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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

When the Elon/Twitter transaction went through, there were a lot of HN comments stating that they thought that this might actually mean a more open, "freer" Twitter.

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.

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It seems to be human nature that people who like something or someone will defend them way past the point of rationality, becoming more insistent the worse things get, and wallow in motivated thinking.

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.

A lot of this just boils down to people wanting to justify, defend, and tolerate anything he does because they want to believe that the nerdy entrepreneur will usher in their cyberpunk fantasies about going to Mars and interfacing directly with machines.

I assume at least some are justifying their expensive car.

Or some people don't get worked up about a stalking jet account.

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?

Elon is simply an oligarch. An oligarch is a rich person that also has political power. Bleh.

My hope was for a more transparent Twitter. I guess that's out the window too.

I dunno, with all of the recent leaks, Twitters internal workings have all been made public. Sounds pretty transparent to me!

Does it? It doesn't to me. It feels like they've deliberately hand picked things that would rile up the base - dropping that the Trump admin requested content removed, but not showing that, then including an image of links the Biden campaign wanted removing, leaving out the fact that every single one of those links was non consentual intimage imagery of a private citizen is the antithesis of transparency to me.

The claim is that they are releasing through journalists for now to stir up interest. I think it's a ploy to get people to jump on Twitter for their news.

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.

The reason it was released through journalists rather than as raw data is because they needed to attach a framing narrative to the data. They had to do this because the data alone without the narrative attached have proven to be pretty banal.

I have zero faith that what is released will not be deliberately slanted. Elon has made his leanings crystal clear, as well as the base he now wants to play to.

Those are Twitter's official comms, not the leaks.

No, those were the twitter files tweets.

How is that not official comms? It's literally sanctioned and arranged by the C-suite.

Regardless, this isn't what I was referring to by leaks upthread.

Yeah, but they have to be open about present workings not just past workings. I'll give them time. If they can be clear and transparent about even this I'll be happy.

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.

well this is rather the perfect test case - is Elon willing to allow the freedom of speech for someone who is doing something that is pretty trivial but to him personally annoying at a pretty low level?

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

Unfounded hope of course: no one who has, or had, monetary interest in the success of Twitter would or would have gained from transparency.

Twitter is a public company, and may be a digital public square, but it does not have the public good as a rewardable goal.

I had thought, and still suspect, that the Twitter purchase might be a vanity project for Musk. As such his motives are a little harder to reason about than pure profit.

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.

Even with this goal, it makes little sense. Every decision could be unliked by some: to be a hero, better keep your decisions confidential.

Agreed, I wanted to believe but this is disappointing.

Even worse, there's no transparency here: What rule was violated, how long is the suspension, etc.

Twitter under musk will have a different set of biases from before. Whereas previously, every major platform would act in lockstep banning certain things, we can hope that musk will go against the grain. This is a healthy part of an information ecosystem. Ideally there would be larger number of players with a more diverse set of biases, but having musk in charge is still preferable to how things were before.

This assumes a lot. They have a moderation team that doesn't run every thing through him personally.

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.

Or maybe he just thinks you can use your block button instead of censoring someone other people like.

Did that thinking not apply to ElonJet's case, or was there something about that case that made it special?

Your logic is astoundingly poor. Have another think about that.

I'm just saying, if he doesn't like seeing that someone is republishing, as a broadcast, information about the travels of his private jet (which, as an FAA-licensed airplane travelling over America's airspace, is always broadcasting its location while in flight, both for the safety of its crew and occupants and for the welfare of the public that is providing his plane a safe and legal air corridor in which to operate over all their private property)...

... 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)?

Why didn’t he use his block button on the Jet account then?

Your logic is astoundingly poor. Have another think about that.

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