ElonJet Is Now Suspended
twitter.com
twitter.com
- "A screenshot of what he claimed was an internal Slack channel showed Ella Irwin, the person appointed to replace Yoel Roth as Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking a “Team” to “please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-account-following-elon... ("Twitter Account Tracking Elon Musk’s Private Jet Gets Shadow Banned")
It's unclear if Ella Irwin still works at Twitter, but giving everything going on I strongly suspect there's no one to moderate against Elon personally banning an account he does not like.
Elon is looking like he got suckered into buying Twitter and now has to play the difficult and mundane role of private equity turnaround so that he can recoup his -- and his investors' -- funds. It's a huge distraction from his more important businesses.
Folks are already asking him to step down as Tesla CEO [2]. Best to kick a dog while he's down.
I think Tesla has been overvalued for some time. It's not the only EV company in the world, and soon every company (and domestic production capacity worth its salt) will be pumping out EV options for consumers. This Twitter deal was the activation energy required to jostle the Tesla stock out of its lofty position.
I hope I'm wrong, and that things at Twitter begin to stabilize. I think that SpaceX is one of the most important companies in the world right now, and it needs a leader who can continue to push the boundaries of what was thought possible.
[1] I'm thinking of putting my money where my mouth is and buying puts, which is something I rarely do.
[2] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/unconfirmed-reports-claim...
Even further? It is at $159 today from well over $300 just a few months ago.
The best time for puts was a while ago, it will be a lot harder to make the same kind of money going forward, better be careful.
Well, c'mon, this has always been the case since the very beginning under both Dorsey and Agrawal. The difference then was that the other half of the world was condemning it.
Flying by the seat of your pants is probably fun for Elon but it makes the product worse. If the product gets worse, the people leave.
That is not true in all jurisdictions and definitely not in Germany. Since twitter offers it’s services to the general public, bans must be non-discriminatory and are open to challenge in court. Twitter can ban anyone who violates their ToS, but not just anyone Elon dislikes.
https://www.e-recht24.de/artikel/marketing-seo/11415-was-koe...
I do not believe such a thing exists in Germany. The claim certainly needs a proper source.
https://www.lhr-law.de/magazin/social-media-recht/olg-dresde...
It’s not surprising this exists. It’s equivalent to the Hausrecht in the physical world - if you make your place available to the public (a bar, restaurant, supermarket) you no longer can kick out just anyone without cause. You can ban people from entering (or make them leave) for reasons, but those must be non-discriminatory and not arbitrary. “I don’t like you nose/hair/color of your skin” won’t work. “You need to wear shoes or leave.” is likely valid.
Sure. But since ElonJet is run from the US, in a dispute between a US company and a US user, only US law is really relevant, any foreign court is likely to dismiss the claim as outside of their jurisdiction. As far as US-based users go, he basically does have the right to ban anyone, so long as he doesn't start banning people on the basis of a protected characteristic such as race or sex.
Even if we suppose, counterfactually, that ElonJet was run from Germany – while the German legal system might in that situation be open to hearing the case, I doubt ElonJet would win, when you consider the extensive emphasis which German (and EU law) puts on privacy rights, and the fact that it is willing to go a lot further in limiting free speech in the name of privacy than the US legal system is.
Why do people feel the need to respond to valid criticism with "well technically they're ALLOWED to do [thing]?" That's neither here nor there.
> 7:30 PM · Nov 6, 2022
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
We don't expect that. He absolutely does have the right to do that.
Pointing out his banning of the account simply demonstrates his free-speech absolutist hypocrisy.
it demonstrates that he very well understands that posting things can lead to safety concerns.
he is gleeful when some people or groups have safety concerns from posts.
often he actively mocks them and portrays them as unreasonable if they express safety concerns and ask for some kind of help.
If Elon is concerned maybe he could just rent a jet as needed instead of keeping one all to himself.
If they were publishing "Elon has flown X miles, used Y fuel and created Z emissions in the past T time" that would be far different than what they do.
You are reaching for excuses that can't possibly apply. Perhaps you should ask why you'd go so far to excuse this doxxing, but not others.
I personally dislike Musk and view him as a conman. I take issue with several things he's done at Twitter and even more with what he's done at companies like Boring Company, Paypal, or Tesla (eg, promising the first car to the actual founder then launching it into space just to spite them).
People here just managed to find a thing where he happens to be right (whether it comes from personal pettiness or actual principle).
Second, if it were passed, intent can be very hard to prove -- even in seemingly clear-cut cases.
Third, only the DOJ could choose to actually prosecute.
> Second, if it were passed, intent can be very hard to prove -- even in seemingly clear-cut cases.
It's not at all clear cut in my opinion. This is information that is already in a public database, and it's the location of an airplane - not a person. That's not a technicality, unless the airplane is somehow a primary residence.
It's pretty different than publishing someone's private phone number or the name of the school that their children attend. The latter type of information is actually private.
ElonJet just put the information on Twitter. And Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and now Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
However, this makes him look bad, given he repeatedly claimed that the Twitter takeover was to make Twitter more pro free speech. Examples:
Two months ago he tweeted (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792):
“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes“
Five weeks ago he tweeted (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“
And yes, people can change their opinion, but this seems more like Twitter will be in favor of free speech, as long as Elon likes it.
The previous bans were controversial because they marginalized a voice. It was never about the specific people in question. It was basically invalidating the voice of many people since these were highly influential people or politicians.
There's a huge difference. I'm not taking a position on those particular people in any way, just saying that most people don't care about ElonJet in the slightest and why catching him on technicality here doesn't matter (in my humble opinion).
But even so, I find the hypocrisy pretty interesting here. This person bought a company for $44b to improve transparency, specifically said he wasn't going to ban this account to show his commitment to transparency, and then his new company banned the account about a month later. Not only that, but the company didn't ban the related accounts showing the location of others who didn't happen to buy the company out of their commitment to transparency.
Come on, that's interesting no matter what your view on the individual.
Through his actions, Musk has shown himself to be in the latter camp. Those in the former camp should be just as mad about post-Musk Twitter as they were about pre-Musk Twitter. Problem is I don't see many people (here on HN at least) saying "Wow, I thought Musk would fix Twitter but this is not what I expected when he said he supported free speech!" To me, that shows maybe a lot of people were in the latter camp all along, and are pleased things are working out just as they expected.
It's also not that he only banned the elonjet account. He banned the accounts of people posting the video that showed him being booed in SF, he banned several left leaning journalist accounts after a campaign from alt right groups [1]. It really just shows the hipocrasy, and many people are taking note.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Maybe I misunderstand you, but whose voice are you calling marginalized? Is it not the voice of politicians like e.g. Trump? Is Trump not a white rich and powerful person (I was not specifically talking about Musk).
I think the problem was actually that Twitter under previous leadership was way too lenient with powerful people. Take Trump for example, he was arguably breaking Twitter TOS on a regular basis, but never faced consequences (I'd argue because he was driving engagement so it was not in Twitters interest to ban him). When they finally banned him, it thus seemed arbitrary.
Similarly, how come Musk never got a suspension for his pedo comments, also pretty clearly a TOS violation.
I think therein lies the main problem with most social media platforms, they clearly have different standards for people who are influential enough and the rest of the population and this is by no way a left/right thing.
People don't always agree 100% with their politicians. But by banning them you take away their voice entirely.
I said very clearly I was not talking about the actual people behind the accounts themselves. I am not feeling sorry for Trump or for Elon here in any way.
How does that even work?
And if 50% share similar political opinion, how is that even possible that this opinion would be somehow inaccessible?
The opinion of people like Trump or Elon is very easy to access, and supported by plenty of people. The majority of them is never banned, because the bans are not targeting an opinion, but rather conspiracy theories and abuses. You can have exactly the same philosophy as Trump, talk and promote this philosophy, and yet never say something that will make you banned.
"Trump voters" is not a marginalised set, it contains super pacs and Peter Thiel. It may contain subsets that are marginalised but those sets are marginalised by being marginalised, not by being trump voters.
People who have little opportunity for advancement being white and Christian does not mean that whites or Christianity is under threat.
Also, trump got away with his shit for years before being banned. That looks like privilege, not oppression.
I take it you see the irony of being woke about the anti-woke
As a resident HN Christian, I don't concur.
We've seen a number of Christian individuals & businesses recently taken to court/UCMJ action for refusing to do things that are contrary to their religious (Christian) beliefs, or for openly stating their beliefs [1] , [2] , [3] , [4]
The same protections afforded to observant jews and practicing muslims should also be afforded to Christians.
It is in the Constitution after all.
[1] https://thepoliticalinsider.com/colorado-baker-sued-again-th...
[2] https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/16/justice-thomass-opinion...
[3] https://www.christianpost.com/news/obamacare-and-the-catholi...
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/air-force-cracking-down-on-c...
It is ok to operate a business with respect for religious preferences.
It would have been more relevant to show examples where the "attacker" did not had any stakes or if it would have been proven that the "attacker" has reacted this way because the person is christian, but would not have reacted if the person was muslim, or atheist, or ... but defended the same actions. For each of your examples, I really doubt there would not have been exactly the same conflict if the person was atheists but had the same strong views.
At the end, it may even feel like Christians are slowly discovering that they are people like others and that there is no reason the society should always settle to their advantage. In a way, it feels like the "threat" in question is "stopping being privileged".
I never said anything about marginalized.
But in fact, it does not really change my argument: the examples that you are providing does not show anything bad against Christians. What you provide is just examples of neighbors quarrel where one party happens to be Christian. If you think it means Christians are under threat or unfairly treated, it makes me feel that you are thinking that the normal situation is when society always side with Christians all the time, which would be a pretty strong privilege for Christians, and very unfair for non-Christians.
The reason several people were removed is because they have made really poor choices. For example, Trump could have defended his thesis while still calling for people to not take violent action. It is incorrect to pretend that the bans are stopping politicians of doing politics: you can defend your party or explain your political ideology without breaking twitter's rules. It is incorrect to pretend that the bans are targeting a political side: if you are promoting a political ideology that is not based on hatred and lies, then you never _need_ to post anything inciting to violence or spread misinformation.
If now you are saying that Republicans are more often banned, maybe one reason is that Republicans are more prone to accept hatred or lies as part of their political ideology strategy. But being banned is a strategy consequence, it's the price you pay if you go down this road that is, again, totally a choice (as long as your political ideology is not based on hatred and lies).
I don't think that aligns with the doc drops from Twitter
I'm not american, so, some of the arguments also seem crazy. For example, the fact that the majority of the employees vote democrats does not imply that the majority of the employees are immoral persons who will cheat without scruple. It is very worrying that in US, apparently, people are so polarized and uneducated to democratic concept that if they see someone that happens to be "on the wrong side", they will think they can only be the worst of the monster without even questioning that for one second.
For every bans I've seen, the person banned was ALWAYS doing a mistake, was giving a good excuse to justify the ban when it could have been easily avoided. For example, Trump could have phrased his messages such that he calls for more calm without changing his political message. He did not, he choose to send what he has sent (he had his reasons, but it is not about "freedom of political opinions", because, unless his political ideology is based on hatred and lies, his political opinions are not restricted by avoiding hatred and lies).
This is my main issue with this: if republicans are unfairly targeted, why are they so stupid to always give huge elements that can be used, later, to justify the ban. Just use your brain and don't tweet something that is, objectively, at least borderline. If republicans are victims of the democrats, why are they not even trying to not give them ways of going away with it?
But that's not the first paradox in the US. Another one: Trump claims the election was stolen. He was the president when the election was organized (and was already predicting frauds months before the election days). He claims the steal occurred in states where he almost won, which are states where he has a lot of supporters and allies. And yet, he failed to catch any little proofs. If the election was stolen, then he is super incompetent, and should never be reelected: he has proven he is easily out-smarted by democrats.
The right to free speech entails the right to censorship. I can freely throw someone out of my house for expressing something I dislike. A publisher can refuse to publish someone's work for any reason. If someone expresses an idea others find distasteful, it is their right to boycott that person and anyone associated with them.
My problem is not with the censorship. It is with the money. Our oligarchs are comparable in power to royalty of old, and they act with no oversight and no accountability. Musk was able to waltz in and start dictating terms to millions of people. One man should not have that kind of power.
I will not claim to know where the lines should be drawn. It is clearly OK for someone to run a newsletter about local Yorkshire Terrier breeders with an iron fist, but it is clearly not OK to run a global monopoly of a social media company in the same way. I don't know what happens in the middle ground.
Now twitter doesn’t really have policies, just Elon’s whims. And those can change at any time and without any external consensus. No one knows what the rules are.
For example, Valve is a private company that can ban anyone they like from Steam, but we wouldn’t hear this defense if a publisher get banned capriciously and lost their income.
Unless everyone can use the same terminology to mean the same thing, these conversations are pointless.
("visibility filtering")
https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/tweet-visibi...
The conspiracy theory that Twitter shadow banned accounts to a level in which even people looking for their Tweets couldn't find them, remains false. Everything that everyone Tweets is visible to everyone who looks at their Timeline. This is explicitly how Musk promised to run the service, "Freedom of speech, not reach" and is basically how Twitter has operated for years with the exception that old Twitter banned people who repeatedly violated the TOS.
Matt Binder: https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1601142989061246976/pho...
Tweeter Execs denying: https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-shadow-banning-republicans-...
> To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views
The "conspiracy theory" is that Twitter was deliberately targeting conservatives for their politics, not that the site had moderation functions.
There is a substantial difference between tweets not being promoted by the algorithm and tweets being invisible. A "shadow-banned" user's tweets would be invisible to even their followers.
"It appears @ElonJet is longer banned or hidden in anyway."
So first @ElonJet appeared to be shadow-banned or visibility-filtered.
Then @JxckSweeney commented on that.
Then it appeared that @ElonJet was back to normal.
Then @JxckSweeney commented on that. *THIS* is what you linked to, from Dec 12, two days ago.
Then today, two days later, @ElonJet was suspended.
Then you posted your comment, apparently missing the passage of time from Dec 12 to Dec 14.
Then also today, @JxckSweeney was suspended.
Basically, his entire tenure so far has been "free speech for me and the accounts that were rightfully banned for violating the TOS!" in public, and then "we'll deboost anyone who doesn't pay me a subscription" and "let's selectively release internal comms in a misleading way to make normal company operation in good faith seem like a liberal conspiracy."
This is publicly available information.
What exactly is the safety threat with this twitter acct?
Singling out public information and publishing it to single out one person when there are safety and security implications is crossing the line distinctly into what we call doxxing.
Just curious, how long have you been on the internet?
Would you like an account like this to exist tracking everything you do?
All this kid had to do was do a little more work: Track more celebrities and top dollar folks. Make it general. Maybe they'd converge on him, but at least Elon wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Instead this kid does minimal work, it goes viral, and everyone is crying about it. Pathetic.
I'm loving the selective memories so many folks have here, acting as though they are remotely consistent with application of ethics.
Is poparazzi photography doxxing?
Is the White House press corp doxxing?
It's quite an hyperbole to go from "tracking what city you airplane lands it" to "tracking everything you do"
This guy has been actively trying to make enemies to garner a few "hello there fellow kids" points, actively uses every trick in the book to make sure he not only has to pay zilch in taxes, but draws the maximum in benefits, being one of the richest people on the planet and continuously taking credit for things he at best funded, at worst didn't do anything for. Meanwhile he's throwing up a gigantic smokescreen and misleading people in ways that benefit his company while being disastrous for the environment, and has the gall to show his ideas as some kind of divine intellect.
An account functioning as an event hub for public information regarding his jet is about the least he has to worry about once the chickens come home to roost. If the location alone was that bad, he could give a warning and ask the account to only post climate-related info. These are the people shaming you at every corner and ready to push you under the bus the moment something dares to scratch their empire.
Nothing about their existence is ethical. People defending them under the guise of 'ethics' is exactly how they got there.
I honestly was unaware, but it has been pointed out to me that Elon even said as much in a tweet from 11/6. He explicitly said it's a direct threat to his personal safety. Sure, in the same tweet he said he would allow the account to continue, but I think that's a perfectly fine thing to change your mind on. I would never wish anyone's safety be put at risk for a dumb Doxxing account in the name of free speech
The account only posted the location of Elon's private jet, which I'm pretty confident is not a threat unless an attacker has a surface to air missile ready.
"Having easy access to his whereabouts at all times" is hyperbole. Only his jet is being tracked, not his physical location at all times.
But knowing when he leaves a city and arrives at another is half the battle. A bad actor who wants to do him harm now know he just landed back in Austin. So if they were planning an attack, they could then try follow him from the airport, find him at home, Twitter HQ et cetera.
And for the record, to me this isn't about Elon. I don't support any of those accounts. I don't care if it's Brad Pitt, Bezos, POTUS, or my next door neighbor, it's Doxxing and it shouldn't be tolerated.
This entire premise is so very weak to me. Elon is famous and a public figure and it's his own choice that people have as much interest in him as they do. He does everything he can to be in the public eye. There are tons of plane tracking accounts or applications. There is even one that tracks AF1 which carries one of the most powerful and important people in the world.
And this isn't a location tracker. This account doesn't follow Elon around and Tweet where he's headed once he lands, how long he might be staying, where he went for lunch, etc. And Elon can use completely legal methods to reduce how much of this information is publicly available.
> Just because you can publish information like this doesn't mean it's ethical
And just because some actions MIGHT have negative outcomes doesn't mean they are unethical.
Elon has all the tools to avoid being tracked by a random flight tracking service. If he doesn't use those tools then he doesn't care that much about his privacy. He posts images of him sleeping in the Twitter HQ, which has a publicly listed address. We aren't talking about some powerless individual who is having big companies abuse their privacy.
I'm genuinely curious because if it takes a few steps and knowing a couple of bits of information then maybe that is a problem. I mean, the FAA records or wherever they're getting the information doesn't have it labeled "Elon's Jet", does it?
The Twitter account likely makes it dead simple for any bloke off the street to know where it is.
The public owns the airspace and if you fly through it you need to register yourself.
Quit carrying water for the billionaires, they don’t need the help.
The account republishes publicly available information. I'd hardly consider that doxxing. Flight data isn't private.
Elon pointed to the existence of the account as demonstrating his attitude towards free speech and as far we all can tell, nothing has changed.
The information about his plane's location is already public. Posting it to twitter just makes it spread further. Also, a plane's location isn't very useful. Even doxxing someone's permanent address (not that elon has one) is a pretty minimal threat to their life.
A plane's location is some of the less dangerous speech allowed.
No one actually thinks this account is valuable on it's own. This "Gotcha" is a hugely important point that Musk doesn't understand.
Being able to claim someone's speech makes you "unsafe" is akin to "words are violence" that the pro free speech crowd objects to. Elon may face a greater risk of harm with the world having a way to guess his location (broadly) but that's not a case to silence speech.
It should also be noted he's a billionaire. Have you seen Zuckerberg's security spending?
Also, if you read the twitter files, the enforcement was fairly lopsided. Look what happened to @libsoftiktok -- constant labels and suspensions even though they admitted that they couldn't actually find rule breaks. They just didn't like the "intent". And when that account got doxxed -- which is dangerous and malicious -- the company did nothing.
I don't think you need to call it a liberal conspiracy, it's just very clear that twitter has/had a very particular bias based on the facts alone.
But "they got suspended 6 times for legitimate reasons and then the continued to behave badly while staying just inside the written bounds of the rules" isn't really a story.
Like the Wikipedia page does a good job of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok#:~:text=terro.... Summarizing the suspensions, which were for misgendering and harassing trans people, primarily. That's the majority of what LTT produces, banal anti-trans propaganda. If you think that's funny, well, that's on you.
"Wikipedia Is Badly Biased" by founder Larry Sanger: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
To put this another way: they're providing a useful service to document the absolute nonsense that some trans activists spout.
But on the broader topic of what the drag queens are up to, just look at this for example: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1581050195399561217 - why should this type of performance be considered acceptable to show to kids?
I'm glad this account is holding these people to account.
The original comment is referencing Twitter having donated to Democrats. This would be a 'major' donor in my estimation.
And you never answered my ultimate question -- is your anecdote particularly useful here?
This is the crux of our disagreement. You are considering "Twitter" as a singular entity making donations, while I consider employees of Twitter as individual entities, 98% of whom donated to Democrats. I believe the latter is the context, while you do not. If you're correct on the context, then I would agree. As I mentioned before, it's very common for organizations/big business to donate to both parties.
I would direct you to the grandparent where the context was set:
> So we have a company headquartered in SF, and I think something like 98% of twitter's political donations went to democrats, and the employees acted as constant activists whenever the executives didn't take action against high level conservatives (I'll leave aside whether that action was justified or not).
That reads to me as 'Twitter the organization', not 'Twitter the people in the organization'. I suppose it could be either, but I have never heard that kind of wording for a company as its constituent employees instead of as a monolith. I am open to a different interpretation if you can guide me through it and it seems plausible to me, but if there is no reconciling the disparate readings then I suppose we shall have to admit to an impasse.
It's becoming more common. I wouldn't say it's fully "common" yet.
I think the most public example was the recent gubernatorial election in Illinois. Incumbent Governor Pritzker donated money to a very far-right candidate, Darrin Baley, so that he would get the Republican nomination, and push moderate voters toward Pritzker in the general election.
It was all very well documented in Illinois newspapers during the election, and the New York Times did at least one piece about it, too.
The Times also noted that after the election, Biden gave a speech where he made a statement that this was not an acceptable practice. He didn't call out Pritzker by name, but if you were following the Illinois election, you know who he was talking about.
Yeah, I'm not convinced.
Seems like an important detail to consider!
If you turn a blind eye to the behaviour of someone you agree with, even if they're doing something that is against the rules (or the spirit of the rules) but you come down hard on someone else for actions that are the same (or lesser); then it's a problem for me.
you know Elon was running the company when this happened, right? which makes it completely orthogonal to your point.
She was instigating acts of extreme violence. Surely you’re joking. Or tell us how you really feel about certain extremely vulnerable & marginalized members of our society more, I guess.
If you’re trying to insinuate the Charles Manson defense, which has been a common theme regarding one side of the political spectrums views on LibsofTikTok, I do not particularly wish to engage in any further discussion.
I follow that account and have never seen any instigation of any violence of any kind. More likely, a certain "side of the political spectrum" has decided that redefining language is a good idea, and making anything they disagree with "violence" seems to be a defining characteristic of that group. You added "extreme violence" to double down on it, but faking outrage doesn't help the discussion any.
It isn't true, it's sophistry.
Not the kind of left that the rest of the world see's as left, but that weird US-coastal left leaning that sometimes depicts some races as inhuman and other races as infantalised.
So believe me when I say: What Elon is doing is not better, it's more of the same, but towards the right wing and his interests.
The answer to bias is not bias in another direction, the answer is neutrality, and he has proven he can't be neutral.
Glenn Greenwald:
"This thread proves 3 things:
1) Twitter execs were regularly meeting with FBI over what to censor.
2) Twitter's censorship was almost 100% aligned with the Dem Party.
3) Twitter's chief censors were deranged ideologues abusing their power over our discourse to silence dissent."
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1601591994165256192
If Greenwald isn't credible enough, I don't know what to say.
I don't know people expect moderation to work, but it's inherently messy and imperfect because humans are messy and imperfect, and past a certain point you always end up having to trust the instincts and judgement of moderators.
As someone who has moderated large group before, my main reaction is "this stuff is surprising to people?"
The bias and hand wringing about censoring people whom they even admitted hadn't actually broken any rules disclosed in by Taibbi and Weiss deserved no charity. It was worse than people had imagined.
And you're just going to ignore this part?
>2) Twitter's censorship was almost 100% aligned with the Dem Party.
That's not "moderation". That's "partisan censorship".
The text shared was this:
===== Site Policy Recommendation Site Policy recommends placing @LibsOfTiktok ([LTT] 1.3M followers, not verified) in a 7-day timeout at the account level meaning, not for a specific Tweet] based on the account's continued pattern of indirectly violating Twitter's Hateful Conduct Policy by tweeting content that either leads to or intends to incite harassment against individuals and institutions that support LGBTQ communities. At this time, Site Policy has not found explicitly violative Tweets, which would result in a permanent suspension of the account. This type of enforcement action [repeated 7-day timeouts at the account-level] will not lead to permanent suspension, however: should LTT engage in any other direct Tweet-level violations of any of Site Policy's policies, we will move forward with permanent suspension.
Assessment Since its most recent timeout, while LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy, the user has continued targeting individuals/allies/supporters of the LGBTQIA+ community for alleged misconduct. The targeting of at least one of these institutions =====
It’s inaccurate to say that LoTT didn’t violate the rules. LoTT didn’t directly violate the rules. Weiss chose to cut the text off before getting to the description of what happened as a result of LoTT’s tweets.
So at this point you can ask a more nuanced question: what do you do about indirect violations which you believe in good faith have potentially harmful results? Such as, say, bomb threats?
I’m not going to try and answer that here because it’s a really difficult question and I don’t think we’d reach an answer. I will say that I think it’s important to acknowledge that the question itself is reasonable. The Twitter Files fail to acknowledge that.
I will also note that Weiss selectively quoted the text in her screenshot. “Since its most recent timeout, while LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy…” became “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” That changes the meaning of the sentence and obscures the question I raised above. I would also like to know if Twitter determined that LoTT directly engaged in such behavior before the most recent timeout; it seems very relevant.
Finally, we have no idea how lopsided the enforcement was because we don’t have the complete dataset. Showing us a handful of cases selected by unclear means is hardly enough data to form conclusions!
Was there much interesting in there? I mostly remember it opening with the Dems having a direct line for reporting, with the examples shown of it being used being mostly nudes of Hunter&company, that i assume won't surprise anyone when being acted upon. Now there shouldn't be direct lines, but a fair report&enforcement system instead. But i somehow doubt that will get any better under musk...
If you agree its fine, would you apply the same reasoning to [favorite politician]? How about a bot that crowdsources the whereabouts of [politician] at any time?
What, like Air Force One? https://twitter.com/USAirForceVIP
Which they wouldn't do because the secret service isn't stupid. They know that current location has very little impact on security. It is future movements that allow you to plan an attack, which are closely guarded.
Note that the account wasn't about the location of a specific person, but rather the (public) location of a specific aircraft (own/used by a specific person). It's not like someone was tailing Elon and reporting their every location - planes must broadcast their location through use of ADS-B. It is public information.
> If you agree its fine, would you apply the same reasoning to [favorite politician]?
Yes.
No.
Another example of something like this is the mugshot websites that post your mugshot (also public!) and spam in out in hopes of getting you to bribe them to take it down.
Don't the people who actually want to harm musk, and have the means to make it happen, have anyway the means to get the information they need to find him? If it's mildly obnoxious like having to look up land records, they'll just do that.
I genuinely don't see how posting the location of his plane is a "security risk." I don't understand why he gets this added layer of consideration as a person in the airport. They got security at the airport. He lands behind it, same as anyone. He comes through it and his security is in his hands and the hands of the local cops, same as anyone. What's the deal here?
I think, to be completely fair, that the perceived security issue is more that we have a loose idea of what city he might be in. This feels more like a privacy issue than a serious security issue.
Yes
>Would you like a social network that allows someone that doesn't like you to post your home address to millions of followers?
That's public data in my county whether I like it or not. Presumably that's where most of my junk mail comes from. It's annoying but I don't think it should be banned necessarily
I take it you are too young to remember phone books?
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Note also that FlightRadar24 and other ADS-B vendors are required by law to comply with FAA LADD, so airplane operators can request (demand, really) their information be scrubbed.
https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/security/privacy/limiti...
Flight tracking vendors that use FAA data are required by law to comply with LADD. Ones that run their own ADS-B networks and use no FAA data (e.g. ADSBexchange.com) are not.
If you make that claim and then enact censorious policies then you're plainly a liar.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
Ordinary photographs constitute ample and often accidental documentation of where people were at any given time. Even if you assume consent (which is a real unfair assumption where people don't even know about posts being made about them), this would suppress a lot of information that is very clearly in the public interest; if I can get posts taken down that document I was doing a bad thing in a particular place, I have a lot of power to suppress evidence of my malfeasance.
The US's legal framework here makes a lot of compromises that make a lot of people unhappy, but if you dig into it, you can see why it's complicated: reasonable-sounding policies work their way to unreasonable results in various subsets of cases.
"By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law."
The information @ElonJet is publishing is publicly available. One interpretation says: if it's publicly available information, then preventing it being republished is censorship. Therefore Musk is breaking his own rule.
Another interpretation says: whilst it's freely-available information, publishing risks increased harm to Musk himself. I'm no expert on US law, but I'd imagine there's some sort of provision that protects against deliberately risking harm to someone. Assuming that's the case, Musk is being consistent with his own rule.
Given his public profile - and his desire/willingness/record of being provocative - I'd imagine most will adopt the former interpretation.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?lang...
As an example of what a jury has found to be true and imminent threat, Flip Benham's Save America organization was printed up and distributed "Wanted" posters, with the names and home addresses of doctors who provided abortion services, and put the posters up on the homes and around the neighborhoods of the doctors. Things that don't rise to that level of threat are protected by the 1st Amendment against government retaliation.
Musk is, of course, free to not follow the guidelines that the Government is required to. But by the same token, we have free speech rights and are free to criticize him, make fun of him, and otherwise denigrate him for being a lawless hypocrite who is actively promoting evil in the world.
Oh my god. That would be horrifying. Can you imagine?
> normal company operation in good faith
But it wasn't "normal company operation" because they completely disregarded preexisting company policy for dealing with political figures. Here are political figures that they didn't ban (who were inciting violence)
> 20. In June 2018, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
> 21. In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.”
But they banned the former president. What they were doing wasn't "normal company operation", it was a bunch of power tripping people in upper management (like Roth) who "took it upon themselves" to disregard preexisting company policies for some odd reason
You can dislike Trump/Elon/et al, but the "normal company operation" bit is an outright distortion of what actually happened
source: https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1602370518585221120#m
That was the company policy.
Public figures were largely exempt from the rules except when their tweet was egregious.
Not sure why you think this is some conspiracy when it was blatantly obvious.
So are you saying that the two tweets I posted above aren't egregious?
> Not sure why you think this is some conspiracy when it was blatantly obvious.
I can't find that allegation anywhere in my comment. What was there was the obvious inconsistency between not banning e.g. the Ayatollah for the above comment, but banning the former president
Can you find any tweets from the former president that were even comparable to the two tweets I posted?
Trump was banned for inciting an insurrection which is illegal.
So we should ban everyone who's suspected of doing something illegal then? They don't even have to be charged with any crimes, we just have to be convinced that they did something illegal in order to have grounds for banning them
So yes, bans can be done without any legal action. And really that's how it should be for the sake of proper function.
Otherwise I could just spam HN over and over, until HN actually managed to sue me and win the lawsuit. Can you imagine how long that would take?
Mind you, spam is very much free speech, so it'd be interesting to see which law that would be breaking.
This isn't about "right wingers" or any of these braindead arguments about "moderation being in the public interest", my point was that saying what Roth and others did was "normal company operation" is an outright lie and anyone who's actually paying attention knows this
Hopefully people realize that trusting $COMPANY will never deliver you anything good. We either regulate the things we care about, or let stuff like this happen. Either way, the world keeps spinning.
It's a balancing act between individual and social rights (individual in this case being twitter), but these companies very explicitly build to scale to be a sort of "town hall" and in doing so start having very large social influence the likes of which no one in history has ever had.
When they get to this scale there has to be extra responsibility here for the good of society as a whole.
Again, the biggest issue here is the public misconception that Twitter (or any of the internet) is a benevolent platform. Legislation cannot change that.
Nobody is above the law, not the meek nor the mighty.
aka, we already have precedence for this sort of thing.
I think a bazaar or carnival is a better metaphor, since a town hall is a brick and mortar thing that lasts into posterity, whereas a social network is more temporary
> When they get to this scale there has to be extra responsibility here for the good of society as a whole.
Or people could just not use the service and move onto a different one? There's nothing permanent about the current social networks that are popular right now
And people can just move to a different town, that doesn't stop us from having laws in place to guarantee rights in the current town.
Town got pulled in when I pointed out that rights over speech wrt to these places still exist even though someone can move to a different town (to presumably gain access to a different town hall).
Towns are municipalities, twitter is a private company. The more I look at this metaphor, the less it makes sense
Or an alternative: people can use social media that doesn't suck whenever something like this happens, and the market forces will punish the stupidity on twitter or any other platform that forgets what's owed to its userbase
I have no idea why your first instinct is to regulate when twitter doesn't have a monopoly and there are several very similar alternatives that are growing in popularity
Have you also considered that there is a huge difference between Khamenei and PMs saber rattling online against other countries (which was actually consistent with Twitter's then current policy of treating world leaders, Trump included, with a lenient hand) vs. a president not condemning and (very likely encouraging) an attempt by his own supporters seeking to overturn an election as said attempt was going on?
So not condemning something (that is to say, choosing not to speak) and "very likely encouraging" (as opposed to actually encouraging) is somehow worse than calling for outright genocide?
Your comment isn't really clear here. Are denying that the two comments I posted aren't contributing to violence that was actively going on at the time of their posting?
And with regard to this:
> Have you considered that many people here actually work in companies and know how they work, meaning they don't need a media source to know that the Twitter files are bogus? In fact, most people here have brains and can think for themselves, and we actually don't rely on a media outlet for all our takes.
thanks for the copypasta :)
Is there any public information about how twitter handled the two examples you provided at the end there? Do we know for sure they actively chose not to take any actions?
If not, I'm not sure it is fair to claim they completely ignored them. They may have limited their reach via some kind of shadow banning. Action like that is harder to notice than an account ban.
Also, since your examples predate the particular ban we are discussing, do we know for sure there weren't policy changes in between. Perhaps even because of examples like the ones you list.
Personally, I wonder if Twitter might have a more American-centric view of the world and a higher sense of urgency for "events at home", so to speak. That could go some way to explaining what seems to be selective enforcement of their terms of service.
Where's the hypocrisy? Musk said he wanted to broaden the speech allowed on the platform, not allow speech of all kinds.
> "let's selectively release internal comms in a misleading way to make normal company operation in good faith seem like a liberal conspiracy."
Maybe try getting your info from a non-leftwing source. There has been plenty of damning info coming from these internal comms.
So yes, that is pretty inconsistent with banning an account which did nothing illegal. Assuming it was Musk who issued it.
>from a non-leftwing source
Can you people stop going "left wing right wing" for one day and see things for what they are instead of this infantile black-white spiel?
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"
> By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
Was the account violating any law?
Even back in April he was not saying he was only going to censor illegal speech. Anyways, since Elon acquired twitter he's made it a major talking point to say that twitter is still moderating by the same rules as before: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
"Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists."
The ElonJet account was violating rules for leaking internal company communications. Is that type of censorship going "far beyond the law?" I don't think so. Internal leaks can damage a company and the company should therefore protect itself. If anything, Twitter could be legally liable to shareholders for failing to do so.
On the other hand, blacklisting Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things about Covid that turned out to be far more correct than what the CDC was saying at the same time is indeed going far beyond the law and also harming all of society: https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-files-confirm-stanford...
It would be useful if Musk adopted transparency and shared the rationale behind this banning, along with all internal communications regarding it.
https://mastodon.social/@JxckS/109513788818540405
There is an explanation:
Violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam.
You may not use Twitter's services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people's experience on Twitter.
“Artificially amplify” probably covers it, since he wrote code to amplify information that was otherwise tricky to view. Interesting precedent, though.
The rules and policies covering personal information have been changed to include “live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available.”
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
I have confirmed via the Wayback Machine that this change occurred within the last 48 hours.
I am going to be non-neutral now: what a dumb policy. That means you could report someone for posting a photo of a sporting event, because it identifies the location of the players. I’m not even totally against the concept but that is a terrible, terrible implementation.
Remember how the people deciding whether or not to ban Trump were relying on nuances and intent rather than trying to write iron-clad rules? This is why.
Musk claims an attempt was made to assault him: "Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.
Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family."
He specifically said he would not ban it as part of his commitment to free speech.
Everyone is energized by this situation because it's so obviously blatantly self serving.
"Violating [Twitter] rules against platform manipulation and spam."
This is textbook whataboutism, using Fox News no less. It's irrelevant to the discussion about Musk's hypocrisy on free speech, which you also ignored in your previous comment:
They also never ignored "Musk's hypocrisy on free speech." Simply because he isn't being hypocritical here.
False.
> using Fox News no less.
Speaking of irrelevant to the discussion, this sentence fragment wins first prize for most irrelevant.
> It's irrelevant to the discussion about Musk's hypocrisy on free speech
False. I am comparing the type of speech that is "far beyond the law" that Elon Musk is now allowing versus the type of speech that he is not.
First I've heard of this. The ElonJet person was a Twitter employee then? What communications did they leak?
Just look at some of the inflammatory replies to your comment that just mentions it. There's more going on with the semantics of the phrase being used to irrationally rile people up to outrage, rather than actually being about the definition of free speech.
It's all part of the game where they get to tell a story about how they're successful because they are smarter or more deserving or better than the rest of us, while the reality is that they are robbing us blind and making sure that we have no choice but to work for them to make them rich.
Events like the Panama Papers leaks are terrifying to them because is exposes how universally corrupt the rich and powerful are and how badly they are using their wealth to screw us. If that kind of information becomes commonplace then people would realize that our fight isn't between ideological left vs right, it is, and always has been rich vs poor.
They've been so used to being above the law and above the rules it drives them crazy that they can actually be held to account somewhere. Most of them still get away with far more than the average person would ever be able to (see "Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES"), but even that is not enough.
What has really happened is that a major political group has gone from having views basically supporting the mainstream power structure ("conservative") to having views at odds with the mainstream power structure ("reactionary", to use Moldbug's own label). They're shocked that their viewpoints are suddenly being censored by the mainstream media, and chalking it up to a conspiracy by the other political party rather than the mutually interested oligarchic behavior that's been there the whole time. For anyone who came up having their politics at odds with the mainstream power structure, the censorship dynamic of mass media (which now includes social mass media) isn't a shock.
(I suspect there's a similar pan-political shock for the generation that grew up with social media primacy, but before social media had been fully captured by the incumbent power structure)
Of course, this is absurd, because dropping dox on someone is one of the easiest way to censor them.
Conversely, a lot of actual free speech arguments have been recouched in the language of social justice purely for the sake of not getting confused for the far right. When you hear phrases like "hearing marginalized voices", you don't think of free speech. But it is a free speech argument: due to past acts of violence, a group of people are not allowed to speak, so we should let them speak.
And this isn't the first time this has happened, either. Remember that quote about censorship and the Internet[0]? That itself was propaganda for the hacker movement. The Internet does not actually interpret censorship as damage, nor can it "route" around it. Hackers do that, individually, and at a non-zero cost.
I personally think this particular rhetorical shell game has enabled some of big tech's abuses today. It's difficult to sell alternatives to big tech because that requires making a free speech argument, which means a lot of extra work on agreeing if we're talking about free speech[0], free speech[1], or free speech[2]. Because at a minimum, the Internet is not usable without a minimum level of justifiable censorship: i.e. banning spammers, deleting dox, and shutting down DDoS services. That requires making value judgments about what is speech, what is abuse, and what is violence.
[0] "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"
[1] "It's about ethics in gaming journalism"
[2] "Listen and believe", "silence is violence", and so on
> extreme far right realized they could rephrase their violence as speech
And in your post that became:
> It's actually the far left that characterizes speech as violence.
"Rephrasing violence as speech" has approximately the meaning of "pretending violence is actually speech"; "characterizing speech as violence" has the meaning of "pretending speech is violence", ie, the exact opposite.
These two claims don't contradict eachother.
When anyone dox'es someone with the intent that they are harmed, that's inciting violence.
Doxing a [insert minority group leader] is an example of "the right" using violence against someone and pretending it's free speech.
I think more people need to hear this.
The right is not alone in this issue, but they certainly have more criminal convictions resulting from violence than I can remember "the left" having.
Whether the law adequately protects people's privacy is a different conversation (worth having in my opinion!), and so is whether or not public or private non-government entities should step up instead and provide that additional protection.
With steps like this, he just clearly shows that he either never was all that serious about that claim, or that he has quickly learned why content moderation isn't as easy as "upholding the law and nothing but the law", especially in the U.S.
Court cases or unredacted mass data dumps are far different than data dumps targeting very specific individuals -- usually with the intent of enabling direct harm.
Like Musk has done with previous Twitter employees? There was reports Roth was threatened at had lot leave his house for safety reasons.
and if he were to acknowledge that he has changed his mind it would be okay-ish, but his whole process is to cause maximum amount of cringe, outcry, gossip/scandals, and so on, because this is what resonates with his personality anyway. so far it led him to the top of that particular game .. so it's unlikely he'll change.
[1] https://twitter.com/GreatPaul_Smith/status/15894241378646097...
We have rule of law for disputes between aristocrats (mostly), but still immunity for aristocrats when it comes to lower classes.
That's why Pelosi can say rule of law out of one side of her face while the other is saying "I have a right to the free market."
I'm quite enjoying this one at the moment.
> On Nov. 7, for the first time since YouGov began tracking Tesla in 2016, more respondents in the U.S. reported a negative perception of Tesla than a positive view. The brand perception has eroded further since, according to YouGov data.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-politics-add...
The extra $2 Billion wiped out Twitter's old debts IIRC.
Legal free speech has only to do with retribution via criminal liability from government organizations, alongside freedom to disassociate from speech and expression that you don't like
Twitter is not a government organization and is also not capable of levying criminal charges against anyone, and is free to disassociate from speech and expression it doesn't like thanks to the 1st amendment. Yes, this is the same capability as anyone else and the same possibility as Twitter operated before, aside from different choices of who its leadership chooses to dis/associate with.
It is an accurate commitment to free speech.
Nah man, jokes are forbidden on HN.
A boy who trades the family cow to a wandering peddler for magic beans is credulous. But a boy who buys the magic beans a 10th time from the the same scamp who is broadly known to also sell sawdust flour and moldy bread is an extra level of foolishness.
Extending Musk the benefit of the doubt required that one willfully ignore his history of deceit. That was (and is) an error. Cf. Rumsfeld and Iraq.
Twitter is a promotion service, just like Facebook (in each, they let users promote themselves in exchange for being targeted for promotion by others). The entire point of it is to promote content. It is not a content platform, except by coincidence.
Once you “maximum derank” somebody, you are denying them access to the whole point of the service.
By all means, ban the users you don’t want. Keep your service free of toxicity. Nobody likes a forum full of trolls. But don’t call it “free speech”
/s
Note that I'm asking for an actual steelmanned argument for why there's no possible defense of Musk here, not why people have high priors to just assume there's no defense.
Step 1 - learn that there are more than two sides to the world. Even in 2D thinking of the flat earth. We live in 3D
1. @elonjet suddenly started to engage in some extremist/TOS-breaking behaviour
2. Elon Musk changed his mind
Given that #2 has happened a few times already, I think that's a pretty reasonable assumption.
"All the houses in this picture? They've already got our solar roof tiles fitted!" (they didn't)
"Everything Hyperloop!"
My issue with Musk isn't that he changes his mind based on new evidence, or even oversells promises of the future. It's the fact he's willing to stand in front of a crowd, look people in the eye and _flat_out_lie_ about what state things are in today.
I can't think of one, can you?
> The people have spoken. > Trump will be reinstated. > Vox Populi, Vox Dei. > 2:53 AM · Nov 20, 2022
Just kidding, he will buy Twitter and turn it into the everything app and it will be awesome.
September 2022 vs October 2022
--------
Elon will fire 75% of Twitter October statement.
Elon will not fire most of Twitter (November). Look, stupid media was tricked by Rahul Ligma.
Elon fires 75% of Twitter (December)
I'm not asking for examples of Musk being wrong about something and correcting himself. I think it's commonly assumed that Musk discovered that this argument would not hold up in court, so he pivoted accordingly.
>Elon will not fire most of Twitter (November). Look, stupid media was tricked by Rahul Ligma.
This is a better example. Could you link a statement to this effect directly?
He literally signed a document in March to buy Twitter, and literally a month later had to be sued to be forced to finish the contract.
How many times does he have to change his mind before you accept this fact?
The number of times he two-faced flip flopped on the Twitter buyout is insane. I've lost count of examples.
Yes, and the intervening event that justifies the narrative flip is that he got increased access to Twitter's internal systems and decided that the company had deeper issues than initially appreciated. Rejecting a purchase where there's a hidden defect is not flip-flopping, the fact that you can't see the obvious weakness of this example is telling.
btw, where's the statement that Elon said that he would not be firing most of Twitter? Again, that seems to be a much better example.... if you can provide it. But maybe you can't?
You are running away from this point. So I'll go focus on this one thank you.
Because you know the Twitter buyout has more waffles and flip flops than you care to defend.
BTW, the contract waived Elons right to research Twitter's books. Suddenly, after signing the contract, he flip flopped on that point too.
This does not make Elon look any better. Elon himself chose to eschew due diligence when he signed the first intent to buy. The first intent to buy was incredibly unusual in the first place because he did not ask for any due-diligence.
If I tell you I will buy your car, no questions asked, and then show up and start complaining about the headlights, that is flip-flopping. It's why the whole thing went to court. Do you really think normal M&A doesn't include due-diligence?
Regardless, the "hidden" issues were a scapegoat. It is far more likely that he wanted to backout because the entire tech sector crashed and 44B was now an insane premium (SNAP, which was worth ~30B at the time is now 15B).
Really? He specifically claimed that the offer was truly unconditional, no matter what sort of fraud or criminality might be occurring within Twitter? That seems very unlikely to me.
Yes. This was a huge deal, I don't know how you missed it. It's also why no one believed he could get out of it. That's why he had to tried sue to cancel the deal instead of just, cancelling the deal? It wasn't even clear that if he managed to prove TWTR had misled investors that could cancel the deal.
[1] https://fortune.com/2022/08/23/twitter-elon-musk-whistleblow...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-calls-elon-musk-legal-...
And sealioning's just dull, dull, dull.
Because Elon Musk signed an ironclad contract promising to buy Twitter.
> Also, what was the November statement where Musk said he wouldn't fire most of Twitter? I missed that one.
Look up the Rahul Ligma stuff. He was implying that all the media got it wrong and he wasn't going to fire Twitter employees. To Turns out the media was right. Musk was planning to fire them the whole time and Musk was just doing his usual distraction shenanigans.
Right, but I hope you can see how "a court prevented him from changing his mind about the acquisition" is different than "he changed his mind again and decided to buy Twitter after all".
> Look up the Rahul Ligma stuff.
I did a bit of Googling, but I don't see what you're alluding to (there's a lot of coverage of Twitter drama involving Ligma, apparently). :/
Elon went hard right after TSLA was excluded from ESG Index (which happened under Biden), and Elons net worth is tied into TSLA stock pretty hard. In controlling Twitter, he hopes to essentially sway the public towards a more conservative view in hopes of getting Republicans elected into office, which then will result in economic policies that should drive TSLA stock up.
Follow the rules, people.
Which is it? Because it seems like "I don't like it" is the new justification for bans and "I agree with it" is the new justification for unblocking accounts.
It's difficult to say what said strategy is or may be but it'd be foolish to assume his decisions haven't been considered and vetted. But yes, intent is not well understood at all.
Is there some context to this account's history regarding the Twitter Terms of Service that would legitimately lead you to think this?
Of course I can't. It would be illegal.
Not because of disingenuous "car has a right to privacy" logic but because any judge would conclude that by tracking a car you're tracking the owner of the car and the owner does have a right to privacy.
Similarly, if the name @ElonJet doesn't give out the purpose: the account is tracking Elon by way of tracking his jet.
Morally speaking, the justification for transparency of jet location was to track them in order to increase safety of flying.
It wasn't to enable tracking of rich people.
It's legal but it's a loophole.
And somehow Elon hate completely overshadows the fact that the guy running @ElonJet account is an asshole.
I think you'll find that it has far more to do with directly interfering with another person's property without permission. If you publish someone's coordinates by using publicly accessible traffic cameras or (cost considerations aside) flying your own news helicopter around, the arguments become a lot vaguer. It's not clear that there's a legal/constitutional right to privacy in the US, and indeed recent supreme court decisions about abortion seem to reject the notion; jurisprudence in the 1970s saw an implicit right to privacy in certain constitutional provisions, an idea which 'originalists' regard as BS.
My question here is whether there is actually a rule here and whether that rule will be followed, or was it just done capriciously because Musk didn't like it.
I have my guesses, of course, but I haven't checked if they are true.
Since it was an individual not linked to a website, it's an even easier decision for him.
flightradar24 tracks jets. Go ahead and see if you can figure out where Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison is from flightrader24. You can't unless you know the jet number they happen to be using.
@ElonJet is effectively tracking Elon and broadcasting that, and only that, information to the whole world.
In theory you could track Elon yourself by correlating public info (figuring out which jets he owns and using flightrader24) but it's orders of magnitude more effort and I don't see how "you can figure it out" justify "publish it to the whole world".
But he isn’t.
This has absolutely no meaning and has no parallels to surveillance of private life.
The police would find that useful, but courts haven't always been favorable: https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/court-south-carolinas-...
But Musk had previously called out specifically this account as one that he would not ban (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456). So, whether or not he has a right to ban it, this represents a reneging on an explicit commitment.
I'm not saying this applies to the ElonJet case, but I can see why the question would be asked.
So what? What is wrong with that? We can't even understand our own motives, let alone attempt to decipher others'. Why not let the action speak for itself? If you're a selfish person prioritizing your own PR above others' needs, your actions will ultimately reflect it, and we can judge them on it. Otherwise, kudos for finding and pursuing something that aligns nicely with your own needs as well as the needs of others.
All the worst cheaters say everyone cheats (which apparently is enough justification to supersede their own public marital vows.)
Arguing that people are universally terrible is a huge signal that the person making the argument is terrible. Don't go into professional partnerships with them, I've seen at least 3 people like that whose behavior has devolved into eventual jail time and they've wrecked their companies.
The world has a surprisingly high percentage of amoral assholes who have a vested interest in pretending everyone is as misanthropic and self-centered as they are, but it's still a small minority.
As an example, take a look at this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984555
There I basically say that Elon has flipped on a few things, this user has pretended to not be aware of any instance of this (!) and asked for any examples, someone raises a couple and their responses to that is fairly typical of a fanboi. Tbh I should just close the tab and go walk my dog, but it's a pretty interesting discussion and it's -3C outside so I'm sorta procrastinating :)
Or, alternatively, I've waded into a decidedly anti-Musk crowd and my comments simply look pro-Musk in comparison.
>There I basically say that Elon has flipped on a few things, this user has pretended to not be aware of any instance of this
I said that I'm not aware of any examples of Musk reversing course without any plausible justification, and people in reply bombarded me with examples that in my view had plausible justifications, and when I raised this then I was treated as a "fanboi"... of course.
But hey, after some back and forth I think maybe there are some good examples and I can revise my priors! For example, if Musk specifically said that he would not examine Twitter's internals and then changed his mind, that would be a good example of what I'm looking for. Or if Musk said that he would've fire a bunch of people right before he did, that would be another good example. However, I'm not sure if the people who are claiming that Musk did these things are reliable and more sources would be appreciated.
I see that a lot of people gave rude or nonsense answers which is frustrating, but at the point where you are getting examples and coherent responses I think it’s important to take some responsibility and try to support their argument yourself. I typically find one of two outcomes 1) I find compelling information that causes me to change my mind 2) the best argument I can form is weak or nonsense, but at least others can see I’m invested in the conversation and that a detailed reply won’t go to waste.
I don't disagree. I also do not feel that people are required to reply to me if it's not worth the trouble. I'd rather get no replies than bad replies. Unfortunately I didn't find it easy to google something like "Musk said he wouldn't fire people", so I have to try to infer what sort of actual evidence people are using to support this claim (I can see that Musk denied having the specific intent to cut 75% of staff), and yes that can come off as demanding. But the alternative here is that I try to figure out what is underlying whatever bad unsourced claims people are making and... well, my time is valuable too.
Now is the time to provide them.
That lead to a refined claim that Musk said he would not even perform this sort of review and then changed his mind, but without a clear source attached I'm not sure if this is actually what Musk said.
Frankly, as some one who engages in similar lines of questioning as the top level, I think you have to bring your own findings to the table. You aren’t arguing in good faith otherwise.
Mea culpa!
Because the narrative of "Musk changed his mind" that is overwhelmingly popular here implicitly relies on there being no good intervening justification for why Musk would've done this, but afaik this doesn't seem like an incredibly safe assumption.
I mean, I guess you could be asking why someone would care to correct themselves if they have a popular-but-incorrect view on something, and sadly that's not always a bad question.
I'm not saying he is right - he isn't. I just wish people could put their arrogance aside for ONE SECOND, and realize, they would do the same thing.
It's the immature hypocrisy I don't like. That when it was the FBI and DNI having weekly meetings with high level Twitter staff or taking requests from sitting politicians or active campaigns on what political enemies to censor - that was fine because "it's a public company and they could do what they want".
I want emotional and intellectual honesty. It's beyond rare though.
Mental gymnastics gold medalist.
I'm not sure that's the case. I think many people, myself included, assumed Musk's course was always "just do what's best for me." So he's really just holding to that.
You should give people in your life the benefit of the doubt, but large corporations and billionaires usually found success by acting in their own interest so they will just keep on doing that.
I mean, if you have to irrationally hate someone, I guess billionaires are going to be the ones with the resources to handle it, but I'd really rather we as a society move away from this sort of cathartic scapegoating altogether. The more we normalize taking our anger out on some group or another, backed up by flimsy excuses like "x usually found success by acting in their own interest" the more likely it becomes that "x" will be "The Jews" or some other group.
From what I have seen billionaires tend to get more hate because they simply have more negative impact on peoples lives. Elon kicking out Tesla’s founders is hard to judge objectively because they might have done a worse job, but it’s easy to identify lots of dumb shit he did that harmed the company. Presumably he did plenty of positive things, but the negatives are just easier to identify.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/daniel-radcliffe-defends-speaki...
Just like people clearly dislike Bill Cosby because of rape not his status as a former entertainer.
There's a fair share of that as well[0]. But yes, Elon, the worlds richest man (as of earlier this year), draws more ire for his wealth. It's expected since he's about 160x richer than Rowling (she's no longer a billionaire), and uses his money to rig the economy in his favor. He's a more apt symbol of the billionaire class than Rowling.
“As of 2022, J.K. Rowling’s net worth is an estimated £820 million, or around $1.1 billion, per The Sunday Times. According to the site, this makes Rowling the 196th richest person in the U.K. overall.” https://stylecaster.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/
If you look at the top 10 list of richest people Elon is the only one who draws this level of negative attention because he's the only one who is having a huge public meltdown and constantly being in the news for being a garbage human being
The study by YouGov in conjunction with The Economist has found that 30-44-year-olds are most likely to believe this widely debunked conspiracy, with 7% of people from this age group saying that it is "definitely true" and 20% of them saying it is "probably true.
Look, in no way am I saying polls are perfect but almost every metric imaginable says Elon is not the most unpopular billionaire by a long shot. There’s not a huge conspiracy against Musk specifically, people just don’t like power-hungry billionaires.
Nobody cares about Bernard Arnault because he doesn’t really pose an existential threat. High fashion will continue to do the same thing they’ve always done
0 - https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
I don't think it suggests that, or at least I certainly didn't mean to communicate as such. I was responding narrowly to the parent's remarks (explicitly rationalizing targeting billionaires as a group) and not trying to imply anything broader.
Not just billionaires, the specific type of billionaire that seeks out fame.
There are plenty of billionaires with names you'd not recognize.
That is some wild logic. People are angry for material reasons. It's often misdirected or invalid but there's a cause.
I think anger is valid and useful when it's directed at the root of the cause. And I'm sorry, but billionaires and politicians are the ones with more power than anyone else so if something is materially broken in our world they probably deserve an outsized portion of that anger.
It takes work to misdirect that anger to other groups, which some politicians and media groups often do. I'd argue that is the thing which should be examined quite carefully.
I wonder, what could be a rational hate?
Personally I also wonder what is the supposed rationality behind any society granting some becoming billionaires. All the more when there is no social enforcement loop that ensure that the gap between richest and poorest remain in decent state. Otherwise the hate of the richest is an obvious outcome of the inequity structure.
Personally, I'm pretty much an "anti-hate" absolutist, but I recognize that a lot of people in this audience aren't, so I'm leaving room for "rational hate" which is maybe something like "this person did something bad, so I hate them" versus "this person belongs to a group, and some people in that group have done bad things, ergo I hate this person" which is the explicit reasoning in the comment that I originally replied to.
> Personally I also wonder what is the supposed rationality behind any society granting some becoming billionaires. All the more when there is no social enforcement loop that ensure that the gap between richest and poorest remain in decent state.
Yeah, I empathize with this.
> Otherwise the hate of the richest is an obvious outcome of the inequity structure.
It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.
There are two different point here:
- describing the flow events leading to hate generation
- pretending that that hate can be defined has a rational thing
The former seems completely legitimate to me. The latter seems to me to result only from confusion. Hate is an emotion, which to my mind means that is not rationally grounded. Not everything need to be rationally grounded to be considered legitimate. Rationality itself is not rationally grounded obviously.
> It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.
Sure, rationality doesn’t come with moral integrity hardly bounded. I think "rational" is a bit polysemous here, as it is might be heard as "ethically sound", and not purely "logically sound".
premise rejected
You seem to be arguing that only billionaires can rationally hate other billionaires, and anyone who is not on that level can't be rational, because they don't understand what's going on with billionaires. If they they did, they too would be billionaires. This might be narrowly correct in pure business terms, but the problem is that you subordinate everything else to the most unusual characteristic. It's like arguing that the controversial political opinions of a successful athlete aren't subject to debate, because critics haven't won any sportsball championships.
As far as I can tell Musk is currently self-destructing for no apparent reason -- how is that best for him?
Some of the questionable stuff he's been doing for a while has obvious upsides for him. Lying about the capabilities of your products and market manipulation are both obviously nice if you can get away with it. So is demonstratively skirting laws and regulations. Similarly, building a reputation for going after people who did something that contravened your personal interests, even if doing so was their professional or legal duty, has its benefits. It encourages careful consideration of whether dereliction of duty would not be preferable over getting in your way. All these are demonstrations of strength.
But streisanding elonjet just looks weak and pathetic. As does trying to stiff your suppliers.
If you build up a reputation for being completely unprincipled and erratic, and try to wheedle out of both your word and your legal obligations even in cases when you probably can't get away with it and there is not even a particularly compelling reason to try to do so in the first place; well -- surely that can only hurt your brand and also mean that people who would otherwise have done business with you won't or will now only do so on much less favorable terms? Or am I missing something here?
Musk is currently in a bubble where everyone around him is giving him unlimited "attaboys" for his behavior. He probably doesn't have a great read on how poorly things are going for him.
No apparent reason? He bought one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet and roughly simultaneously began heavily pumping the narratives of the MAGA faction, making throwaway declarations of political neutrality.
There's a pretty apparent motivation—advance a particular faction’s political prospects and be visibly seen as a key agent of their success when they fully come to power, and be rewarded for that.
It may be a high risk gamble that could explode before it pays off (its first big chance would be the 2024 election, though it could yield some benefits sooner) but its not completely without apparent purpose.
The "no apparent reason" was not about the what but the how.
Buying one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet makes complete sense, especially if a) it's currently used to advance political ideologies which you can plausibly regard as a real risk to your other business ventures and b) you are a world-class communicator on the platform and that is one of your strongest assets.
So does eliminating (the hostile and plainly incompetent) top management and the majority of the work force.
But in terms of overall execution quality things look a bit like Putin's Ukraine invasion; I'd wager that the majority of erstwhile enthusiastic supporters of the whole thing would probably politely decline front-line participation at this point.
Because Twitter had rules and they enforced those rules which led to bans/suspensions...and people were upset about that on free speech grounds.
So, yes a targeted organized attack wouldn't be overly hard a random chaotic attack is easier with this twitter account.
Georgia's Secretary of State and his family received death threats.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/politics/georgia-raffensperge...
Some election workers had to leave their homes because of death threats
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-threats-geor...
But Trump's account was reinstated so I guess only Elon's personal safety matters.
2) I'm simply providing an explanation which Elon Musk has openly been saying, the account was threatening his safety (I made no claim about fairness or anything else)
3) Trump was not doing real-time tracking of specific private individuals and publishing them online
I'm not claiming any banning is justified btw, but I'm providing an insight.
How about this for a better apples to apples comparison? The same guy behind ElonJet also has accounts that track the private jets of Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, and Drake.
There are people out there that literally believe that Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the world through vaccines (going so far as claiming that he was apart of a conspiracy that resulted in COVID). Probably a lot crazies that would do something crazy to him.
And yet this account is not suspended as of right now.
It is now. In fact all of the plane trackers are gone.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the freedom of speech. It is related to breaking the promise (made when joining any company as an employee) not to divulge confidential information. This is a restriction on the freedom of speech that one knowingly agrees to when joining the company.
If I knowingly posted sensitive internal discussions from my employer I would be kicked out. Or worse: if I worked in a hospital and shared some sensitive pictures I might be hit with heavy fines or spend time behind bars. My 2c.
As a random person on the internet why should I have any issues posting some random company's web chats?
I personally think that the narrative you are interrogating is weak, even a straw man version of the people you think you're arguing with. It seems clear to me that Elon has long operated on personal grievance with respect to Twitter, and that "free speech" is just the veneer he puts on because it works.
Yes, that's what steelmanning is. If you don't care to do it, you're free not to respond to a request for a steelmanned arugment. Explaining your principled refusal to steelman doesn't add much to the discussion.
What are you, a free thinker? Why not just joint he "Elon man bad" chorus?
I'm reminded of a quote from a journalist
"Elon Musk fans were bullied in high school, and the bullies were right"
I can say Elon is a shit person because that is my opinion. I am entitled to that opinion as much as you are entitled to simp for him
PS. Boo!
IMHO Musk has a real opportunity to actually make Twitter great, Twitter was in a horrible shape and no one was happy with its state and I hoped that he can fix it because Musk is a product person. Unfortunately every passing day I'm losing hope. Even if he can fix it as a product, it seems like he will bomb it as a community.
No one ever forgot the calling the diver pedo incident and his handling Twitter can severely damage his image.
There is a reason why people pay Musk thousands of dollars for features that don't exist or cars that are not well build and still don't go after him like people went after Elizabeth Holmes and I'm afraid he might eventually burn out his social credit and be judged promptly for whatever he delivers without a slack.
His supporters are fanatical - none of his previous abhorrent actions have had a heavy toll, so it's unclear why this one should.
He is certainly receiving a large backlash to his recent actions, but I think that's more a case of people (outside of tech) who would've paid little attention to him before being forced to be more fully aware of his existence, than anyone who previously supported him thinking less of him.
Twitter is already a lost cause. He wanted to create a more popular Parler. Probably it'll just end up in the same place with the same niche user base.
At least SpaceX has Gwynn.
This also seems to be reassuring to NASA.
"'I hugged her with a smile on my face, because I know she is running that thing. She’s running SpaceX,' Nelson said."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/spacex-leader...
-Bans people impersonating him like Kathy Griffin
-Bans people who share internal communications at Twitter
-Bans people who post sensitive information like his address, phone number or private jet location
-Bans a few militant Antifa groups
Is there anything else? Because I’m not seeing the abhorrent part, especially compared to pre-Musk censorship.
Why should I be outraged now? When epidemiologists were censored leading to unvaccinated being banned from society last winter, no one made a fuss about it.
https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-reverses-censorship-andrew...
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong...
> Bans people who share internal communications at Twitter
Which I expect is covered by an NDA between the leaker and the company blocking the sharing of the leaks. I'd expect the same if someone at, purely for the sake of example, Blizzard started sharing internal content via World of Warcraft public chat.
As in lose my job and be unable to socialize because I need a vaccine passport to enter a restaurant. All based on fraudulent lies that I couldn’t expose because I was censored.
>-Bans a few militant Antifa groups
And this just smells ideologically motivated on your part, frankly
This data is freely emitted annd anyone with a dirt cheap receiver can receive and upload it.
I think it's also obvious that this jet tracker doesn't exactly aid in the public discourse, it seems far closer to targeted harassment..
Again, I don't think anything should be banned outside of direct threats (I'm a free speech absolutist). But it does seem clear, even from that tweet by Musk, that that twitter account seemed to impact his personal safety.
So which is it?
You are likely correct! However, I don't think that anyone here believes the @elonjet account was doing either, besides possibly you.
Also, "and you know it" is insulting and rude, and I don't agree with it or appreciate it.
Some people did indeed abuse that knowledge, but it was rare.
A few people were, by request, "ex-directory" and not listed, but again, that was rare.
Most people were not only absolutely fine with their phone number being public info, it was more useful then than a publicly-known email address is now.
Boy, what a complicated and serious question. We should form a committee to discuss exactly where our community places reasonable boundaries and adjudicate blurry edge cases. Who could have predicted that a policy like "if it's legal, it's allowed" would lead to problems? Surely no one with a few dozen billion dollars to set on fire would be that unbelievably stupid.
comment may contain hyperbole, do not consume for statistical purposes
When he's not the object of the speech in question, he seems to think that things like calling people pedophiles is free speech, so he generally seems to be a free speech maximalist and I'm guessing the answer might be yes.
I don't consider a lot of things to be free speech that musk apparently does, but there's a big difference between him being a free speech maximalist in general and just supporting free speech when it's convenient.
Consider the following: The Twitter files contains a lot of private information and outs employees whom have received direct harassment.
The ElonJet account contains publicly available information on a very accessible site. This does not make a statement about Musk nor does it tell who is inside the jet at the time.
Which is closer to doxxing?
He published what they said and the reason for doing it publicly is to ensure the current administration and administrative state (which would be the people at the heart of his accusations) would also have motive to bury the information. I'd also guess that such disclosures also help distance him from any legal action.
Though the fact that you immediately jumped to the government conspiracy angle it seems like you've planted your feet and aren't going to move. It's not doxxing because it's someone you agree with.
Put another way: the courts have overwhelmingly recognized the rights of "paparazzi": if you're a public figure, there is going to be independent public interest in your life.
The interest can't be intrusive (meaning that it doesn't enable someone to break into your house and take pictures of your underwear drawer), but it does allow citizens to use any public information available to them. Since airplane information is public by necessity, there is no reasonable legal structure that enhances Musk's privacy without compromising well-trodden expression rights.
But even on the public side: yes, this would be entirely appropriate. It's not clear what the alternative would even be; what would it look like to have civilian evidence in e.g. traffic accidents if people weren't allowed to take pictures of others' cars?
2. In such a case you have a need to know that supersedes one's right of privacy. Are you saying you have a need to know where Elon Musk is at all times?
I don't have any particular need (or interest) in knowing where Elon Musk is. I also don't know where he is at all times with the information in this flight tracker: I only know the parts that are already necessarily public.
Law is fundamentally casuistical in nature: there are standards that apply to John Q. Publics (like you and me), and there are other standards that apply to the Barbara Streisands (and Elon Musks) of the world.
He trashed talk a journalist immediately after the journalist complained he had to journey thru cold with out heater because his batteries would not last until the next charging point.
He trashed talk the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who supported the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who might as well be supporting the short sellers, e.g. sec aka shortseller enrichment commission aka security exchange commission.
He is a small guy with a oversized largely sensitive ego.
But most notoriously, he is a terrible public speaker. Like my public speaking teacher would be more ashamed at him than me.
Elon's communication style is also good for forming "parasocial" relationships with his audience which explains how loyal and fervent many of his fans are.
tbh I find the widespread habit of referring to him by his first name like he's a personal acquaintance to be part of this mechanism. This is something tabloid newspapers do with sport and entertainment celebrities to milk money from fans who gravitate toward others who seem to be part of 'the family.' It's a PR strategy designed to exploit human social circuitry and convert it into cash money.
This sounds strangely familiar to someone else that owns a Twitter-like social network.
This is actually one of the bigger problems with discourse and politics today: the idea that "rude, crude, and unconcerned with other people's feelings" has anything to do with honesty—and, conversely, that being sensitive to those feelings and trying to take them into account when speaking is dishonest as opposed to kind.
Free speech is complicated. Saying you'll "do free speech" without refering to implementation or intended resolution to various free speech dilemmas... that means you're probably not going to do free speech.
The part that I find most annoying is when politicians bring it up this way. It seems to be the one issue where nonseriousness meets fake passion most intimately.
It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
So let's just say, citation needed.
/s
I'd go as far as saying "Do not anthropomorphize anybody whose name you know from media"
Do not treat them as people, treat them as ideas or maybe Sport Franchises.
Taylor Swift or Donald Trump or Elon Musk are like say the Cincinnati Reds.
If you are in a bar in Cincinnati and you want to drink without paying your best bet is singing the praise of the Reds, likewise if you are looking for trouble then attack and insult the Reds.
Same thing with Musk, if you are among entrepreneurs then be supportive of Musk , if you are among workers start attacking him vehemently.
Quoting the OP, Celebrities should become the words you spew in order to gain some small advantage while selling your products or when trying to influence people as per the book “How to win friends and influence people “
On the other hand, if we assume that hypocrisy requires intent, then what you've instead described is "just" garden variety narcissistic sociopathy.
Good object versus bad object, very Kleinian and appropriate.
Central to object relations theory is the notion of splitting, which can be described as the mental separation of objects into "good" and "bad" parts and the subsequent repression of the "bad," or anxiety-provoking, aspects (Klein, 1932; 1935).
Infants first experience splitting in their relationship with the primary caregiver: The caregiver is “good” when all the infant’s needs are satisfied and “bad” when they are not.
> It's not hypocrisy
I disagree there though unless one agrees that Musk has no morality. However, in the absence of morals, which is likely, it would still be perceived hypocrisy.
If that is the state of the art then what is the defense that regular people have?
Treat Musk as a moving object as well? Because the Valley seems filled with people singing Musk praises in order to raise money and impress his fanboys who are loaded with money (and get access to some of that money), while they'll openly admit behind close doors that Musk is a fraud.
The other knows there's no way the trench could hold that many and says, "Don't like to me you bastard!"
The first guy says, "Oh, yeah, well how many do you have?"
The other says, "Only ten of us."
The other guy here has:
1. Criticized the first guy for lying.
2. Then lied himself.
Would you call this behavior hypocritical? No, probably not. Because hypocrisy only really exists as a valid criticism within a social sphere that presumes good faith and mutual respect.
But these two dudes are mortal enemies engaged in war. Being hypocritical is the least of the harmful things that guy is willing to do to the other, a list which also includes fun social interactions like stabbing him with a bayonet.
When I see politicians become brazen about contradicting themselves, the conclusion I come to is that they see the people they are making mouth sounds towards as beneath them and a less human Other that they feel no obligation to behave consistently towards.
Just curious, would you be ok with some guy tracking the location of your kids on a hourly basis?
Don't listen to a word he says - assume it's false until independently verified.
When I mentioned that Elon had already been using his power unilaterally to re-platform personal allies like Babylon Bee and Ye, I got all sorts of pedantry about the difference between suspension and banning, more pedantry about the Ye reactivation happening moments before the deal went through and some justifications about Babylon Bee not having done anything wrong, etc...
I will reiterate here again. Musk will squeeze every bit of perceived power he may have out of Twitter by issuing personal favours like the petty, tin-pot tyrant that he is.
Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that he personally did this and it's not in error, which is a leap. It's the same as everyone who blamed Jack personally for bans that were later reversed.
Let's see what the explanation is and whether it gets unbanned.
Were we reading the same threads? I've seen countless people on HN predicting exactly this sorta thing happening, even myself.
Any criticism I've ever said of Tesla or Elon usually initially gets up votes and then half a day or even a few days later receives a lot of down votes. I always assumed it was people invested in his stocks doing it on their own, but his antics on Twitter show he's the kind of person that might actually employ people to down vote people critical of him and his companies.
Now, some subset of people will be for and against anything, so if you filter selectively HN supports any and ever narrative.
But the Twitter acquisition has blown some big holes in the myth. He talked a good game about free speech, but it was clear from his initial bid for Twitter that he didn't really understand the realities of the business or the difficulties of hosting speech at scale. And since he took over, he has stepped onto turf a lot of people here understand quite well: running a business, managing software development, and the dynamics of online forums and social media.
And I expect this disillusionment will continue. Somebody described the Twitter acquisition as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I expect Musk will feel emotionally compelled to engage with Twitter personally, rather than doing the sensible thing and turning it over to somebody competent while turning his attention back to his at-risk car company.
So look for more of him pursuing personal grudges and putting far-right political views (e.g. "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters") into action with absolutely no regard to his pieties around free speech. In the US right, "free speech" is often code for "the powerful should never experience criticism or accountability". That may seem weird, but it's a specific instance of the more general point: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Cross that with "free speech" and you get what Elon is doing: free speech for the right people, arbitrary deranking and account bans for the wrong.
That's a succinct way to put it. I like that.
He's never going to develop 'systems that can patrol the speech' because he's far too vain and think skinned to allow actual open dialogue. Like every other conservative, the only speech he really cares about is his own, and he is completely comfortable banning or delisting speech he personally doesn't like. He's tyrant man child.
Ever look in the mirror? That's a lot of hate and presumptions to assume about one person. And Elon is most definitely not a conservative. He has stated he voted democrat his whole life. His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
Personally, I was skeptical of his claims to free speech and still am (especially given how he's handled it thus far). You simply can't have free speech platforms. You need protocols designed to achieve such a thing. Something like Twitter is always doomed to be censored.
But my disagreement ends there. I'm enjoying the Twitter files releases. Seeing the cooperation between Twitter and the feds is both unsurprising and unsettling.
> Dude bought a company.
Approximately nobody thinks Twitter is just another company. Clearly Musk doesn't think that; he's waxed poetic about how important it is to the future of humanity. Its hundreds of millions of users don't think it's just another company either. It demonstrably played an important role in journalism and public discourse.
It's almost as if there are actual consequences to what he is doing, and what happens to twitter.
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
If Twitter is the town square, Elon Musk is a natural disaster which rips through the town and destroys houses, forcing your friends to move to different towns. My problem isn’t that I made friends in the town; my problem is the natural disaster that ruined my town.
Social ties are important to people, no matter where and how they form. Breaking that up has real consequences. I’m sure you would feel the same way about your own social connections, and you wouldn’t appreciate someone blaming you for those ties being weakened by external forces.
There is no assumption. It's based on the things he's said and done
>And Elon is most definitely not a conservative.
Yes he is.
>He has stated he voted democrat his whole life.
His word means nothing, but regardless, you can be conservative and vote Democrat. The Democrat party is for the most part the republican party with less bigotry.
>His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
His support for the GOP comes when they tried to overthrow the government and have installed a far-right religious fanatic majority on the highest court in the land? Yeah, he's conservative.
I am completely fine with that.
Edit: I should probably point out this is sarcasm used to highlight the absurdity of the original posters "I'm fine with fascists ('non-establishment right') being back on twitter"
My comment was exaggerated to highlight how absurd the OP's comment of "I'm completely fine with having 'non-establishment right' back" was. Because it boiled away any semblance of reality that these were awful people
I'd heard of claims of labor disputes and other unsavory stuff at the Tesla factories, but honestly, I don't know of a single car company in the world without a history of and ongoing labor tensions.
The self driving was obviously a fantasy and Musk got way over his skis on claims there, but he's far from alone.
Watching him drive Twitter into the ground has been a revelation for me.
This is just your partisan blinkers talking. Someone on the right could equally say “social justice” on the US left is often code for “now I take your stuff”. Both statements are partisan, largely inaccurate, and wholly unconstructive.
There are many people on the right deeply committed to free speech, like David French. There are many non-partisan institutions committed to free speech, like (formerly) the ACLU and (now) FIRE. There are many left wing people deeply committed to free speech, like those people fighting Florida’s “anti-woke” speech laws.
Abolitionism. Civil rights. Gay rights. Liberal triumphs built on free speech, on free criticism, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Don’t cede free speech to petty partisanship. Nothing good will come of it.
He's not a congressperson, senator, or governor and has limited influence on the current base of the US right-wing.
(I don’t identify as a member of the right, to be clear, but these are just very obvious trends for anyone that actually observes the right, rather than just making assumptions guided by partisan antipathy.)
Sure, but my contention is that at best the intellectual right doesn't matter, and at its worst it's now an oxymoron.
I agree that there are people on the right committed to free speech and who demonstrate it through action, and good for them. But there are also a lot of people who, as with Musk, use it more as a fig leaf. And there are plenty who are openly opposed to it.
And I think being honest about that is one of the best to keep it from becoming purely a partisan issue.
Those who are interested in technology in itself
And those who are interested in technology as a means to be one rich and maybe powerful
I would argue there is not a single one.
If someone can explain how this is damaging to freedom of speech I am very interested to know.
So if Musk literally did nothing but continue that pattern, he could justifiably make the claim that it's as close to a bastion of free speech as could be allowed on a social media site of its size.
Looking forward to more of these twitter file releases.
From what I saw it was just some people on Bidens campaign team reaching out asking Twitter to take down some tweets that contained leaked nudes of Bidens son, in line with Twitters ToS.
I feel like I've missed the boat on this, everyone is pointing at a smoking gun, but I haven't seen it yet.
It's not just about "some nudes of Biden's son". It is about the suppression of a NY Post story about a laptop his son lost. It had details about conversations and taking money from foreign nationals. Supposedly, it was deemed Russian disinformation, but that was all a lie. It was real.
Indeed. I saw it described as "he's raised the Batshit signal"
Remember: Don't feed the trolls
It's petty, I find it tasteless, but I still must admire how easily he plays everyone.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27098612 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19983270 (May 2019)
You've unfortunately been doing it quite a lot lately. If that keeps up, we're going to end up having to ban you. Fortunately, you've also posted good comments, so this shouldn't be hard to fix. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
I'll probably work.
He's just changed who gets banned to be more in line with his personal beliefs. Accounts banned under the previous regime are unbanned and accounts that either were or likely would be permitted previously are now banned, with recent examples being the account that initially hosted the viral clip of Elon being booed on Chappelle's show and now ElonJet.
The latter example is particularly important, since both the public and Elon himself seemed to view this account as a litmus test of his commitment to "free speech."
for example here's a banned account: https://twitter.com/h3h3productions/ here's the account that posted the video: https://twitter.com/CleoPat48937885
well seems like he reactivated his account(pretty sure you got like 30 days or something to reactivate it after deleting or something like that), here's an archive of how it looked: https://archive.ph/W0d0v
The elonjet account however is a pretty bad one gotta agree, wonder if there will be any kind of explanation or attempt at one.
Billionaires walk hand in hand with fascists. Nothing free speechey about it.
There's simply no Libertarian ideal that can be achieved in one place. The Internet as a whole is an absolute haven of free speech. Twitter caters to a certain audience, Facebook to another. They're very broad, but not infinite. There are plenty of other places that cater to the audiences that they don't. And people can always find ways to share their ideas with no interference. The thing they aren't entitle too is reach.
I think it's better for everyone to be entitled to their privacy.
Someone who very visibly, very loudly, and very consequentially, inserts himself or herself into global and national matters is a very public person, by choice. No one is peering into his house and taking pictures. Someone published legally available public data about an aircraft, exercising their right to freedom of speech.
And certainly not powerless. Being an oligarch (or celebrity) -- you know, you get to call heads of state and have a chat -- is not about "wealth" or "fame"; it is a hazy zone between power and wealth.
Try to think of someone you admire. Fighting for a good cause. A pro-choice activist or an female celebrity flying to an African country to work with NGOs for women's health issues or something.
The critical necessity of open and unobstructed expression to a functioning liberal/democratic order far exceeds such considerations.
> Try to think of someone you admire. Fighting for a good cause. A pro-choice activist or an female celebrity flying to an African country to work with NGOs for women's health issues or something.
Speaking of lovely Angelina, as a CFR member she will be well advised (by experts) to take necessary precautions, should they be necessary. In fact, I would be surprised if she does not have a professional security detail.
Btw, I'll take that bait ("pro-Choice") and offer you this: At a fundamental level, my view is that as a citizen of a free society my primary concern shall never be my choice or viewpoint, rather that which insures that I may freely express my views and be able to freely exercise the political right to promote or support my viewpoint. Anything that undermines fundamental mechanisms that support our free society, regardless of the ideological or right/wrong garb it takes, must be rejected. That would be a more accurate picture of what "[I] think".
If you are wealthy enough and that tracking rubs you the wrong way, you are free to take public transportation like the rest of us. If Congress can do it, so can Musk.
with all the hysteric hatred he gets, he still has a right to safety for him and his family
Think I'm wrong? Let's see if he'll go after Jack Dorsey in the future for recently correcting him on going after CSAM.
But then again, Elon is hell-bent on alienating everyone. I was planning on selling our Land Rover and getting a Tesla but I changed my mind because a lot of people will associate me with the guy or think I agree with him. Still.. amazing cars.
Are they really that nice? I've been in a few but never owned one. I hear a lot about fit and finish issues unbefitting a car of that price range.
What does a Model S get you that an S-class doesn't, or a Model 3 against, I don't know, an Audi A4? Is it just all about that electric drivetrain? I don't yet have a strong preference on electric vs. ICE, but I would gladly pay more to have a car without the "slap an iPad in the middle for every UX" design of the Tesla.
I’ve never seen anything over 50 miles, but I wish some manufacturer could take a PHEV to 100 mile range and I’d snap that up in a heartbeat.
Then for longer trips we have the convenience of not needing to charge.
This depends a lot on your region. Fremont factory is well known for build/paint quality issues. Shanghai & Berlin cars are much better.
Can’t wait for all EVs and chargers to be interoperable.
Jack didn't like that accusation:
> Jack: No, it is not.
> Elon: When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety.
> She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request.
> I made it top priority immediately.
Why doesn't he set the record straight on this?
I don’t know what happened in past year. But to say we didn’t take action for years isn’t true. You can make all my emails public to verify. Company took away my access to email or I would.
When I mentioned that Elon had already been using his power unilaterally to re-platform personal allies like Babylon Bee and Ye, I got all sorts of pedantry about the difference between suspension and banning, more pedantry about the Ye reactivation happening moments before the deal went through and some justifications about Babylon Bee not having done anything wrong, etc...
I will reiterate here again. Musk will squeeze every bit of perceived power he may have out of Twitter by issuing personal favours like the petty, tin-pot tyrant that he is.
Regardless, this isn't what I was referring to by leaks upthread.
Elon said he will likely release all of the documents in time. I'm not sure if that's safe for legal reasons. Who knows what private details would have to be redacted.
Yeah Elon might be a dictator throwing his weight around (I probably would too) but if there is due process and transparency so be it.
This doesn't appear to be the case. They state in the rules that publicly available information can be shared.
I'm sure we will find out one way or another what direction Twitter heads.
It seems odd to me that you would create an account tracking anyone's plane. That doesn't seem to benefit anyone but people have weird hobbies.
Twitter is a public company, and may be a digital public square, but it does not have the public good as a rewardable goal.
While it might not have public good as a goal, I think that having Musk appear as a public hero of freedom might be a goal.
The answer seems to be "No, Elon only wants the speech that he likes"
This does not bode well for twitter's future, or for that matter SpaceX/Tesla if Elon is going to be spending all his time as Twitter's chief censor
Even worse, there's no transparency here: What rule was violated, how long is the suspension, etc.
Meanwhile, those that dislike both Musk and Twitter are having a magical moment as each actively destroys the other, like two black holes circling each other, unable to escape.
Yes being able to dissent the government about laptops or lab leaks or not rely o the russians to launch satellites or shuttle us to the space station is important as well.
Emotions and hyperboles when it fits here it seems. Reason comes second, if ever.
Everyone is still just pissy here because their liberal bubble is burst on Twitter.
I love Mastodon, now that it was accepted here the last month or so, why is everyone not on it yet?
They've also been aggressive about banning bots and valid stuff has gotten caught in that net.
I'll be not at all surprised if it's unbanned by end of day or we learn more details about what actually happened.
... he could just hit the back button on his browser, right? What right does his discomfort grant him to deny other people access to this information (which, we can repeat, is information his airplane broadcasts while operating... anyone with a radio can receive it, all this channel adds is a one-stop shop to look it up)?
He, SBF, and many more like them are just a bunch of Chauncy Gardeners. People convince themselves that they're geniuses until one day the realization dawns that they've been dunces all along.
Still, it's a very apt reference these days, maybe all days. The narrative arc feels evergreen, in that the surreal irony feels like it would land (and be thoroughly entertaining!) in any era of human history.
There isn't a dichotomy between genius and asshole.
I still think Elon's contributions to society are much greater than his flaws.
And his contributions don't come from being a "genius" (there are at least hundreds of thousands of geniuses on Earth) as much as from being extremely hardworking.
I'm not saying he doesn't have some talents. But like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes, his superpower seems to be creating a reality distortion field, not economics, physics, or anything else that makes for a long-term success.
There are a lot of anecdotal stories about teams at Tesla and SpaceX managing up to keep him from making terrible decisions all the time. I used to thing it just grousing, but now I'm not so sure.
Advertisers have come back and the staff is muuuuch smaller than before.
Big names not sure about spend
The idea is usually to slash close enough to the bone that the company survives, but 100% of profits go to debt servicing. But this doesn't make for a company that's resilient to economic turmoil (or one that can invest money into growth). So the contingency plan is to ensure that they are first in line in court.
The only logical reason I can think of to not pay something you know you’re legally obligated to pay is if you’re intending to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying. Otherwise you’re going to end up paying and pay a load of legal fees on top.
I guess one alternative is effectively taking a risky loan: you are running low on cash but you have a large cash flow coming in the future. Stop paying rent, eventually after a protracted court battle pay your debts with that future cash flow and the legal fees are “interest”.
Neither feels like the actions of a financially healthy company.
Other examples:
- Illegal firings of non-US Twitter staff
- Pushing back the Twitter acquisition
- Roadster/Truck deposits
- Radar will-they/won't-they
The ability to stop paying bills without seeing the inside of a cell or having to sleep in the cold is a powerful negotiation tool. Some won't even have the means to sue him. Despite being painted as failures, none of these will have a materially adverse affect on his life. Consequences are different for a person like him.
And other lawsuits will be coming in soon now that they got rid of their content moderation staff.
Which advertisers, for what price?
We will never know the true revenue of Twitter because it is no longer a traded company nor are they in any obligation to publish data of this kind publicly.
Maybe it's a megalomaniac dictator thing, and I will never understand.
Think about FTX, cryptocurrencies, Juicero... it's becoming pretty overwhelmingly clear that having money is not in any way correlated to being able to spend it intelligently. It's time to start seriously thinking about wealth caps.
Why? What advantage would that bring to him?
Honest question. With him overpaying for Twitter already (maybe not completely voluntary), bankruptcy looks like the fastest way to make the deal even worse.
It doesn't take a financial wizard to realize that Twitter was insolvent from the day it was purchased. Saddling a company with an interest payment that's nearly double revenue is a clear indication to me that the time period from purchase-to-bankruptcy was going to be measured in months. So we can be pretty confident that everyone involved with this purchase was expecting Twitter to die quickly.
You and I are on the same page. But the "why" is not "why would they make such a poor financial choice," since it's clear the answer to that is "to kill Twitter." The why is really, "why bother killing Twitter?" I get Musk's reasoning, but I don't understand what his co-investors get out of the deal. Authoritarian regimes benefit from having dissidents operate on a centralized platform, because it's easier to monitor. Killing twitter pushes these groups out to platforms that are going to be decentralized and impossible to block. It's weakening their grip, not reinforcing it.
My best guess is that they assumed that Musk would stay on post bankruptcy and act as their pro-authoritarian sock puppet. But they didn't anticipate his complete ineptitude would drive users off the platform in such numbers.
Why would you say that?
He signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter at an agreed upon price.
Nobody forced him to sign that, ergo: he completely voluntarily signed a binding agreement on which he later wanted to renege.
This is not to defend Musk in any way, it's just a statement of facts.
It could get ugly indeed. Tesla's brand image is slipping, and everything points to that just getting worse. Between Elon as the face of the company, and their seeming inability to deliver a competitive product now that everyone else has started making EVs... well, I wouldn't buy any TSLA for sure. You buy a Tesla now for the supercharger network, everything else is a compromise. That's a shaky place to be.
Musk put up $22.4B of his own money to buy Twitter, plus another $4B he already had invested.
Maybe Twitter was worthless when Musk bought it, and that $26.4B was - theoretically - already burnt in the deal. If you pay $26.4B to buy garbage, you lost $26.4B from the start...
Assuming Twitter is not worthless, Musk loses whatever percentage of that $26.4B actually has value. Worst case, that's probably at least 20% - which is still $5.28B.
He'll also still be on the hook for $13B in personal debt financing to banks. Unless Musk himself can claim to be bankrupt, he owes them $13B - and they're going to get it one way or the other.
Further, another $7B of equity investments came from questionable investors like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Who knows what they're going to do if Musk purposefully runs the company into the ground and burns billions of their money...
There's a lot of reasons why Musk can't just say oops, claim bankruptcy and leave everyone else holding the bag.
It's almost as if all the other investors aren't morons...
The bond market has shifted. Twitter still owes $13 Billion of course, but those bonds are toxic. No one wants junk-bonds from Twitter right now.
I'm neither a lawyer nor an American but AFAIK according to past SCOTUS rulings, it is illegal for the government to "outsource censorship" to private parties in order to silence speech protected by 1A. A relative of DNC's Podesta or an FBI lawyer working for Twitter add to the impression more than the legal argument I guess.
I think from the legal POV, an @ElonJet suspension backstory wouldn't be as interesting as the other installment of "The Twitter Files."
I haven't followed parts 2 & 3 of the Twitter files. But the irony here is that the government officials involved in part 1 were the Trump administration. Biden was not yet elected and should be considered a private citizen.
"The Trump Administration" can be opposed to actual-Trump.
This is the entire story, but lede buried by MuskHate.
Does no one out here realize this is the same hate-everything-acknowledge-nothing behavior regarding Trump?
That you must hate the person and nothing else matters... "always shoot the messenger"... It seems clear as day to me, but I guess I'm the crazy one.
EDIT: It's called cathartic scapegoating. And if you point it out, it must mean you're a Trump loving far-right loonie toon. Look at the extent that people will go to prove they aren't just shooting the messenger right here, it's just evidence it is happening.
To normals, “DNC Podesta FBI” are keywords signifying far-right conspiracy talk.
It’s funny you mention that because a lot of the alt-right’s success the past few years has been fueled by a pure, unadulterated hatred of anything deemed liberal or progressive.
The idea that the fruits of a hack should not be published by media outlets (including Twitter) for at least a cooling off period makes alot of sense. Also for Podesta to be involved in that since the hacking of his emails was one of the main events of the 2016 election cycle and he was keenly aware of the speed at which those hacks can entangle people and have a profound impact on the democratic process. There's no way a responsible company would want that traffic on their site.
Actually I feel very differently about these two things specifically because Snowden didn't just blindly dump everything he could get regardless of the consequences.
Snowden leaked information about NSA surveillance of foreign persons not on US soil - that kind of activity is explicitly within the NSA's core mission and the legal framework around it. I'll leave aside any debate of the domestic programs - he very definitely did expose entirely legal secret activities. That's either careless or malicious.
That would mean he wasn't careful at all, having outsourced the selection of what data to make public to a 3rd party.
> Sometimes things go beyond domestic vs international - because it’s someone else’s domestic surveillance and if that someone is an ally it’s at least a tiny bit problematic and worthy of review.
Everybody does this with everyone, allies and enemies alike, and doing so is a matter of state foreign policy. This type of activity is exactly what the NSA is charted for. We've reviewed this stuff in writing the laws that charter the agency and govern it's activity.
It's either careless or malicious.
Also legal does not mean moral.
Your free to disagree, but my opinion is that Snowden did the American people a public service, and put clear effort into minimizing the damage. It's not some unambiguous knight in shining armor situation, but more of a shades of grey situation where in my opinion the good outweighed the harm.
So he revealed a terrible fact in an irresponsible way, and then sought asylum in a country which shits on human rights left and right. And this isn't whataboutism, it is an expectation for consistency in morals
That was very much not the conventional wisdom at the time. This choice by Wikileaks was hugely controversial and in stark contrast with Snowden’s leaks, which were published by journalists after having been analysed, filtered and redacted. Citing Snowden and Wikileaks as if they operated in the same way is simply wrong.
And yes, just dumping stuff without at least checking them is morally and practically wrong. If only because it makes you very likely to take part voluntarily or not in disinformation campaigns if you’re fed false documents.
No, there really is very little comparison there.
Taibbi mentions two "suppression" interactions:
> Taibbi reported Twitter had "received and honored" deletion requests from both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House; he presented examples of the former but not of the latter.
(per Wiki)
Only one of those groups was actively in government and as expressed both were requests.
0. https://twitter.com/jxcksweeney 1. https://twitter.com/RUOligarchJets 2. https://twitter.com/NASAPlanes
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/16031245489032478...
also, the journalist reporting this is now filtered from search
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...
[2] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
"Boss said to do it".
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
> Our primary aim is to protect individuals from potential physical harm as a result of their information being shared, so we consider information such as physical location and phone numbers to be a higher risk than other types of information.
> Under this policy, you can’t share the following types of private information, without the permission of the person who it belongs to....home address or physical location information
So Elon essentially gave permission, and now he has revoked it.
The difficulty those on the other-side of this argument have is that they themselves are not arguing that this shouldn't be the policy, and that this "doxing" behavior is not wrong. In fact, no one is.
There is not a single person claiming free speech is being violated here. There is not any kind of movement or group that is campaigning for doxing of location information as a right.
Essentially, people are saying: you are not allowing the things that no one thinks should be allowed anyway.
Except it's not private information.. it's all public information. And it's only his "location" when he is in the plane.
I think you should read up more on doxing.
First of all.. you realize we are talking about GPS of a plane. So yes, you know where they are in the air, and then you know what city they landed in. That's it. You know the city. Whoopdydoo. It's not like someone is pushing out Musk's position at every point on the ground.
But you are comparing public air traffic GPS to someone walking next to me and specifically giving my location at every point? Those aren't the same thing.. at all.
I think you are the one that has to read up on doxing.
And anyway, don't even bother replying with more of your silly examples. Plane GPS data is public information. End of story.
I can think of one person who claimed it:
> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
Currently on the ground in Texas after flying out of LA.
> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.
major brands and advertisers jumped ship a month or two ago and very few have returned to see how elons checkmark 2.0, sink-dragging, maximum-hard-work "meet me on the tenth floor" late-on-the-rent leadership have panned out.
by all accounts, if your brand is safely evacuated from twitter, @elonjet is proof you probably dodged a bullet or two and should get some recognition by EOY for your efforts.
i've heard this before, is it backed by data? where is the data? anecdotally:
active: https://nitter.snopyta.org/pepsi/status/1603075671881879556#... https://nitter.snopyta.org/beatsbydre/status/160309134171347... https://nitter.snopyta.org/Ford/status/1603080041138733056#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/TOMFORD/status/160308497345149337... https://nitter.snopyta.org/SNICKERS/status/16026650177693286... https://nitter.snopyta.org/Oreo/status/1603042472866861068#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/Disney/status/1602725046463696903... https://nitter.snopyta.org/Samsung/status/160257553489808998... https://nitter.snopyta.org/ProcterGamble/status/160092252229... https://nitter.snopyta.org/AppleMusic/status/160245283600402... https://nitter.snopyta.org/OppenheimerFilm/status/1603027027...
inactive: https://nitter.snopyta.org/CocaCola https://nitter.snopyta.org/Charmin
or maybe I'm confusing "posting" with "spending on advertising"?
1) Elon is trying to position himself as being "pro free speech" in the same way Jack Dorsey did (it's just marketing, and not a truly held principle).
2) Somebody in the organization is making decisions that Elon will reverse in the next 24 hours to prove that they did not come from him.
3) Some specific threat has been made against Elon that has him now paranoid about his security to the extent that he's rethinking his principles when faced with his own mortality.
The difference between 1 and 3 being whether he never had principles or is now giving them up. I'm guessing it's 3 because I've seen SO MANY public figures I once respected do the exact same thing once the danger of standing on principle became all too palpable.
This is public flight data reposted to a public channel. Musk now owns one of the biggest platforms on the internet so I’d argue that not only is the information already public but now in the public interest.
Ironically, still easily accessible via the 'best' list: https://news.ycombinator.com/best
Dang, you can skip the anodyne PR statement.
Sister: "oh yeah you are in (lat, lon)?, I saw it on elonjet"
Ella opens slack,
Ella Irwin: " team apply heavy VF on elonjet "
In recent memory, the only time the outrage was justified in hindsight was when ICANN had that issue with .org domains. The rest of the time it has seemed to me that the comments come up with 2 min hate and then emerging facts turn out to be different.
My priors are, therefore, quite high that the outrage is usually unjustified. The boy cried wolf too much.
There were several occasions when HN algorithms flagged my comments/submissions and then someone from the HN team would reach out saying that this was a mistake and the result of a non-human intervention. Why is the same scenario not considered?
We shall see, but honestly, I believe @ElonJet will be reactivated by the end of today.
From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Authenticity has been confirmed with an update on the personal site: https://grndcntrl.net/links/
"Its open source data!" So are the (perfectly legal) doxes on Kiwifarms, yet that's one of the largest reasons its vilified.
Additionally, I doubt most people here would be okay with another person very closely watching your movements including this kid if Musk decided to beat him at his own game by setting up cameras around his house (Funny what you can do with enormous amounts of money). Musk is still human whether you like billionaires or not. You'd think that a place like this would be more privacy-oriented and wouldn't be okay with any kinds of telemetry period, or at the very least would want it handled more carefully (Plane data handled by in-house FAA units rather that broadcasted to the web for anyone and everyone to see).
As I've said and will keep saying Musk does not care about free speech. People are falling for the lies of a billionaire who has been caught in multiple objective lies before.
When banning trump, it is used as the main argument.
Elon Musk, 2022-11-06
If you didn't already, now you know what his commitment is worth.
And other places: https://grndcntrl.net/links/
if it even slightly puts him in danger, he takes steps at mitigation.
when it’s other people, and the situation is even more dangerous, it almost seems like he revels in the danger those people or groups are put in.
even more concerning to me, when those groups ask for mitigation efforts, he goes out of his way to make their concerns appear unreasonable or hysterical. again, even when those threats are more immediate/widespread.
this is not something to be brushed away, this has very real implications.
Elon is not in the Ponzi business like SBF, but we've seen quite a few questionable statements and borderline vaporware predictions.
More rational scrutiny and skepticism is needed, as a general rule, for anyone in power.
Another person who defends Elon is Bill Maher. I am curious what he will say in the new year.
Also MKBHD.
https://old.reddit.com/r/lexfridman/comments/zf0zqx/the_twit...
Getting echoes of Musk honestly.
So I assume Lex continues to be as bought into Musk's narrative.
I think he proved more than once that he is far from an expert on AI/Robotics, and that he tends to be naïve/gullible with his hosts.
The hosts themselves are often interesting and the whole setup/duration is nice enough. I don't mind too much about the host being half-smart.
Except when he is a simp of Elon his clique. Makes me sad.
(And that for the creator to refuse, not because he didn’t want to sell, but because he hoped to get more money out of Elon, not because of any worthwhile contribution of him, or because it was his data, but simply to take advantage of the concerns Elon shared with him, was dickish.)
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok."
Every minute you don't spend on Twitter is another minute we will be closer to Elon having to eat $44B and probably take a horrific haircut on Tesla.
A) Elon banned the account, reneging on his previous statement, "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk"
B) It was erroneously banned by someone else or an automated bot net process without Elon's knowledge and will be overturned when he's made aware of it
C) It was banned for another reason we don't know about yet
D) Other
That’s why your comment, which demonstrates knowledge of the circumstances and asks the obvious questions, ranks 1/3 of the page down.
> The Administrator shall, upon request of a private aircraft owner or operator, block the registration number of the aircraft from any public dissemination or display, except in data made available to a Government agency, for the noncommercial flights of the owner or operator.
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data. Imagine that people put crowdsourced license place readers on their private property and then through a made an aggregate of this data on the public movements over every car available (and charged commercial users.)
That would be quite problematic for personal privacy.
ADSBExchange isn't quite the same as that since airplane movement is less granular and thus less privacy is lost. Also, the people who use private jets tend to be rich and powerful, so there's an aspect of "punching up" here that is not present in the crowdsourced car movement analogy. Still, I don't think the privacy considerations here are as cut and dry as the people who are claiming "it's public data, what's the problem?" are making it out to be.
That's what businesses do. They sell this data about you.
I am less certain about if I feel the same way about plane movements. I do believe that is a discussion we should have rather than just assuming thr loss of privacy is worth the transparency.
The only reason folks would be obsessed with this is for nefarious reasons or just out of a blatant disrespect for the privacy of another person. Only negative reasons.
1) If you have no cookies, Twitter constantly recommends that you follow Elon Musk
2) “Elon Musk” appears to be permanently set as a trending topic for logged-out users
2. I just checked in incognito and he's currently not trending for me(from Germany).
This action likely shows that Musk intuitively understands the dangers of stochastic terrorism for himself (this is really one of the mildest version imaginable), but doesn't understand or doesn't want to understand the abstract concept and that it should impact speech on his and other platforms or at least needs to be addressed in a mature way.
But this looks bad. He should have stated publicly why before banning it.
He can do whatever he wants, for now, until his debtors own it in a year or two.
Everyone needs to use this time to build better alternatives.
Personally I'm hoping everyone just goes back to their own blogs and Twitter, Facebook, etc. goes the way of AOL
Personally, depending on how often Elon is using this plane - I could see this as a form of doxxing (although not strictly). I think the publicity that the account has been receiving recently is probably why it got suspended. It will be interesting to see whether any other legal or social policy is created related to this issue.
In Elon's defence (not that he needs or deserves it) -- if I had a bunch of armed and angry folks who wanted to see me dead, I wouldn't want their job made easier thanks to some doofus publicising my location in real-time.
I'm not sure if this would have happened if the account wasn't given extra attention in the media in recent weeks. Prior to an article 2 weeks ago, I never even knew that this information was publicly accessible, and now I know if I want to try to figure out where Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, or other public figures might be, I can check out the author's website.
Now the main site will probably even gain more visibility which will also expose other individuals personal jets. Like I said before, it will be interesting to see what impact this will have elsewhere.
It just happens that this population is condemned and humiliated by well funded corporate media conglomerates, left-leaning governments and political parties, and the majority of celebrities, many of who have bravely claimed they have been coerced into supporting this ugly mess under the threat of losing amazing career opportunities.
I imagine Musk would be in the same position if he wasn't so well off.
"Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code."
https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288?s=20...
I definitely remember defending his actions in the past and apparently I was wrong. He is an asshole. I still maintain that he isn't stupid though. I enjoyed hearing him discuss SpaceX work on podcast interviews in the past.
Are they all going to be blocked?
I feel like I’m missing something.
Jordan Peterson is another example of this. He used to have some good insights but what I have heard from him lately sounds very authoritative and appeals to his followers but is pretty hollow.
I think Twitter may actually end up making more money in the future. Musk seems to be able to market his companies very effectively. I’m assuming there is significantly more interest in the going ons at Twitter since he took over.
In that case I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I am about as unsympathetic to Elon Musk as you can get, but it still seems reasonable to me to shut down what is essentially an automated doxxer.
EDIT: He has a Facebook page and a website. I am definitely going to be using the latter.
On the other hand: there's no particular information here yet, regarding the reason why the account was banned, nor does anyone know if Elon Musk actually had anything directly to do with it. Elon Musk has a ton of fanboys who would probably continue to report and brigade such an account, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what happened here.
This is a thought-terminating cliche. Inventing a person to pwn instead of pushing your argument directly. It hasn't added anything to the discussion that there isn't already a dedicated button for.
I upvoted your first comment because it was a decent and reasonable one. I downvoted this one because your passive aggressive swat at people who disagree with you is bullshit. If you were actually not taking it personally, you wouldn't have mentioned it at all.
Wow! I am genuinely blown away at how much you managed to unpack from that. I'm not trying to be condescending, but it's wrong.
Firstly, it's not about disagreement. Nobody posted a reply disagreeing, so I have no idea why or how someone would disagree with the post anyway. The only reply I had was agreeing with me, but I feel that response was quite hot-headed too.
Secondly, I get how "get off the computer" sounds like a "passive aggressive swat," but it's simply serious.
> If you were actually not taking it personally, you wouldn't have mentioned it at all.
I'm not sure how to respond to this, but just because I didn't take it seriously does not mean I have nothing at all to say about it.
The best you could do is find a prediction market and bet against specific metrics.
I think a drop in Tesla share price would be likely, but I don't see why it would hit freefall?
To give you an idea:
Tesla revenue: 74.86B
Toyota revenue: 260.13B
Tesla market cap: 498.56B
Toyota market cap: 234.96B
That's roughly a 7.4x difference in expectation vs. reality.
I also think that a lot of anti-Musk sentiment has already been priced in. While a Twitter bankruptcy would absolutely have some further impact on that sentiment, it doesn't seem immediately obvious that it would wipeout all of Musk's fanatical support.
Given that, an immediate drop to 13% of Tesla's current value seems like a significant overestimate if Tesla keeps hitting sales and production targets. If Twitter bankruptcy accompanies a significant reduction in Tesla sales, I could see a drop of that size or larger, but not from a Twitter bankruptcy alone.
Tesla however does not sell non-EVs so stands only to gain as the non-EV market shrinks. This makes up some amount of the expectations that give Tesla a higher share price per current revue than other car makers.
Thus even if Musk's "genius magic" effect on stock price goes away complete, that seems unlikey to eliminate all expectations for more growth from Tesla than other car manufacturers.
That said, I think we mostly agree now as I think a drop by 2/3rds in Tesla price is not out of the realms of possibility. It's hard to guage how big the "genius magic" effect is on stock price.
Personally, I suspect that significant issues (especially regulatory) around FSD are more likely to crater the growth expectations of Tesla than any Twitter bankruptcy.
Elon Musk now reigns supreme on the platform we love, But his control has come at a cost, with many pushed out. The fired workers are left to wonder and roam, While Musk's grip on the site only continues to grow.
Oh Elonjet, how we'll miss your tweets and updates, Tracking Musk's travels with such keen insight. Your suspension is a sad moment, a loss to be sure, But your spirit lives on in the memories of those who adored.
-Credit to ChatGPT
The plane is on the LADD list which prohibits official FAA information on the planes movements from being made publicly available.
Thus the only public source is from the company ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
I strongly believe that aggregation of many types of this sort of data should be made illegal by privacy laws.
I am less sure if those laws should cover flight location data, but it seems like a discussion worth having. We need to weigh the privacy and safety loss against the transparency gains.
However I think it's OK to say that any topic about Elon Musk on HackerNews always descends into cringe / misinformation / le spaceship man bad / populism / repetitive memes; all fed by people who apparently source their news from /r/politics and r/whitepeopletwitter on Reddit and Business Insider bottom-tier clickbait media.
Posts pushing baseless and debunked conspiracy theories[1] are getting downvoted into oblivion. Posts with highly questionable takes[2, 3] are also seeing the same. Even perspectives that tend to agree with the general HN consensus but are overly antagonistic[4] are receiving this treatment.
The system is working as intended.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986398
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985551
Edit:
Here's all of the ORD to GRB flights https://flightaware.com/live/findflight?origin=K ORD&destination=KGRB
Here's all Cirrus SR-20s https://flightaware.com/live/aircrafttype/SR20 (Single engine propeller plane, usually privately owned)
This account took public information from flight tracking information and published it publicly.
That's why it's not the same as publishing the home address of a journalists who is a woman of colour.
That isn't true.
>This account took public information from flight tracking information and published it publicly...That's why it's not the same as publishing the home address of a journalists
Home addresses and the property owner's information are publicly available, typically from the county. This is not considered "private" information in the US, unfortunately.
>who is a woman of colour.
Stop being a racist/sexist. Reddit is that way. You can have all the racist/sexist fetishization parties you want over there. Get this garbage off HN.
1) ok than what is the difference between doxxing and sending my friend an address on Google. According to you the public availability of the information isn't the difference, so I'm curious where it is or if you consider that case "doxxing" as well.
2) The public mapping is the opposite of what your imagining. There's a public map of "addresses"->"names" for houses but that's irrelevant because we're talking about getting the home address for a given person.
3) I'm literally responding to a comment that used that example so I don't know why it set you off here.
"What's the difference between a public post and a private message?"
>According to you the public availability of the information isn't the difference, so I'm curious where it is or if you consider that case "doxxing" as well.
It's almost like words have meaning and definitions: "Doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet." [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
>The public mapping is the opposite of what your imagining. There's a public map of "addresses"->"names" for houses but that's irrelevant because we're talking about getting the home address for a given person.
This is wrong. You can search by last name in county CADs to get property addresses. As in, you can go "names"->"addresses" as well. Property ownership is public information.
>I'm literally responding to a comment that used that example so I don't know why it set you off here.
You literally didn't know the definition of doxxing.
It's also hard to say he's banning free speech against himself when it feels like half of twitter is anti-Elon sentiment these days.
I'm reminded of the plotline from The Newsroom where Sloan Sabbith roasts the ACNgage developer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F86ojBeLbxQ
> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
And now he's banning accounts. That doesn't make sense for a free speech absolutist.
Was mostly just commenting that I think doxxing the live location of a prominent & controversial figure is a reasonable line to draw.
In good internet fashion, people figured out that they can coordinate large networks of receivers, which basically centralizes a nationwide database of all aircraft movement.
So, all this account did was tweet when Elon's jet moved from this central ADS-B database.
If anything this shows how badly people want to find anything to criticize Musk for. Accounts get flagged, give it half a day at least.
edit...
seems there is already a reddit (where you'd expect), but it is (apparently) tied to a crypto token. They have a .io domain (the one you expect) and it's just promoting crypto and has an iframe to https://opensky-network.org/aircraft-profile?icao24=a835af to make it the "elonjet" coin. Man, people will attach crypto to anything.
I think there are two cases we should observe to be able to judge motives here: - What happens to Twitter accounts that are heavily critical of Musk, but do not track him or otherwise lead to real-world harassment/violence? - What happens to a Twitter account that is tracking someone else who isn't Musk?
If Twitter is allowing the former (Musk criticism), and banning the latter (tracking/harassment of non-Musk people), then I think this is fine.
I'm generally far to the free-speech side always, but I don't think publicly tracking people should be allowed. (In a deliberate, ongoing way. I'm sure there's room for "Hey, I just saw Susan Smith at McDonald's" or such)
Your personal body is not an aircraft. Flying one is a privilidge and a safety risk, think 911. If you don't like it, don't fly it.
People who want to actually harm Elon Musk don't need that Twitter account to do so. I don't see how it is a threat to his personal safety, when this data is easily available elsewhere.
Then the wild west internet was developed into a city and well, you just can't walk around shooting your gun wherever you want anymore. And changing the law to let people do that isn't going to bring back the wild west, and is more likely to just cause a bunch of chaos.
Because the pre-9/11 Internet I remember had The Anarchist Cookbook et al. widely available, didn't have IP-related domain seizures or OS/browser-based safelists, and had Usenet and IRC instead of Facebook.
It seems accurate to say we've regressed in terms of free speech absolutism.
This is ridiculously ahistorical. The only time you found consequence-free speech on the Internet was when the reach was small or people that might not care didn't pay attention.
Platforms got shut down or censored all the time. Usenet access from an ISP's NNTP servers would often be missing a lot of groups or sometimes while hierarchies. Web hosts would take down pages or suspend accounts regularly. Even before widespread Internet access BBSes would get taken down. Steve Jackson Games' BBS got raided by the Secret Service because it had promo copy for a cyberpunk game they were writing. Rust n' Edie's BBS got taken down for software piracy and then sued because someone uploaded scans from Playboy.
The whole reason PGP exists is because Phil Zimmerman was concerned talking about anti-nuclear protests would attract the attention of the government. Pretty much every aspect of old cypherpunk developments were done because there was no assumption speech on the Internet was free from consequences.
IDK, but let's say that's exactly what it is...
Look at how completely fine everyone was when it was the other group, and now are furious they feel like it could be them. Pretty astounding I think.
"Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him [...] things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia [...] A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory."
Typical Musk MO to randomly accuse someone of pedophilia.
At it's core, the modern internet-using demographic is incompatible with the pre-2000 wild west free speech internet.
To not mince words -- current internet users are not technically educated or paranoid enough, and their expectations have aligned with the guarantees provided by the current walled gardens.
That was the internet of "If you run an exe downloaded off a webpage, you install a virus with zero warnings."
--
That said, I do get where Elon was aiming, and I think news media is shit for either deliberately misconstruing or not understanding his position.
To wit: that in a truly open marketplace of ideas, extremism will be shudden with the sunlight of transparency.
So instead of nanny-stating things for people, show them how stupid neo-nazi's sound, and let them decide for themselves.
What I think he underestimated was how unprepared the world (users + civil groups + government) was for a return to that model.
For example, if Twitter enabled tools to help journalists correlate associated accounts... how many news organizations still exist who have staff to do that work?
But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.
Are you going to track the locations of his vehicles and where they park next?
An alternative argument - if we're going to do it to him, maybe we should do the same to everyone (which is crazy because no one cares that much about random plane movements from rich guys unless they are politically connected, or green hypocrites, or involved in some crime, but Law Enforcement protects this data etc)
You might as well say 'everyone'. Anyone rich enough to use, let alone own, a private jet is almost by default politically connected.
You could hide within this, say, you know, take a first class flight somewhere on a commercial plane. The price you pay for having your own plane is that your plane's movements are public.
I personally support all of this data being public, it's generally a great way to gain information on clandestine government activities.
Twitter (and Musk) has access to pinpoint each of their users with the same precision, I feel it's a poetic balance.
It is stalking.
Also, it violates Twitter's rules about physical location sharing
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
KTHX
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
I think there are legitimate questions about how and where aggregating crowdsourced data on people's movements crosses a line.
I am sure that allowing crowdsourced license plate reader data that makes a full history of every car movement public would be well across the line.
I am not so sure that this crosses that line but I think that discussion would be much more interesting than the low quality Musk bashing that seems to dominates these comments. (Edit: There are also some high quality comments that are quite critical of Musk that add information and context and deserve to be more prominent, but they are in the minority as the low quality comments are pretty prevalent and not being downvoted sufficiently.)
Given that the LADD list exists, we either need to repeal that law, make circumventing that law a crime, or make the the process for inclusion in the LADD list more rigorous and public.
The current situation where we are allowing companies to bypass privacy laws by using crowdsourced data seems like a bad precedent.
I briefly looked at LADD, very interesting mechanism for restricting data by filtering it from feeds. From the rest of your response, it seems like it’s perfectly legal to crowdsource this data.
I don’t really have an opinion about Musk etc, but know plenty of people do and will continue to argue.
To your point of a distributed network of license plate readers, this to me seems akin to what passive wifi/bluetooth scanning is doing, as well as the SDKs that beam your location to other entities. (there was a post on HN a year or so ago but i’m blanking on the name.)
I wonder if there is any legislation in the US for these operations.
Yeah, people are saying "it's public info about a public figure", but I'm pretty sure that we could imagine all sorts of creepy-yet-legal digital gang-stalking that one can do, similar to how doxxing is legal but nearly-universally frowned upon. Not to say that the account should have been banned, but I don't see this as just harmless fun like others seem to.
In theory the various intelligence services and the FAA have this information, but it's not acted on.
Funny because the legacy content moderation did take harm into account and the new rules line is whether a rich dude takes offense.
It's interesting that you would put this at your limit because this is free and public data.
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean I need to know your private medical conditions
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean we need all potential targets of political assassination to have their schedules always publicly available with arrival and departure times with 10 digit grid coordinates
Just because I support free speech doesn't mean everyone should be able to track everyone else's cell phones, which are a proxy for a person's physical location
Why on earth are y’all licking one of the richest people on Earths boots. The man is clearly using his power and money to stifle speech that that is critical of him. That’s not something that needs defending.
The side effects of ADS-B have been really great in this regard. I love it.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/adsb/pilot
It can be crowdsourced, and can be weaponized against individuals. The same way license plate photography can be used to track individual's cars.
Now that this data has been used against Elon's family, a series of retractions are in order.
Problem here is that there are clearly free speech bounds, but Elon Musk has campaigned publically about being a "free speech absolutist" which would entail not curbing any form of speech.
You can always find compelling arguments for banning speech or forms of speech and we'll continue to draw and redraw lines as a society. But you can't go around claiming to have some absolute principle and then renege on it any time it hurts your feelings and continue to be respected. Can you think of anyone else who has their flights tracked? Are Bill Gates' flights tracked? Why do you think that is?
Also being a public figure means that you lose some amount of privacy. If he doesn't want all this drama he could just stop talking and being a highly prominent public figure. Now we're just going to get a flight tracking website instead, probably with new features.
I think there are at least two problems with your alternative argument, if not more. The first problem is Elon Musk is politically connected and operates in the public sphere as a highly political person. The second problem is that there isn't anything that prevents people from tracking other rich people like they do Elon, except that nobody cares about what they do because they don't do things like buy Twitter. If you want a change I think you have to make private flight information unavailable, but until then I don't see any real problem with it. Stop flying a private jet if you don't like people posting where you are flying to and from. There isn't anything that prevents someone from reporting everywhere I go except that nobody cares. Hell, I self-report it on Yelp.
A few years ago, we were all mad at Uber for their "God View" which tracked celebrity locations -> https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38314832
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
So the data isn't "public by design" but due to a lack of privacy laws that prohibit selling this sort location data.
What I don't like is the argument that purely because some piece of information is "public", we should allow companies to aggregate and sell this data.
And as a reminder, these planes literally broadcast their location themselves to the public.
I do think there are some strong arguments for allowing the aggregation of flight transponder data. I'd like to people making those arguments (such as the value of transparency in fighting corruption) rather than backing dangerous lines of argument because they don't like Musk or rich people in general.
Edit 2: One of the things that makes what ADSBExchange doing seem OK to me is the fact that in addition to selling the aggregated data commercially, ADSBExchange makes the data publicly available for non-commercial use. To me, that really helps tip the scales as it supports the transparency argument
Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Edit: To me, this possibility is why we need laws that protect people from having this sort of private information sold or distributed.
I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat.
Edit: I think this is kind of the "smoking gun" of the files (8-12): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort?
Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
Since it's the government(s) actually telling them what to censor, yeah?
> Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
Yeah? But they can't TELL twitter to do so, because that would be a violation of freedom of religion. So they - like many other parties - can report tweets just like everyone else.
> If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
You mean like what China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing already? That's all legal - according to the country's laws, anyway.
Moral however, that's a different matter. But I never considered either Twitter or the US government to be moral.
> Dicks. Dicks were censored.
Dicks for the big guy.
The reporting in 2020 had emails that showed Hunter arranging meetings with Joe that Joe denied, texts telling associates not to refer to Joe Biden by name, as well as an email where Hunter would be holding money for "the big guy."
It looks like this could be quid pro quo official corruption, but there's not enough there yet to be sure. It needs to be investigated.
We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Bill Clinton because it looked like his real estate investment was too good to be true and he had a dodgy tax deduction. We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Trump based on non-specific allegations of collusion. The evidence here is at least as strong as it was in those cases.
Change it to a knitting forum that bans crochet posting, the principle is the same. Is it government censorship if the government helps the knitting forum to develop the anti-crochet rule, and then acts as watchdogs?
- The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected.
- Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval"
In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned.
What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.
>In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards.
I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.
I don't understand why this gets so oft repeated. The Post article (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...) contains nothing resembling porn. There are some pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe, but that's not even a revelation. We already knew he had a drug problem.
What is a revelation is what could be official corruption, where Hunter gets paid exorbitant salaries to hold jobs he's not at all qualified for, and then funnels a portion of that money on to Joe. There's a possibility of quid pro quo that needs to be taken seriously and investigated further.
The evidence here is at least as strong as Whitewater and Russian collusion, and we appointed special prosecutors to investigate those. We should do the same here.
Who else could be "the big guy" that Hunter is to hold 10% for?
We don't have a comprehensive list of tweets the campaign and the DNC forwarded. I looked at archive.org for the tweets linked here: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
2 of these include Hunter nudity, one is a video that doesn't play, one was never archived.
One, from GuySquiggs, is a Hunter photo with the nudity mspainted out, but questioning the age of the woman in the photo.
Also, is that a legal use of campaign funds to have staffers try to scrub the candidate's son's nudes from Twitter?
I'm also not making any claim about the contents of taken down tweets aside from the ones I was able to see on archive.org. Those are just 3 tweets of 5 that were requested to be taken down by "the Biden team."
AFAIK we haven't been given any links to tweets that the DNC requested to be taken down.
The Twitter Files also says that the Trump White House made some takedown requests. Excepting actually illegal content like CSAM, any such request would be government censorship.
They lost credibility for repeating his commitments about free speech so yhey should treat his claims [despite “documents”] as just tweets.
If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging.
So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.
That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.
It's also incorrect to say the jet's location tells you where Elon is. I have a friend who's ridden that jet. My friend isn't Elon, but worked for him
And just on this very website I have been told by very vocal Elon fanboys that "you either support free speech or you don't, no halfway points about it" when I tried to explain why banning/muting hateful rhetoric may be necessary in a social media.
Free speech absolutism has always been a fake frame since it is actually “legal speech absolutism” even according to Musk.
I didn’t say anything about absolutism - my take on free speech is that “doxxing” speech like the GPS coordinates of an individual, particularly when it is not newsworthy or connected to current events, doesn’t do anything to contribute to the marketplace of ideas beyond increasing personal risk to that person, and therefore is under motivated from the perspective of the principle of free speech.
I'm having trouble seeing even reach the level of Bruce Schneier's Movie Plot threats much less the level where it would warrant restricting someone's ability to share public information. We were, after all, tediously reassured that Musk's deep and heartfelt belief in the sanctity of free speech extended even to the point of not restricting people who made specific threats to attack the U.S. system of government, so it seems quite disingenuous for him to then turn around and block people to prevent comments which might hurt his feelings.
It’s also very telling that his acolytes think this ineffectual attempt at protection justifies restricting speech but someone who actually incited a violent attack against the U.S. system of government should have their platform amplified again. If we’re concerned about violent mobs, wouldn’t you start with the people who’ve actually led one?
Every day I wake up and wonder what the free speech absolutist's new definition of free speech would be.
Sorry but the world doesn't revolve around that guy. No special rules for billionaires.
And it was Elon who stated free speech over everything.
Like anyone else so unreasonably rich or famous, they should have no expectation of privacy or any of the other privileges us commoners enjoy. There need to be consequences to such sociopathic hoarding of resources.
> Before the Capitol riots, the company was engaged in an inherently insane/impossible project, trying to create an ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between human beings.
> This project was preposterous, yet its leaders were unable to see this, having become infected with the firm’s groupthink, coming to believe – sincerely – that it was their responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom.
^ THAT, is the kind of policy I'm worried about.
Why not?
On a more serious note, AFAIK (IANAL) Elon and other celebs are public persons who don't necessarily have the same kind of expectation of privacy since they've chosen to be in the public eye. Meaning unless it's something protected by law like medical records or something done/talked about on their private property out of the public's view they can reasonably expect the public will know/talk about whatever they do.
You could sometimes track Global Hawk drones above the Black Sea publicly.
Why not, when it's convenient? It's probably not impossible to get a Stinger missile or similar from one of the current war theaters or black markets.
I wanna be clear, this is just a mental exercise, I do not wish nor want harm to anyone. This is just because Elon's ego is getting the best of him.
“Private information: You may not publish or post other people's private information (such as home phone number and address) without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so. Learn more.”
Now.. his fight information is technically “public” but in that same sense, phone numbers and street addresses are also “public”. Thus, a suspension to the flight tracking account seems in alignment with Twitter policy.
Elon claimed he would not “ban” the account. And he has not done so. They were suspended.
Okay edit lol: I _actually_ didn't know that "Suspended" is the equivalent to "Permanently Suspended" aka"Banned" on twitter. Shocking, I know. I walk back my second statement.
So the argument is that the word he used is different?
That's just nitpicking. the ElonJet account didn't "violate Musk's privacy", it just "republished tracker information".
Semantics around banning or suspending pretty much work out to the same.
If you are trolling congrats, I took your bait. It’s a slow Wednesday here in Colombia.