Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

I don't know - it doesn't seem consistently applied Donie O’Sullivan published a tweet containing a statement from the LAPD and was banned; and personally I don't see it being upheld once Elon's fixation on this story wanes.

Furthermore, it just seems that Elon is doing what he accused Twitter of doing for so long; enacting arbitrary rules to silence political opponents. It's his site and he's free to ban who he wants but does he see the cognitive dissonance of how he's running the site?

I don't think so. The New York Times demonstrated this three years ago, nobody really cared: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...

I don't think it seems like a good rule. Not only is the information public but I think it is not hard to dream up reasons why it would legitimately be in the public interest to report on the comings and goings of someone's private jet.

Some type of team at Twitter that could look at more tweets.. the resources to look at ALL of Twitter.., systematically, for these issues of “trust” and “safety”

You could the create a very clear policy, and work to remove any doubt such a policy was consistently enforced!

I know crazy idea..

Or did they report about the banning of someone who reported his location?

Is it just fine and not DOXing to track and publish the location of people who don't move around all the time, after a 24 hour time lag?

Sounds like this 24 hour rule is specifically designed to protect Musk himself, and only incidentally anyone else who happens to own a private plane.

That is what everyone has been saying for years. I mean, it turns out they were wrong and Twitter was actually colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment. But censorship and targeted suspensions were defended tooth and nail by internet commenters.

Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Surely people wouldn't be so shortsighted?

The dude is truly off his rocker now. The "rules" are whatever he makes up on the spot. He's self-destructing before our eyes...no longer the richest man in the world. Telsa stock tanking all because he can't STFU and acts like a spoiled 12 year old.

We've established now that Elon really doesn't like it when people dox him, and all his right-leaning supporters are defending that.

Well, that's a precedent now for when minorities and vulnerable people who aren't billionaires are doxxed by right wing hate groups (e.g. Kiwifarms).

And radical free speech just got abruptly limited when it got personal.

The important point should be that the principle should be applied equally, particularly since groups like Kiwifarms are much worse than ElonJet.

It's easy to point out Musk's hypocrisy and shifting standards. Conservatives did the same when it was more liberal people who ran Twitter. We need to appeal to something higher than "everything is great when people who agree with me are in charge."

Very typical narcissistic personality disorder symptoms. Narcissists are made not born, by other narcissists, thru treatment that is dehumanizing and inhumane from a very young age. We should give him our compassion and empathy, but not allow him any power. Power in the hands of a narcissist is dangerous, as the orange man showed us.

At least now everyone understands the value of a neutral free speech town square and can see that "it's a company, they can do what they want" was always a disingenuous argument. It was never principled, it was always predicated on bias alignment. It's the same with those who are happy about these journalists being banned. Blatant bias and hypocrisy on both sides.

He owns it; he gets to decide the rules, and everyone else gets to decide whether we want to use a platform with those rules

It's not going to work out well for musk financially when nobody wants to use it anymore, but that's his problem. Our problem is finding alternatives

- Public figures, like politicians, top businessmen, and so on don't get the same amount of privacy and protection as regular Joe. You can follow them and track them. If you have power and influence, you don't enjoy the same privacy protections as others. That's a really good principle to have.

- Elon Musk himself is know for punching down that violates this principle. His M.O is to point his crazy followers against regular Joes and then playing innocent. "It was not me".

Nothing could be further from the truth.

You have no fundamental right to track Elon Musk, just like I would have no fundamental right to track the whereabouts of you and your family. Disagree? When do you let us attach a tracking device to your conveyance?

Few, if any, would be comfortable having their family movements tracked by the public.

Also, journalist is a bit of a stretch. Journalism died a long time ago. Corporate script-readers at best, and state-run media parrots at worst. Either would be a better description than "journalist."

I remember when that "journalist" from WashPost published the home address of a woman she didn't like. Everyone was all for that...

Now it seems the shoe is on the other foot and the hypocrites don't like it.

I think it’s you that’s missing the point here. It’s only abuse of power if the rule against doxxing is invalid. So it does come down to the rule and whether or not doxxing is acceptable. If we decide that doxxing is acceptable and posting anybody’s real-time location data is acceptable (without their consent), then he is abusing powers. If that is your conclusion, then you don’t have the right to complain should it happen to you. If you believe the opposite, that doxxing is unacceptable, then the rule should apply equally to everybody. Critics and journalists do not get a free pass to break the rules.

He could have banned the account on day 1, but he tweeted in defense of it. I don’t buy the theory that he had to wait to save face, he seems perfectly content to change his mind and make new rules on the spot without worrying about the backlash.

It seems more likely that he had idealistic reasons for buying the site and is becoming less idealistic as time goes on. Every worldview is flawed, you just don’t know it until you try to implement it. I think he’s moving past any initial altruistic aspirations and is now treating Twitter more like a tool that can be customized to achieve certain goals. I’m sure he thinks the goals are good for everyone, including himself, but from the outside it’s not mirroring the “public square”, “absolute free speech” mantras pre-acquisition.

Elon jet is alive and well over there.

https://mastodon.social/@elonjet

This is hn, not 4Chan

I think people should take into account that something deep inside Elon knows he's in deep shit, and is probably contributing to him taking rash actions and generally lashing out. He was never a wise man, but I still suspect we're seeing him at a low ebb of rationality. Again, no sort of defense: this is a problem entirely of his own making.

"A warm welcome to all the newest converts to the great American cause of free speech!" @pmarca

There are many shades of gray, of course.

Which is why there are rumors and calls floating around that the US government should seize control over Starlink and SpaceX, e.g. [1], for national security issues.

The entire debate perfectly shows why neither complete government control over such programs nor complete private control is good - Boeing/ULA were milking the government for cash and acted as pork distributers for decades while showing not much progress, and Starlink's actions in Ukraine show the dangers that independent actors can wield over US foreign policy.

[1] https://fee.org/articles/former-bush-speechwriter-says-feds-...

It’s important not to make any issue an “I align with X so you’re against me” conflict.

Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact.

Musk is also behaving erratically, inconsistently, and seemingly also unethically over Twitter. And has done so in the past, eg in the dispute with the diver or against short sellers.

One aspect of Elon’s actions does not cancel the other out. We should celebrate the good and debate the bad.

I feel like this melodrama is driven by Musk’s detractors ready to pounce and dismiss, say, the development of reusable rockets, by Musk being petulant. That is not an argument that makes any sense.

And the same goes for any fans who think Musk’s incredible achievements give him permission to ban and censor those who annoy him.

https://wandering.shop/@soheb/109522542818200411

The only people who actually do care about Twitter are journalists. Musk proceeds to ban some prominent ones from Twitter, for utterly frivolous reasons, which makes them realize that 1/ they're not immune to this and 2/ one of their main work tool is brittle, and will make them actively search for another, if they weren't already.

This behavior is strange. Either Musk is engaging in self-harm, for some reason, or he's testing how much he can get away with.

Still convinced all this is really about is anger at the destruction of the class system that existed on Twitter.

> Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.

... is that it could still be true that the platform is institutionally biased in one direction. Both sides could think it, but one could be right and the other could be wrong.

Of course, if I try to stick up for one side then I'm playing into Yishan's hand. He's rigged the game so that if you try to argue back then he can just say you're proving his point: "no, you just think it's biased against you, but other side thinks that too! See what I mean?" But considering the revelations we've seen in the recent leaks, the "both sides" rhetoric now rings pretty damn hollow.

I think parts of Twitter may be easy to build in isolation, but the entire platform as a whole is certainly not easy by any means and would be very expensive to construct.

See the terrorist attacks against Drag Queens.

Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.

I'm actually okay with bans, suspensions and all the rest. But only if there is the following

  - A redemptive path back 
  - Due process 
  - Transparency
  - Fair application of the rules.

While I'm sad Elon has taken this turn I still don't think Twitter is any worse off. They did this before just to a different group. At least they appear to be making progress on removing child exploitation.

I don't know if the platform can survive the disruption and unpredictably that Musk has introduced but from a moral standing, removing child exploitation wins a lot of points with me.

When a cult leader fails to deliver, or otherwise issues a prediction that never materializes, the cult member usually grow stronger in the cult’s convictions. This is kind of a counterintuitive psychological phenomena but it has been demonstrated quite a few times. There may be something of a cognitive dissonance driving this. It is that after you see your cult leader fail, you can either dismiss all your prior believes, or change your version of reality to match the cult’s altered dogma. It seems as if doing the latter is easier for most people, so this is in turn what most people do.

uhhhh, no. Doesn't seem like they're having a reckoning. Will check back with next shoe drop.

Edit: I see 2 on this comment. Good for them.

Our company had already stopped spending on Twitter ads back when the first (possibly false) reports about increased hatespeech on Twitter came out, where I was one of a few protesting the decision, since it seemed like giving in to the hysteria and just trying not to become the target of activist journalists. But now it's clear even to me that staying on Twitter is a brand safety issue.

And the rule change was quite clear that linking to the jet tracking was prohibited.

That all said, he's gone too far here. And it's an unwinnable fight anyway.

This is not new behavior.

It's become clearer and clearer however that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. There are all sorts of reports around now that SpaceX management is very effective at building a firewall around Elon to stop him doing a lot of damage.

But his politics, narcissism, deception, misrepresentation and incompetence actually aren't new. Lying about his education, his role in Paypal, founding tesla and so on. It goes back decades.

Personally I'm not surprised at Elon's temper tantrum and banning people who are mean to him on Twitter. What saddens me however is how many stans and apologists ("dick riders" if you will) Elon still has. Elon does not care about you. You will never be Elon. For the record, this is a general "you", not who I'm replying to specifically.

He seems to try very hard to show who he is, some people just won’t take him at is word / actions.

A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.

Yeah, he owns the worlds largest auto company, largest rocket company, and just threw down $40 billion to buy the worlds biggest social media company.

Dude is in dire straights indeed.

WeChat: "am I a joke to you?"

Seriously, Zuck wishes he had the kind of daily center-stage that WeChat has in their customers' lives. Totally guarantee that if Twitter officially folded they'd at least make a play and they might well come out on top.

WeChat is absolutely the #1 beneficiary of any Twitter collapse scenario - which is one of China's reasons for lending Musk all that money. It's win-win, either they own musk and twitter (they've already got him banning chinese journalists and pushing the state position), or twitter collapses and they get a play at WeChat 2.0 for the western market.

Russia is the other big player in Musk's loans... not sure if there's an immediate benefit to them from collapse, but, if it succeeds they'll have a similar venue for psyops and misinformation campaigns at a minimum, plus potentially some direct leverage just like china.

> Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway.

Oh, not only does Mastodon have moderation but it's worse than that: mastodon is effectively community moderation. The problem of edgelord shit (literally edge, finding the exact boundary of the law/written policy/etc and dancing around it) is that everyone knows it when they see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy. But if you're an edgelord nazi or kf'er you'll just get banned from pods, or pods will refuse to federate with you at all. People have no obligation to play the tap-dance with you around what the exact boundary is, if you wanna be an edgelord fuck then get banned. Hell you'll get put into banlists (like ublock lists) that servers will subscribe to and block you everywhere.

This is not government censorship after all, just good old fashioned O(1) moderation. I'm sure you know what would happen if you posted nazi shit in your local discord. What the fuck bro *kick*. And if the "nazi pod" forms, that will get filtered out of everyone's peering.

Social media always adapts whenever the social norms or group expectations (for a particular community) are too at-odds with the moderation policy. When someone turns into a badmin and violates community norms, as musk is doing by inviting nazis and shit back onto the platform, the community will melt away and re-form somewhere else that aligns with the social norms. And the thing is, now that you've moved away from centralized moderation, there is no one single finely detailed moderation policy for you to play games with, it's just what the hachyderm admin or whoever wants to set as their policy, it's different on a per-pod basis, and a lot of those people aren't going to be inclined to play footsie with nazis or KF'ers. It's transgressive/edgelord content precisely because most people don't like it, after all.

1. You have no idea what the intention is behind an alleged disabling. There are a thousand perfectly rational reasons why you'd want to turn off self driving when automated emergency braking has been enabled. Autopilot in general is designed around the premise of disabling during non-normal events. A pending crash is definitely one of these.

2. There is pretty extensive rebuttals so the most notable example used in your PDF, including that the car in question didn't even have have FSD purchased and that even if autopiloted was purchased, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have.

A father had the vehicle his child was in attacked. He's upset and afraid of the welfare of his family, and you decide to compare this behavior to that of a dictator? Cool

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-start...

Seems so.

> Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to the Mastodon page of @ElonJet, a student-made bot that tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.

If someone disagrees but has a rational tone, I am more willing to voice my disagreements.

For me, tone effects my engagement with opposition, not whether or not I oppose something.

I would argue that without the "mean" tone, people might stick around twitter and have a discourse about their disagreements, and with the "mean" tone people are more likely to just bail and complain outside the platform.

Obviously we don't have a control group, so we have nothing to compare what twitter is doing right now against something else directly.

Biggest bot attack ever I’m guessing…

Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.

Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not good to see.

It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.

You can practically see the switch flip. I’m not sure he’s openly said Musk has made bad decisions until this moment.

Why do it by saddling the company with so much debt that it seems financially so difficult to survive?

Just from a business standpoint it doesn’t make sense.

It'd arguably be nice to have a national election without Twitter.

I'm surprised people think creepy stalking is free-speech.

People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.

He also brought back a ton of banned people … who were similarly banned without explanation.

In this case, he needs to set rules and judges for his kingdom if he wants a certain group to keep using it.

As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists

He unbanned a lot of people that were also banned previously for no reason. I think a lot of the outrage comes from the "unfairness" now being dished out to those people with whom the outraged agree with...

Is Musk making mistakes in his management of Twitter? I'm sure he is.

On the other hand, it is also true that a lot of people now have it in for him, and will amplify any story about such a mistake, regardless of how real it is, simply because it is what they want to hear, it feeds the current narrative, it makes great clickbait.

In terms of how Twitter actually turns out, I think we are really going to have to give it time, including waiting until the media gets bored with it and moves on to some other topic. It is probably going to do worse than Musk hopes, but also not as badly as many of his detractors predict.

Of course, Musk isn't helping things by feeding that media outrage cycle himself. But I can only imagine that behind the scenes, cooler heads – such as Gwynne Shotwell and Robyn Denholm – are urging him to step away from the controversy for a bit, stop feeding it and let it die down. Hurry up and find a new CEO for Twitter, then go spend a few weeks chilling on a tropical island.

> He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.

He's always been willing to stake it all on the left field idea. Sometimes that has worked really well for him (Tesla, SpaceX), other times it has gone rather poorly (Twitter). But, you can't really have one without the other – either you take big risks, sometimes strike it lucky and make it big, other times get badly burnt; or else you don't, and you avoid the burns, but you'll never make it as big either. The kind of person who always takes the right big risks and never the wrong ones, is either too lucky or too wise to actually exist.

He made a huge amount of money really fast, and now he's gone back a lot on that. But he's likely got another 20-40 years of life ahead of him, he could easily make it all back and then some.

And now all the tweets referencing mastodon are gone too.

It’s amazing to me that despite despite several data points showing Musk would be capable of doing this, people are still giving him the benefit of the doubt.

That’s the power of personal branding.

> Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841

What kind/level of activity are you looking for?

Just curious, not trying to make a criticism of you or anything, to be clear.

https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-collapse/

Read through. The paragraph about how it manafests in the workplace is quite telling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znFNKlzuTSc