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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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. "

"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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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