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Comment by kentm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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