. I'm genuinely curious what alternatives to millionaires we have there.

Are you (or bambax) arguing for straight up communism, where everything is owned "communally" or by the state?

The day to day value is probably not even a remotely practical metric for this sort of taxation. Average yearly value or quarterly value or something like that seems much more sensible. You can’t expect anything to work if people are worried about daily price fluctuations causing them significant impact. This isn’t meant to be some sort of punishment after all, just the logical extension of steadily increasing high income tax brackets to a point where we as a society agree you don’t need any more money and the tax rate becomes 100%.

If it worked with strait income it wouldn’t be too hard but at the level of wealth we’re talking about most of the money isn’t income it’s just capital… a big pile of capital assets of value they have control over which they can leverage small portions off to take loans against for cash to do whatever they want at an interest rate lower than the rate of growth in the value of their capital assets… because they’re never a risky loan applicant and the whole system tilts towards them almost as if money had some weird form of financial gravity.

So while I’m no super genius economist and political wizard with all the answers to how it can be done, I just think it’s important we recognise that there’s a point where these people have so much money the system is broken for them and if we believe in the equality of all people, that all people are born equal, we should be trying to change the system in a way to rectify the problems their wealth causes.

There would be years of arguing all the details about trusts and percentages and inheritance and family control and super PACs and even if it’s constitutionally allowed since there’s precedent that money is speech and this could be argued to be an unreasonable restriction on the sort of speech (money) a person can have (not more than a billion dollars worth)… it’s a massively complicated question I’m just saying I think we can agree it’s well and truly kicked in by the time you have a billion dollars and maybe we can all get together and work out a way we agree on that stops people getting more power and money for free due to capital interest rate returns each day than many of us will ever have in a lifetime.

all people are born equal

All people should have equal opportunity, free from prejudice, sexism, etc. But all people are not born equal.

Equality in rights, does not mean people are identical.

Where I live, taxes become crazy high if single, and with imcome over 100k. So I just work less.

And I get paid well, for I am exceptionally good at what I do. This means that by taking more of my money, simply because I choose to excel, the government has taken part of my labour, right off the market.

The skills they so very much desire, are diminished.

People blather on about billionaires, and how the wealth should be redistributed. I've done the math. Take all that wealth, and in 1 year it is gone, forever, never to return, and it barely makes a dent in anything.

Communism just doesn't work, because it removes that drive, that zen to compete, that desire to build from people.

It just smacks of jealousy to me.

> But the reality is we should just tax net worth over a million at 100%

I suspect that the answer does not lie in an absolute number but more in a 99th or even 95th percentile sort of way.

It’s about a high enough number to get agreement.

Day to day citizens won’t care and would probably get behind it because its easy to point at bad billionaires who only did bad stuff because they had billions to do those things with. And tax revenue would help their lives so great … tax the rich … easy sell.

The millionaires are basically just upper middle class these days, they might think differently but it’s not hard to construct arguments based on their real life and use things they care about to get them to agree.

The multimillionaires are the toughest sell, but i think it’s probably doable. They aren’t yet detached from reality, they have causes they care about they can’t single handily bankroll. they haven’t gotten rich enough the tenth generation of their families may never need to work, they can be reasoned with.

The hundred million plus will probably on average hate the idea as they are probably in general looking at the continuation of their net worth growth and considering themselves as likely be eventually billionaires themselves… on average. Some will be on board, maybe even a significant percentage but I think the majority wont. The thing is about critical mass. With even a modest percentage of these people and all the rest…

With that aggregate group you can use democracy to make things happen even with the billionaires trying to buy the system. There are rich people on board to pay for counter media propaganda and the voting class do matter to their elected representatives as those people worry about getting votes next time.

A wealth tax at say a hundred million is so much harder to sell than at a billion.

And that’s all before you’d get into how it was structured. It would be almost impossible for the world to stop billionaires hoarding wealth in some foxhole full of gold and diamonds and valuable art and so on… but even just capping personal wealth at a billion and forcing the rest of their wealth into trusts and companies would likely be a net good as the army of money managers and businessmen would spread that money further around the economy than a single billionaire ever could.

> Day to day citizens won’t care and would probably get behind it

In coastal cities, sure. Beyond that, most people understand the cost of a Prohibition-style war on private wealth.

I did not realize the 18th amendment only banned the possession and consumption of alcohol for the top 0.1% of drinkers, which is what a hard cap at about a billion would introduce. 99% of private wealth is closer to 0 than to a billion. Calling policy aimed at ensuring billionaires don't exist a war on private wealth is ridiculous and like calling the state monopoly on violence a "war on justice"

> It’s about a high enough number to get agreement.

But don't you think it's a little too easy to select the number so that there are so few people impacted that their opinion on the matter won't count either way? And so that you personal won't be impacted either?

Thats sort of the point of democracy. When most of us agree something a small number of us are doing… is undesirable in the view of the majority. We are empowered by democracy to change things so the minority are no longer allowed to do the thing we consider undesirable.

This isn’t about who’s allowed to marry or what religious beliefs you can have… it’s should you be entitled to make more money in interest than the average citizen can earn in their entire lifetime. At some point surely you think there’s enough money and they don’t need more? Perhaps you think it should be ten or a hundred billion?

For me I think it’s a billion in today’s money (roughly, since money is obviously fluctuating) and I say that even though I grew up with the hustle and grind startup mentality as my ideal and dreaming of striking it rich with a startup and becoming a billionaire based on some crazy smart idea and tons of hard work… I’ve wizened with age and I think a billion is more than enough. 20 year old me might not have but 20 year old me was also burning out my mind overworking myself trying to find a way to make myself rich… to be honest 20 year old me was an idiot for not seeing how the system of global finance works and thinking a tech startup was the path to riches. Should have gone for fame and smart financial management of the short term fame related income followed by careful fostering of a lifestyle brand focused on licensing out the perceived reputation.

> But the reality is we should just tax net worth over a million at 100%

As a reference point, a retirement account funded with $1,000,000, designed to support a $50,000 annual spend (inflation-adjusted), only has a 75% chance of lasting 30 years before the money runs out. (per default parameters on https://cfiresim.com)

The original commenter spoke of "over a billion". A million is a modest middle-class retirement account. A billlion is a thousand of those.

That's a strawman because it assumes a 100% wealth tax could exist in a vaccum and would have no effect on the economic system whatsoever.

A more realistic concern would be that if you set a 100% wealth tax for all wealth exceeding a million dollars, rich people would just structure their wealth so they don't exceed that cap. In most cases that wealth is primarily in companies (i.e. profiting off other people's labor). So if want to place a ceiling cap on "how much money you can have" (figuratively, let's not pretend this is ever about cash on hand) we'd also need better transparency for corporate ownership.

Personally I think a 100% wealth tax as a "maximum amount of money an individual can have" is a red herring and while wealth taxes are certainly a way to skim some of that surplus value siphoned off by people who own companies (speaking as a company owner myself to be clear), it's just a band aid for the underlying problem.

In my opinion the only logical solution is to abolish individual ownership of companies, effectively requiring all corporations to operate as cooperatives. This isn't an "easy answer" as there are clearly a lot of nuances to what the laws would need to specify in order to make this happen, and it's clearly in stark opposition to how company ownership works in most places today, but it's the only way to fix the problem of excessive wealth accumulation, if we view it as a real problem.

The current system enables the power law. Bring back predator-prey to keep the resources balanced.

What do you mean by this?

just joking - had some extra karma I wanted to purge

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences. Plus, twitter is a private company and can change its terms whenever it wants.

We can freely point out the hypocrisy and ignorance of the “free speech absolutists” like Musk. That would be a consequence of us exercising our free speech.

> Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences.

Actually, the freedom is freedom from consequences (other than speech in return or being listened to or not).

That would require others losing their freedoms.

If you're a dick, I need the freedom to say so, to encourage a boycott of your restaurant, to not invite you to parties, to protest your public appearances. All of those are consequences and important freedoms.

That's the "speech in return" part.

Then we need to discuss what definition of "consequences" you're using.

I gave the definition but I'll write it slightly differently if it wasn't clear before. Speech is free when the consequences are:

- it is not listened to

- it is listened to

- there is speech in return to the speaker

If you consider boycotts and being shunned by your social circle "speech in return", I suppose we agree. I'd tend to consider those to be consequences of free speech, though.

You can use your free speech to tell others not to do business with X. When enough people are convinced by that, it's a boycott.

The part of free speech that is always in question is the free part. Hence, consequences, in this context, are linked to what affects that freedom, otherwise they're just part of being in a reality where everything is caused and hence has consequences. Thus, calling my dog back and it runs to me is not a consequence of free speech in the way we're discussing it.

Boycotts are based on the freedom to buy what one wants, but when they are mandated then they're not. They can be used to try and stop someone speaking, then they're against free speech. If they're not used in that way then fine.

Being shunned is not being spoken to or listened to which is freedom of speech.

Were you forced to invite them before their speech? No, your freedom of association is not affected by someone else's free speech. Burn those RSVPs all you like.

If you want to go down the everything has consequences route then there is no distinction between free speech and anything else in the universe so it's not really worth bothering with.

Of course they can, no one is arguing against that. The point here is the hypocrisy of Elon Musk positioning himself as a defender of free speech, saying that they would not ban this account and then doing exactly what he said that wouldn't happen

If you put it like that there's freedom of speech everywhere, it just so happens that in some places talking gets you killed...

Nobody is saying that Elon and Twitter “can’t” change their terms. Just that it’s funny the guy who literally used this specific example to illustrate his commitment to free speech has changed his principles.

Everyone knew he was a thin skinned hypocrite who only ever meant free speech for things he agrees with. The news here is the proof.

> No one needs more than 999 million

It's not like anyone has the money in cash you know.

You should rephrase your statement to "nobody needs more than a billion dollar stake in one or more companies". That is more realistic, and maybe a better discussion can come out of that one.

Oh I'm pretty sure the IRS could figure out a cash equivalent.

DON'T

NEED

BILLIONAIRES

To late for an edit now. And while just throwing the number out like it’s a bank balance is a bit of a hot take… I’m fully aware of the fact that any realistically useful proposal for this kind of wealth tax would require a lot of careful structural work to make useful and effective.

It’s important to note that the USA is one of the only countries that expects overseas citizens to file tax reporting paperwork. Normally this is perfunctory stuff. But the key is that it’s law that living full time outside the USA doesn’t mean you have any loopholes for skipping the paperwork… The IRS is uniquely positioned under current law to enforce a global jurisdiction wealth tax on US Citizens … and since the USA already requires a payment for processing the renouncing of citizenship, you could just as easily place a punitive sized fee or fine for obviously renouncing citizenship to avoid paying billionaire taxes.

But once one country moves toward this sort of law I think others would follow. We have international law organisations that are used for tracking financial criminals and if more countries had similar laws these international organisations would gradually be more and more useful in ensuring billionaires can’t just stash money in overseas banks markets trusts and assets.

My take is that billionaires are mostly made because they own a very successful company. So when you talk about wealth tax of these billionaires, you automatically talk about diminishing their stake in said company(-ies).

And I think that is the main point that needs to be discussed.

Another view of this is just that they've very effectively captured the value created by the workers of those companies. Rather than wait for them to accumulate that value personally then tax it, we could limit how and how much value accrues to individuals who run companies.

How would that work in practice? Like give shares to workers as the company becomes more valuable?

Elon could easily raise that amount in cash.

You can't say that after the same Elon bought Twitter for 55 billion. If he can get that money using his stock as collateral then he does have it in cash.

In practice, Twitter is partially owned by the bank right now. Although he did sell Tesla stock to get a large part of that money.

>If he can get that money using his stock as collateral then he does have it in cash.

The literal opposite is true. If he has to sell his stocks it means he does not have it in cash. If you are using your house as collataral, you do it precisely because you lack the money in cash.

The only way to reduce his networth bellow a billion is seizing stock in his companies grom him. Him paying money is the exact same thing, just with an additional (likely devastating, for him and the company) step.

The real question is whether you want the government seizing corporations from individuals.

>Also billionaires are a symptom of a broken society.

They are the symptom of any society which allows unlimited private ownership of cooperations. Just by probability alone some companies will grow by billions and any major owner will become a billionaire.

>we should probably just tax net worth over a billion at 100%.

Which, in this case, is totally equivalent to the government seizing Tesla or SpaceX. Billionaires do not have billions in cash, they are billionaires because they own assets, likely not very liquid, worth billions.

I really hate to be shilling for rich people, but "disown them" is not the solution. The real problem with billionaires is that they are both extremely powerful and unaccountable. Both of which is the fault of the political class, which both shields the rich from accountability and gives them power. The informal power is the problem here.

There is also a qualitative difference here. The billionaire who became a billionaire, because he built up a long term productive company and the billionaire who won in the positive EV Casino (the stock market) are not the same. The former might even be deserving (although I do not really like that word in this context) of some influence, as a legitimate representative of corporate interests.

Yes, but it’s nigh impossible to strip them of the informal power without stripping them of the actual power they hold by virtue of stocks and corporate control, assets and cash… all of which are readily fungible into political into political donations and all the other forms of legal bribery like funding opposition environmental studies to block competition or funding lawsuits to change laws they don’t like or anything else they can legally leverage that financial wealth for.

As ideally we could separate these two forms of power and achieve the removal of the unaccountable informal power… but the sort of large scale socioeconomic and sociopolitical reforms needed to do this honestly seem harder to achieve than just taxing the billionaires till they aren’t billionaires anymore. Maybe then we’ll be in a position to try and start the reforms and could have the sort of world where money doesn’t buy you unaccountable power… but I think that’s not something that would be achievable in my lifetime.

>Yes, but it’s nigh impossible to strip them of the informal power without stripping them of the actual power they hold by virtue of stocks and corporate control, assets and cash…

Why?

>legal bribery like funding opposition environmental studies to block competition or funding lawsuits to change laws they don’t like or anything else they can legally leverage that financial wealth for.

Make it illegal, you are literally listing the specific things which shouldn't happen. Where is the problem?

>but the sort of large scale socioeconomic and sociopolitical reforms needed to do this

You just gave a list of issues. Ban every billionaire from contributing to lawsuits. Ban them from "donating" to anything and actuslly punish them for violating the law.

>just taxing the billionaires till they aren’t billionaires anymore.

This is just seizing corporations by the government. And the problem is that you expect politicans to move against their benefactors.

> Make it illegal, you are literally listing the specific things which shouldn't happen. Where is the problem?

The problem is that people who have the power to make it illegal are the same people who profit from it not being illegal.

EDIT: your username is so emo, lol. I love it.

Sure, but the problem gets significantly worse as the threat gets larger. "Disown the billionaires" obviously results in a far stronger reaction than "let's stop some of your influence".

If you can't even do the later the former is obviously impossible.

He needs to be cruel to liberals to sell electric cars to conservatives. It has worked brilliantly up to now. I am also a SpaceX fan, and a fan of electric vehicles, but my distaste for the 'cruelty is the point' culture is starting to outweigh that.

Given that the biggest grumbles coming out of conservatives is that they think Biden raised gas prices to make them buy electric vehicles, I don't see them lining up to buy Teslas anytime soon no matter how many Twitter liberals Musk puts in harms way.

You are explaining exactly why Musk has to do what he does to sell cars to conservatives. There is a huge amount of culture-wars baggage like what you describe that he must drill through to get them to even consider an EV. Being unabashedly cruel to liberals is the way. Liberals already buy his cars, because they are at this point in time the best EVs on the market - once that changes you will see a change in tone from Musk.

Wanting to limit people’s potential sounds like a hellish idea of a society.

No offense intended with this

Do you ever wonder how the people with your mentality cope with moving the goal posts? RE: "billionaires are a symptom of a broken society. No one needs more than 999 million"

Do you think that in the 1920s people said the same thing but changed it to millionaire and 999 thousand? How far back do you think we need to go in time before the same was said about a thousandaire? I would guess the 1200s.

Sure, this is why you account for inflation, like Social Security benefits do. 10% inflation? 10% increase in the benefit/limit.

This is exactly how I think of it. It’s not complicated at all. No feats of mental gymnastics required just good old fashioned common sense.

Musk made clear his personal commitment to free speech when he said Alex Jones would remain banned. Musk specifically cited his own personal experience and opinions as the reason Jones would remain banned.

And lied about the experience, too, stealing the story from his first wife: https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start...

> He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it. I held him in my arms when he died.

> with everyone more angry at him than ever his attempts to be liked in public (the Chappell show thing etc)

what continues to stun me is how tone-deaf his efforts are. Is he trying to be genuinely liked or is he trying to prove that he's funny" and "cool"? Popping up on stage unannounced at a comedy show of all places, to deliver a catchphrase from 2 decades ago was not going to end well.

Elon just craves attention, and he’s rich enough that he can get it wherever he wants. One day he wants to be a character on Rick and Morty, so they accommodate him. He wanted to be on SNL so he inexplicably gets to host and star in an episode despite being unfunny and untalented. He wanted to be on the Twitter board, they didn’t accomodate him, so he staged a hostile takeover of the company. Not to mention the cave incident where he tried to insert himself, was rebuffed, and then tried to ruin someone’s life.

There’s a clear pattern of Musk forcing himself into places he doesn’t belong and no one wants him, and it never ends well for anyone involved.

There's some truth in this comment, and his reaction to the diver in Thailand was obviously not great, but at least on that topic there's a less scathing interpretation:

In a desperate scenario in which it was considered highly likely that all those kids would be unable to be rescued alive from the cave by any means at all, Musk said something to the effect of I have engineering and production resources, we can try and come up with something in case it may be useful, and quickly built and delivered a device after close consultation with members of the rescue team on the ground, and also supplied various other forms of equipment and expertise.

Luckily the kids were rescued and the capsule wasn't needed.

That diver then said in a TV interview that Musk should 'stick his submarine where it hurts' - for absolutely no good reason.

As I said, Musk's reaction was inappropriate and he's paid a big price for it, but it was hardly without provocation.

Why do any of you care what Elon says? People here spend an inordinate amount of time loving or hating him - when he has near-zero impact on their lives.

The peril of free speech is that it's a 2-way street. Every minute of Musk freezing up on stage is a minute that a paying audience is not seeing Chappelle perform.

Much like you then I love what Elon Musk is the leader of but I despise him and hate him with every fiber of my body.

> I’d like the Elon of a few years ago back

Were you one of those defending him when he was calling random people on Twitter pedos to his 50 million followers?

I was not, I was one of the one’s hoping he would just shut up and get back to making electric cars and cool rockets to put people and robots and anything else we want into space.

He's not gonna send "cool rockets" anywhere. His business is hyping his stock.

Were you also one of those who believed his cars were gonna drive themselves?

I thought everyone was leaving Twitter and moving to alternatives?

Doesn't seem to have happened. Everyone's more obsessed than ever with Twitter drama.

What's really funny is that I see people on Twitter tweeting about leaving Twitter every day. I know they won't, so the whole thing doesn't make any sense.

Nobody with skin in the game will.

I respect people that take a stand, but then you have to execute. Delete your account, anything less makes you a hypocrite. Don't de-activate, don't cross-post. Delete it.

Nobody with a big following is willing to do that. They know that their inflated relevancy only works within Twitter and absolutely nowhere else.

On the other hand a certain bias is at play here, since you won't see the people that just deleted their accounts (or announced that they would and then executed on it).

True for small accounts, not for big accounts.

Sure, they all do what they want, and also I have to decide whether it's worth following him to pollute my twitter feed or not.

So far I believe that I'm getting more value by still following that person, and also it's great to see some opposing viewpoints to other people on Twitter. I just wish it was a bit more nuanced.

Account deletion carries an elevated risk of impersonation.

I think there's a few things going on, first the alternatives aren't really up and running yet - Mastadon is clunky, Post is still very much in beta, Jack Dorsey is an unbearable asshole, there's a thousand alternatives all spinning up right now, we'll see what happens when they actually launch.

Secondly, there are actually some people leaving, and the people leaving are the people who bring actual interesting discussion to the site - people like John Green for example decided he couldn't tolerate the pedophile slur and has left. That's not a problem in the short term, but those leaders are just that - they're a leading indicator.

Thirdly, and I think this is the most important part, Twitter has become the Elon Musk show. Everyone is still on Twitter, but the only topic of conversation is "what did Elon do today" and that's not a formula for a high engagement lasting and profitable enterprise. People tune in, but they're not there for the reasons they once were.

Finally though is the most important part - which is that Twitter hasn't changed. Revolutionary bluechecks? Got rolled back, now it's back but with no features. Longer posts? Not implemented. Payments? Not implemented. Max Deboosting? Not implemented. Digg was starting to rot for a long time, and reddit was starting to gain traction for a long time, but it was only when Digg finally pushed out a new feature did everyone go "aaaand... we're done". I would suggest that's where we're sitting right now. Everyone is pissed off with Twitter, it's a worse experience with fewer good users, but there's no alternatives and not much has happened yet. But just wait, it doesn't take a look to push people over that cliff, and once they're gone they're never coming back.

All the people saying that they were leaving are the worst behaved on twitter who everybody wants to leave. Reply guys all, the ur-leaver is somebody who nobody ever heard of until they replied "how dare you, sir" about 1,200 times under Trump tweets, and who now spends all their time reminding Briahna Joy Gray that she's a bitch and a Russian traitor.

They're pretending that their leaving is a threat, when it's really the targeting of advertisers and the direct threats of investigation and regulatory retribution from the administration that's the threat to Twitter.

This is nonsense that never happened. Many people have left, some have not. Did you expect 50m to close their account overnight? Many people with big following and many with no followings have left. Also, people can leave twitter but still be interested in the "drama", as it can shape how other social media outfits behave moving foward.

I'm somewhat surprised by this and I'll give Elon the benefit of the doubt until it's more clear what has happened.

This quote is a perfect summation of how every bad faith actor in human history is enabled.

You're the bad faith actor here. You come to conclusion with zero facts.

The benefit of the doubt is something you generally give someone the first time they do something seemingly wrong or disingenuous. For example, the first time someone makes a baseless claim that someone they don't like is a pedophile, you might go "Well, that guy might know something I don't..." but when that person goes on to act like an asshole for the next decade, at some point you have to stop giving the benefit of the doubt. Do you still give Musk the benefit of the doubt about the moderation council he's planning to form before he lets Trump back on the platform?

This isn't about any benefit of the doubt, this is about confidently dropping conclusions on incomplete information. That's hysterical speculation, not "benefit of the doubt".

Further, no, I don't pass judgement on every single action or word somebody expressed based on prior behavior. This creates Disney-like villains, which is for the simple minded.

I mean... this comment thread is literally about whether it's reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt. It's not "hysterical" to say the guy we know the guy didn't like the account, he'd tried to get it removed before, and despite him saying he wouldn't remove it, he probably has, because he's lied before. You're reading a load of emotion into something that doesn't have to be emotional. It's just a pretty obvious point that once you give someone the benefit of the doubt and they showed they don't deserve it, you probably shouldn't give it to them again. Otherwise, as one of the previous posters pointed out, you're going to continually reserve judgement against what is clearly a bad actor.

It's a pretty simple point about an iterated game.

The point is indeed simple: you don't know. In the period when you don't know something, the rational thing is to wait until you do. Everything else is speculation.

You're free to speculate as much as you want, but it's just guess work. The only thing I objected to is to turn guess work into confident conclusions, and presenting them as fact.

What I’m saying is we know enough. This isn’t a court of law, we’re allowed to surmise what is true from the facts we know.

What do you suppose the jet account did to get banned?

I don't know, which is the entire point. If we don't know, we can't judge.

He explicitly mentioned he wouldn't ban elonjet so I'll hold my judgement until more is known or if there is just silence from his side.

Now that he has commented... He backtracked, how lame.

I waited a day before passing judgment, I guess that makes me a bad-faith actor enabler. Right d23?

It's a shame you had to include the latter part of this comment. The point was he didn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on this because of the preponderance of the evidence from his past behavior. That was proven correct.

That's how I felt about your comment too, how peculiar.

I am aware of Musks history with lying, it was still possible there was an alternative explanation taking into account his strong stance on this particular point. It's not like we had to wait long before we got it clarified. The outcome was a bit of a letdown, but that's how it goes I guess. This story keeps writing itself. [0]

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/15/twitter-jour...

I'm sure Cloudflare (or some YC lo-code?) would happily comp the elonjet kid their hosting?

Hosting isn't the issue here; the account was just hooked up to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af.

Space Karen strikes again

it's cost? just several billions.

Couple of hundred millions, rather. But if your point is that a private jet is expensive, you're right Einstein !

He's referring to the price of buying twitter to be able to suspend the account after Elon previously offered the owner 50k.

It doesn't matter what musk, does it?

musk won't lose popularity amongst his fanboy. They will lick his boots until he's replaced by the next loudmouth.

musk could ban every extremist right-wing tweeter, fire 95% of his employees and not pay any severance then throw bags of dog feces at the laid off engineers' children. They would still love him, hell, they would love him more.

This is a danger of idol worship. Once somebody has achieved influence they almost always use it in a destructive manner.

But hey, he's rich.

Twitter is a private company. Don’t like it? Build your own.

I thought it was the town square of the world?

Was it before Elon bought it?

ElonJet was "citizen journalism" at its finest, fighting against the Woke Mind Virus of virtue signalling private jet owners.

Today is a sad day in the fight.

"Hours after he published his thread and after Gizmodo and other media organizations commented on his allegations, Sweeney published a new tweet saying it appeared Twitter had lifted its restrictions."

Is this even a story? "Anonymous Twitter employee", "alleges", account not "suspended" but rather allegedly given "limited visibility", then amazingly the restrictions are gone.

The account is now suspended.

The account was suspended, then unsuspended quickly after, and now is suspended again as of Wed Dec 14 08:04:17 AM EST 2022.

Close. The account was visibility filtered, then that was removed. Now its suspended.

"Script kiddie uses Twitter to systematiclaly dox owner of Twitter. Gets banned from Twitter"

How is this news? I know at the moment it's trendy to hate Musk (although no one will admit the underlying political reasons), but come on, we're better than this.

ABSOLUTE FREE SPEECH

Damned if you do it, damned if you don't. Just damned if you're not a Democrat in general.

you don't think it's notable that he so quickly reneged on this promise? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

It's a sign that he's getting too many death threats. Banning the account was to reduce the amount of noise he gets, so his security could focus on ones that are more realistic.

"Free Speech" by whom? Musk owns the platform, he can do whatever he wants with it. Twitter is and always was an advertising / entertainment platform that had a weird side effect of distributing information. It's a shame that he done broke it.

But "free speech" is "the government puts you in jail/kills/takes your stuff for saying or not saying something."

Twitter, FaceBook, ToothSocial, breightbargh, NYT, FoxNews -- all have an editorial voice, exist to advertise and entertain, and are not really under any obligation to promote or not promote any specific agenda.

There's some gray area where the US "Common Carrier" doctrine (where a conveyance isn't liable for what people use it for, if they impose no editorial control over the content, such as the situation of someone defrauding someone else using a telegram protects the telegram operator from liability). The best case would probably just be to say that "algorithmic" moderating is editorial control so the facebook and traughsocial and twitter all would be liable for content, and thus not viable enterprises. Good Riddance.

That's not what Elon considers free speech. It's completely fair game to hold him by his own standards. Elon mentioned this account in the same breath as the defense of free speech and committed to not banning it.

Pretty clearly, at best, Elon is a twit. His stated views and his public actions are at odds, and his reputation for honesty or trustworthiness will be affected. But people are free to change their minds, or lie, and everyone else is free to form an opinion or make decisions as a result.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

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