Twitter Is Banning Prominent Journalists Criticizing Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Is Banning Prominent Journalists Criticizing Elon Musk

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69 pointsinfrawhispers36 comments

Appears to be about 7 journalists so far [1]. Really does feel like it’s actually going to collapse at this point.

[1] https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/16035518847484600...

The replacement for twitter is the fediverse. It has already been growing by leaps and bounds since Elon's takeover.

  https://the-federation.info/

People will say "mastodon" a lot and they're not wrong, but the relationship is that mastodon has proven itself the breakout killer app of the fediverse. Click around a bit and you'll find other types of instances like Pleroma, PeerTube, etc.

Basically it's a set of open standards (in particular ActivityPub) developed to do a decentralized version of what twitter and similar social apps do. And no lock-in to a commercial platform or app or protocol.

it appears these journalists reported that the LAPD has no police report around the alleged stalking incident at the los angeles airport, which i assume he didn’t want to trend

Elon tweeted and posted a video about that incident asking for help to identify the perp. Why would he do that if he didn't want it to trend?

I'm not the OP. I think the tweet the OP is referring to is not Elon's video of a man in a car. Instead, it is the tweet by Donie O'Sullivan where he published a statement from LAPD saying that no crime report had been filed in regards to the interaction Elon described.

The implication is that perhaps Elon is lying.

I'm not saying that he's lying. But Donie's account hadn't, unlike other journalists who got suspended, tweeted screenshots that showed how to find ElonJet on other platforms.

So it's not clear to me what he did to get suspended. His most recent tweets were to an interview he did with the ElonJet guy [1] and the tweet from the LAPD saying there was no criminal report.

Maybe the interview was "bad" enough to trigger the doxxing policy due to giving notoriety to the account? But if so, yikes.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/tech/elonjet-twitter-suspende...

Apologies if I got confused.

If your argument is correct then I tend to agree with you.

"Free speech"

The First Amendment of the US Constitution defines free speech as protection from government interference in free expression. Twitter is a corporation, free speech laws don’t apply. It can ban anyone it likes. This is perfectly legal.

The comment didn’t say “free speech laws” it simply said free speech which is broader.

I'm not sure how much free speech we should assume on someone else's private platform. In theory Elon Musk could close Twitter off to everyone, but his closest friends. In the same way that only a few people can use my phone to make calls. I'm no Musk supporter, but Twitter is his now -- if we don't like it, we should roll out a new "Twitter" -- which I'd happily switch to.

Right. Everyone knows this. We've all heard that a million times now.

But the term is being used in this context in a looser definition.

The irony is that many people have cited "free speech" in reference to past actions taken by Twitter that they disagreed with politically. And, of course, the biggest irony is that Musk was one of them.

The other irony is that many people cited "private enterprise" in reference to past actions taken by Twitter that they agreed with politically.

I agree that there is some hypocrisy on both sides.

The irony is that Elon said he was buying Twitter in order to enact his "free speech absolutist" policies, and it turns out he really just wanted to ban elonjet and apparently every journalist on his beat.

https://archive.ph/ID6Ta

One wonders if Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon are working on a replacement platform?

Subreply is an alternative, but it is demodded on HN every time it reaches front page.

Google and Meta at least would be crazy if they weren't doing something quietly on the side. Are publicly traded companies allowed to work on a skunkworks-type project available to the public without revealing that officially?

Yes, including Lockheed Martin, who has the original Skunk Works.

I'd wondered if they could do that because of the nature of their industry, or it remaining on the R&D side rather than a publicly marketing project until it was proven.

Probably not. Twitter is wonderful as a public service/utility, but it is unclear if it will ever be profitable.

I thought Twitter could never die, but if acts like this continue, Twitter's users will slip through Elon's fingers.

By now, any Google social product is DOA. After Wave/Plus/etc, a new site won't gain significant early adopter attention. They're better off buying an existing thing or spinning up their own improved AP/Masto service, taking a page from the gmail playbook.

Twitter is so sad. It was so simple early on, then became complicated with misinformation, and now is a raging dumpster fire.

Why should journalists be immune from bans if they break the rules?

What rules have been broken here?

Clearly the expectation of privacy for corporate jets, frontrunners in the emerging battle for control over our data.

Anyone can get flight information. The FAA makes real-time flight information available (ADS-B). Individuals can request to keep their info out of the public feed. So no expectation of privacy.

Someone with Musk's public stature and apparent addiction to publicity will struggle to argue for any expectation of privacy.

I think the person who you are replying to was being sarcastic. These journalists have not been posting flight data.

Probably the same rules the NY Post broke when they got banned, "don't post things on Twitter that make the people in charge upset".

The NY Post were never banned from Twitter.

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-y...

A frozen account is not a ban, try again.

A link to an article was banned. Also, no one at the New York Post was willing to put their name on it, there was no byline at all. Considering the sketchiness of the source at the time - no byline, a stolen laptop, etc - wasn't really a hard call to punt on it.

Elon is claiming these journalists were doxxing him which resulted in his family being attacked.

Make of that what you will.

The only rule most of them broke is "don't upset Elon Musk".

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