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Comment by lrgart | Hacker News Reader

> If they had merely done what Musk does now

If they had merely done what Musk CLAIMS he does. But what he claims is not what he actually does do.

That flight tracker he banned is based on publicly available information that everybody can legally access, at the same time he posts someones license plate for weird paranoid reasons. How can he be against doxing when he does it himself with people other than himself?

> there is certainly way more speech now than before

Speech does not get more free, when there is more of it. Speech replaces other speech. There are certain things you can say on a anonymous image board you cannot say anywhere else. But there are also certain discourse you can have in other places that would not be possible elsewhere.

> While Musk can no longer claim to be a free speech absolutist,

What are the arguments for this??

Is it because he's blocking live trackers (from Mastodon or otherwise) for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination or is there like.. an actual good reason/example for this statement?

Every other notable person who is genuinely at risk of political assassination implements actually useful methods to prevent it, such as using good opsec, having a solid security team, not flying on the same three private jets everywhere, not travelling in rare and easily identifiable vehicles like prototype Cybertrucks, and not revealing their own location through tweets. There are companies that specialise in helping with all of this as a service, including booking charters, hotels, and other tickets through difficult-to-trace intermediaries. They also work closely with law enforcement.

Musk has not been carrying out any of the practices of someone worried about assassination, and the idea that @ElonJet did anything to increase the risk of him or his family being attacked is ludicrous. The account wasn't even active at the time of the alleged attack on his child.

The extent to which people will defend the baseless claims of Musk just because of who he is blows my mind.

> for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination

Are you talking about the alleged incident that demonstrably had no connection to his jet tracker, and was so scary he didn't file a police report?

> an actual good reason/example for this statement?

How about him banning journalists for merely reporting the news and falsely claiming they doxed his address? Or him acting like a big baby and blocking anyone who doesn't stroke his ego?

I mean, yes, banning people and entire domains that reference a website which shares information that's literally broadcast by his aircraft to anyone with a suitable receiver including quite a few public websites sounds pretty contrary to being a free speech absolutist...

He can simple hire/fly in someone else's plane. This isnt a tracker on him. It is a tracker on his own vanity.

Presumably for a whole lot less than he paid for Twitter, he could have purchased 100 jets and flown them around the country continually for years, hopping on and off as he chose and nobody would have any idea where he was. He is still, afaik, 'worth' 100s of billions of dollars even though his wealth has plummeted.

You'd prefer the global warming impact of that over the alternative?

This is like moving the argument goal posts: the movie

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