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Comment by asdajksah2123 | Hacker News Reader

Blocking speech that may be harmful to a handful of millionaires and billionares = Common Sense.

Not promoting speech that may be harmful to tens of thousands of already marginalized people = Woke Mind Virus

My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.

Me suppressing my personal information is protecting my physical safety. You suppressing your personal information is an unacceptable breach of free expression.

Me revealing your personal information is transparency in the public interest. You revealing my personal information is doxxing and puts my life in danger.

@pmarca

> My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.

Let's not group mean tweets and mass shootings under the same umbrella

I didn’t read it like that. I read “attacks” in the “verbal attacks” sense as opposed to physical.

The idea that verbal attacks can be somehow synonymous to physical attacks is nonsensical.

Like the term "verbal violence" - what a way to conflate meanings to a misleading extent.

In other words you’re just repeating that sticks and stones may break bones but words will never hurt. Hardly a well established / obvious statement, and one that’s covered in early grade school discourse

You should tell that to people who invented the phrase "stochastic terrorism."

Hard to tell if this comment is left-wing rhetoric or right-wing satire.

Usually the comment history will tell you.

Perhaps left-wing satire of right-wing hypocrisy?

Being canceled =/= being terrorized irl.

Why does this even need to be said?

Often that's exactly what it is. People coming to your (or your relatives) homes, people physically attacking others at workplaces and restaurants. People setting up fires and behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them. We have seen many examples. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen.

> behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them

Such as the wave of attacks on drag events.

Like this: https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/nypd-says-3-people-attacked-wi... ?

...can you give some examples?

No they can’t. They’re hoping if they beg enough they might get some trickle down economics. We all know this is not a discussion of facts or reason.

You certainly seem to know that.

Tim Pool is swatted regularly for example. Tucker Carlson had to move after his home was attacked. There was an attack on Brett Kavanaugh. There’s a lot of such stories.

They don't count, apparently. None of this is based on principles.

In this particular case, there was an attempt at terrorizing Elon IRL. So why shouldn't attacks on him therefore count as "stochastic terrorism", insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept?

as others are indicating, at least some of the problems here are:

- he recognizes that it’s reasonable to take actions if an account *might* influence his real life.

— he mocks others and declares they’re unreasonable when they ask twitter for help.

- sometimes he even escalates the threats towards others, portrays them as hysterical and starts ranting about town-squares and woke cancel culture.

I agree that insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept, Elon has probably also engaged in it.

That's a terrible premise to start a conversation on HN. Let's not use extreme concepts invented by ideologues + controversial figures being petty as the basis for thought experiments.

Stochastic terrorism may be an extreme concept invented by ideologues, but the fact remains that if you have a big platform and you criticize someone harshly, that might cause crazies in your audience to go after them. So as a society we should figure out what is and isn't acceptable behavior here, and invent rules to apply universally and impartially.

You can't censor your way out of this problem regardless. People will still post Elon's flights details elsewhere.

Censorship is almost always counter-productive and every time it fails it just escalates. Eventually we'll be doing night raids on people's homes over tweets like the UK.

The costs are far too high for very little benefit. Just look at the moral and cultural compromises taken by the US/Canada/UK in Afghanistan/Iraq/globally to crush Islamic terrorism by force. It generated as many problems as it helped, at a very high cost of tons of freedoms for the western public (not just people in the middle east). Now we're on Part 2 of "compromise freedoms for the greater good". No thanks.

some people's personal information, if broadcast, puts them in danger like Salman Rushdie, while with most people nobody cares about them. what's your snappy hypocrisy koan for that? Salman Rushdie's exercise of free speech but not revealing where he was made him some kind of huge hypocrite?

some people's personal information is in the public interest, like Al Gore's electric bill or how often he and John Kerry fly to climate conferences, and POTUS's also, yet the secret service keeps his travel plans obscure to protect him.

many attacks may be consequent, and many are not; much of life is stochastic.

so I don't get your point. I think Musk is sincerely trying to make twitter more free speechy than the previous administration, and I think he's sincerely grappling with issues at the margins. I don't think this silly twitter bot's POV is no longer being heard.

The counterargument is that elonjet is only tweeting information that is already very public.

Elons Jet, by law, must openly broadcast, over the radio waves, location and route while operating. There is a legal right to publish that information. If he doesn’t want people to know his location, he can avoid traveling on the one private jet linked to him. But that’s not what he’s doing.

His child being followed by someone wanting to meet him has literally nothing to do with the location of his jet.

This is an emotional reaction to a situation that only affects him.

And given the massive negative PR some of his decisions have garnered lately, and his thin skin about them (just today he claimed that the booing at the Dave Chappelle show is because "people weren't letting him speak"), I take this vague claim which has only tangential relevance to the stalking with a grain of salt.

"Pursuing legal action against Sweeney"? Not criminal action against the stalker?

No video, not with all the cameras?

Proof that alleged stalker got the information from that Twitter account, and not FlightRadar24, or even the FAA?

Yeah, I would be unsurprised if it turned out that this was all just horse manure to try to provide cover for his decision.

He may not know yet who the stalker is. Which would be a pre-requisite to pursue a legal action.

Perhaps his security guys called 911, but so far LAPD says they have no record of the event. I'm wary of trying to draw any conclusions about the event absent some independent confirmation.

I'm not sure police would be eager to investigate "some guy followed me" type of complaint. Of course, if the complainer knows the right people, they would. But Musk is squarely in the "wrong people" corner with the powers that run LA now, I think, so not sure he'll get a lot of help from LAPD on this.

I think police take calls from pro security guards at least somewhat seriously, not least because a lot of cops do private security work on the side.

The guy was obviously a process server trying to serve papers. Billionaires get served papers all the time.

For all the drama Elon is creating he has refused to register a complaint with the police. He is going after everyone but the process server.

>while with most people nobody cares about them

It only takes one lunatic to care about "nobody" and you can have a fatal outcome. The criminal registry is filled with lunatics such as domestic violence perpetrators or stalkers that found out personal information about a nobody and acted violently on it.

You might be star stuck and a deep believer of Elon the new Saint, but the original comment is pointing out the hypocrisy and danger of one person deciding on whose information we can spread based on augmenting it in the framework of "free speech"; but then essentially boggling it down to naive notion like you stated:

"nobodies" - who cares about them? It's about popularity and favoritism (free speech is the rhetoric)

"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)" seems like a simple rule that can be enforced even-handedly against both sides. On the other hand, "don't do speech that causes harm" is so vague that it guarantees endless battles.

If the New York Times writes an article criticizing someone, and then a crazy person shoots that someone, is the NYT now required to stop writing articles criticizing people? If not, then why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?

U.S. case law sets the bar for incitement really high precisely so you don't have prosecutors trying to silence newspapers in the way I described above. Some people have argued that Twitter should adopt a lower bar in order to prevent harm, but I've never heard anyone describe a coherent principle that wouldn't also allow the NYT to be banned as I described above.

This is a weak comparison. There are some pretty big qualitative differences between a critical NYT article and LibsOfTikTok. And… frankly if the NYT was routinely publishing content that was getting people harassed and threatened? Yeah we should be asking them to change something in their content too.

Humans can tell the difference between news that sometimes has negative side effects, and singling out people for harassment. If humans can tell that difference, so can rules - society isn’t math, the rules don’t have to be equations.

Humans can't tell that difference, except in the sense of "it's good when my side does it to you, and bad when it's the other way around."

Elon Musk aggressively criticized Yoel Roth, forcing him to flee his home in fear for his life.

Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz published the full name and address of the (previously anonymous) LibsOfTikTok writer Chaya Raichik, forcing Chaya to flee her home in fear for her life[1].

Most people think that one of these two events is okay, and the other one is very bad.

[1] https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1516279523049889797

Again, I see major differences between those situations that don’t have to do with “sides”. It seems like you’re equating the consequences of the actions with the actions themselves. I.e. if both actions result in someone fleeing their home, they must be the same action.

They weren’t the same action.

The first difference that comes to mind is that the elon situation is an unaccountable individual billionaire, where the nyt is a group of journalists / editors. Dozens of people vetted the choice to publish her name - nobody can vet or check who elon decides to go after next. Plenty of more nuanced takes about the twitter files and roth have been published and didn’t result in angry mobs thinking he’s a pedophile - because those takes were checked by editors and a well established code of ethics.

Elon attacking roth is in many ways the same as what libs of tiktok is doing. Using a huge platform to point an angry mob in someone’s direction, while claiming innocence of the resulting harm. Where revealing libs of tt’s identity is an act of holding power accountable - you wield the power of the mob? The public deserve to know who you are. Elon attacking roth, is… what? Roth has no power anymore, isn’t causing ongoing harm, at this point criticizing him seems indistinguishable from trying to sell elon’s public on the righteousness of his twitter takeover.

What “sides” are those? I’m on the side of “billionaires are too powerful”, “journalism is generally pretty useful”, and “don’t send angry mobs at people for living their lives and having opinions”. Liberal agenda gone mad over here :)

> Humans can't tell that difference, except in the sense of "it's good when my side does it to you, and bad when it's the other way around."

Many humans can though. There's a very big group of people that think every corrupt politician should be investigated. This type of thinking is not equally prevalent amongst all sides of the political spectrum. It is prevalent amongst all extremist forms though, but that probably has to do with the type of person that becomes extremist in the first place.

Why did she have to flee her home? No one was after her. Do we even know if she did flee her home or was it just another lie? Seems like a scandal to gain attention.

>"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)" seems like a simple rule that can be enforced even-handedly against both sides.

He posted a real-time photo of X at twitter HQ like two weeks ago. And then a picture of him getting his badge.

Should Elon suspend his own account for doing that?

Also what sides? Elon jet wasn’t political afaik.

> Elon jet wasn’t political afaik.

In the current political climate, anything that isn't political but does something one side of the spectrum dislikes, automatically becomes political. Elon has turned quite extremely and vocally to the right. So people on the right will view ElonJet as an attack on the right. Unfortunately, that's just how it goes.

These days you can't even write anything objectively anymore. You'll always end at a conclusion that one side will interpret as being against them and then attack you for it.

Slight tangent, but it's especially visible in people who support stuff they're actually not in favor of, just because the perceived 'other side' dislikes it. I've seen people who live environmentally conscious support farmers in the Netherlands, just because the farmers were protesting the current government. Dutch farmers have a huge impact on the Dutch environment and supporting them is the opposite of being environmentally conscious. Yet, people think that the enemy of their enemy must be their friend and the other way around.

Real time location tracking and harmful speech don't impact the ultra rich and normal people in the same way.

Location tracking can be dangerous to rich people because they are a target. Most people are not targets and therefore really would have significant extra risk from being tracked, although obviously no one enjoys being tracked.

Harmful speech is much more impactful to minority groups than it is to the rich. The rich can chose to live in a bubble, they can move around the globe to avoid the issues and they can hire security. Normal people can't so easily escape the consequences of society becoming hostile towards them due to widespread hate speech.

The jet’s location is public information though. Elon is broadcasting it (by FAA law)

He could always fly commercial

>"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)"...why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?

LibsOfTikTok has called out doctors using their names, photos, and their place of work. Isn't that effectively revealing the location they will be at most days? Is it any less likely that a crazy person will wait outside those medical facilities to attack a doctor than it is that a crazy person will wait outside an airport for Musk? Isn't what LibsOfTikTok is doing even more dangerous considering they intentionally frame these doctors as a threat while ElonJet is purely informational?

> Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)

So I'm not allowed to post a group picture of my Meetup anymore? Yeah, that sounds like the kind of social media which makes money.

> speech that may be harmful to tens of thousands of already marginalized people

What this means in practice is "speech that powerful, privileged, unaccountable people, who think they are worthy of controlling the thoughts of everyone else, deem to be 'harmful', based on their vague feelings and biases."

So if people who are marginalized go on Twitter to complain about it, their reports don't count? Perhaps some 'powerful, privileged, unaccountable' people do exploit this cause for their own selfish ends, but it seems to me that your argument is predicated on the idea that marginalized people are incapable of asserting any agency, and if they try to do so they must not really be marginalized. I think you should re-evaluate your premise here.

Exactly. If you be less racist, you’re just giving the globalist elites what they want.

I don't trust anyone else to decide on my behalf what speech is "racist." Let me think for myself!

Please do.

I think it comes down to tangible harm vs intangible theoretical harm. Anyone can claim intangible harm from anything.

Doxing someone is a real tangible harm with very likely dangerous outcomes. Having an opinion is not.

If you consider doxing as a real tangible harm then what about vulnerable groups coming under harm due to being singled out? LibsOfTikTok made claims about Boston Children’s Hospital that caused tangible harm and yet they were unbanned. You might say that LibsOfTikTok didn’t cause the harm, that the responsibility was on the people perpetrating the bomb threats, but the same logic applies to ElonJet and this “stalker” incident.

"harm due to being singled out" seems way too broad, e.g. every time a politician is criticized, they could complain on the grounds that they're being "singled out"

Politicians are public figures. The threshold for them being “singled out” is mich higher than for a member of the public.

> Politicians are public figures

So is Elon Musk.

From my limited understanding of the whole LibsOfTikTok / Children's hospital thing, what they had posted was false and thus libel and thus illegal speech which is not allowed on the platform?

That seems unrelated.

I don't connect to Twitter, but I thought that LibsOfTikTok posted evidence in the form of screenshots and recordings of what hospital representatives had said over the phone. Someone even found a paper where authors affiliated with Boston Children's Hospital reported 65 gender affirming surgeries performed when the patient was a minor at the time of surgery: https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm11071943 (Table 1).

From the paper: "The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. "

Information being false or libelous is another reason to ban someone. That makes it more hypocritical that LibsOfTikTok was unbanned but ElonJet was banned.

Ok, but why Musk still allows them on the platform?

May be useful to consider the hypothetical where the statement is true though. What's the right policy in that case? Seems like the sort of hypothetical our speech policies should be robust to.

> You might say that LibsOfTikTok didn’t cause the harm, that the responsibility was on the people perpetrating the bomb threats, but the same logic applies to ElonJet and this “stalker” incident.

Correct on both counts. Neither account should be banned or punished

I like that response; its a point of view with proper consistency. Twitter is also a private so another view is that you can ban them both and it’s also consistent and within Musks rights.

Of course it’s also within Musks rights to ban one and not the other, just because. But he’s also taken a very public position on free speech wrt Twitter so I think it’s reasonable to point out when those standards are applied inconsistently, and also challenge people who are trying to draw arbitrary lines to defend him.

This is an imaginary dichotomy, though. The proponents of content moderation on social media argue that hate speech causes tangible harm. For example, there are many mass shooters that say that they got radicalized purely online, such as Dylan Roof. This is not intangible harm, it is tangible.

Sure, but where is the line drawn? A lot of political rhetoric across the board is pretty extreme. The guy who shot up a Republican Congressional baseball game at baseball practice was into a lot of anti-GOP and anti-Trump stuff[1]:

> He had also joined several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including “Terminate The Republican Party;” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans;” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”

I'm all for people toning things down. But the entire online ecosystem seems to be full of various factions warring against each other with extreme rhetoric. Even the discussion of extreme rhetoric is filled with extreme rhetoric ("These people are going to get someone killed!"), which can (and is) used to justify all sorts of bad things.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/14/homepage2/james-hodgkinson-pr...

There will always be insane people in this world. Was Hitler and the nazis radicalized through the internet? Was Timothy McVeigh? Censoring people out of the fear semi casual relationships occurring between them and radicalization doesn’t work.

It’s not like people who apt to deeply believe radical ideas once their source becomes censored they just stop there. Human beings don’t work like that.

I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.

> Was Hitler and the nazis radicalized through the internet?

They radicalized millions of people via their speech, which is the correct level of abstraction. Whether it was offline or online speech is a distinction without a difference.

> There will always be insane people in this world.

Mono-causal explanations are factually wrong. The Dylan Roofs of the world clearly have severe mental health problems, combined with being radicalized online by other people's speech. It's the union of all these factors that causes the observed outcome.

> I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.

Well, it's harder to make a case for libsoftiktok than places like 4chan. I think it's reasonable to say that 4chan et al. have literally caused people to die via mass shootings.

Knowing the location of your plane is theoretical harm.

If someone actually attacks you based upon that location, now it is tangible harm. It's too easy to conflate the two.

Knowing the location of your plane is legal requirement as well.

>Knowing the location of your plane is theoretical harm.

It's not even theoretical harm. It's not harm.

You are not entitled to privacy when owning and operating a jet in public airspace.

That's motte and bailey on "harmful". Nobody is banning people for saying Musk is a moron, nobody is advocating for "There is a <slur> walking on so and so street right now" tweets. Criticizing people vs revealing their precise current location to everyone on Internet are very different things.

> nobody is advocating for "There is a <slur> walking on so and so street right now" tweets.

A few months ago Elon was. Remember when everything that isn't illegal was going to be allowed on Twitter?

This is public information. His own plane reports it. Anyone can buy a receiver to pick up the transponder, and websites exist to collect that data from people who do. All this Twitter account does is report that for one plane in that database. Anyone, including stalkers, can make a script to watch it.

Plot twist: Elon applied for and obtained privacy protection from FAA so it was no longer public information.

The owner of @ElonJet account de-anonymized the info and bragged about it on Twitter.

Now Elon is suing him and people who helped him to obtain that no-longer-public information.

See https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288

> The owner of @ElonJet account de-anonymized the info and bragged about it on Twitter.

...in February.

Plot twist: Google “site:faa.gov elon musk registration”

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

It’s owned by FALCON LANDING LLC located at 1 Rocket Rd. I mean… come on.

> FALCON LANDING LLC located at 1 Rocket Rd

Witness protection programs need to hire this guy, he has a gift.

Elon is claiming this is the new standard going forward:

"[Elon] added that any account revealing people's real-time locations will be suspended "as it is a physical safety violation"."

So he made a rule so he could ban someone that was (supposedly) affecting him.

I wonder how he'll react when he learns about smartphone "Location Services"

I wasn't aware of those being on Twitter, but they're absolutely horrible for privacy.

Does this include paparazzi or celeb sighting photos?

If it is in real time then presumably yes. Perhaps with exceptions for previously announced or expected attendance at certain public events like award shows and the like.

The fact that Elon used "woke mind virus" at all has already shown he is neither centrist or independent.

It always boils down to

>It's different when I do it!

Is there a distinction between speech and posting other's PII (Personally Identifiable Information)?

Well there was an issue with other account posting information about school teachers being groomers and pointing people to their names, pictures, etc.

That account is still online, well and doing it. As others have pointed out, as long as the people that are affected are not Elon Musk, then it seems like for Elon Musk it is mostly fine.

Direction threats have always been against the law, what you claim is “harming already marginalized groups” is not at all the same thing, and not against the law.

Unless you mean specifically targeting people, in which case, twitter and other places don’t allow this.

Elon said:

>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.

From https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603181423787380737

You can see Twitter's full policy here: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

A hypothetical account that broadcasted the location of marginalized people in real time would not be allowed, is my understanding.

I think it would be good if we could get past the "your team vs my team" thing and talk about the best set of speech principles overall.

The difference is that the information we're talking about here is already completely public information, repackaged in a different format. It would be more like an account that tweets the nearest homeless shelter to you - open information, packaged differently.

Where it might become more problematic would be if the account included inciting language with the information ("here is a homeless shelter, go and mob it"; "Elon's about to land in CDG, who wants to stage a riot"). But I think it's clear that that's not what this account is doing - it's just giving information out that already exists.

And for what it's worth, it's not just Musk who gets this treatment. Most British political events of the last few years have involved journalists excitedly gathering around flightradar24 and watching some poor minister's plane as they make their way back to London to get fired, hand in their resignation, etc. That's essentially the same thing that this Twitter feed is doing (albeit usually more focused on the event rather than 24/7 tracking of one vehicle), but it's not considered a security risk because it honestly isn't. I mean, when the Queen died, Huw Edwards did the same thing for the Princes' plane, and he'll probably win a BAFTA for it...

In all fairness, I have some sympathy towards Musk, as it sounds like he's dealing with the shock of his child being stalked. That's going to evoke a strong emotional reaction, and I can completely understand why he'd want to shut this sort of thing down. But that doesn't make it useful (the information is still public, and anyone motivated enough to track Musk down IRL doesn't need Twitter to find it), nor does it change the hypocrisy of the situation. It seems like he's just lashing out at the wrong person, and making decisions over things that he can control.

> In all fairness, I have some sympathy towards Musk, as it sounds like he's dealing with the shock of his child being stalked

If this is true at all. What other evidence is there besides his word? Which, in my book, is not very trustworthy.

Trust and Safety is an extraordinarily difficult problem to handle at scale. Ideally guidelines should be public and applied consistently. That's a high standard.

Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.

>Trust and Safety is an extraordinarily difficult problem to handle at scale. Ideally guidelines should be public and applied consistently. That's a high standard.

Agreed.

>Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.

I agree, but the previous admin was not even trying to meet the "public and applied consistently" standard (see Twitter Files). So I'm hopeful that there will still be improvement in the long run. Hopefully this is a teachable moment for Elon.

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