Hacker News Reader

Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com