Elon Musk takes control of X account from user who had held it for 16 years | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk takes control of X account from user who had held it for 16 years

independent.co.uk

50 pointsisaacfrond64 comments

Also in Elon News today:

Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/15a086f/com...

Free speech for me but not for thee

Now, would you trust X with your online banking when they do stuff like highjack an account just because it has a cool name they want?

In fairness, I wouldn't trust X with anything whatsoever in the first place.

Reminder that the same guy is also the ceo of starlink, the satellite internet service provider.

And his temper tantrum with it last year probably got a few people killed in Ukraine.

Would you trust Nissan for trying to kick off a person who owns nissan.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comp...

Is that at all relevant to the product they sell?

If Nissan took my "verified" car that I purchased, no I wouldn't.

Why does anyone think they own or are owed anything on a private platform?

Decentralize or one day you'll also get screwed over. That's been the lesson of the past year or two.

How has not been the lesson of the past quarter century (of general people having access to the Internet), over and over again except then new people show up or everyone just forgets and they start using whatever the new shiny thing is?

It certainly has, but the level of centralization, the amount of control by the platforms, and the lack of alternatives has always been slowly ratcheting up year by year, day by day, as we boil in the pot.

It reached other people's breaking point far earlier, many of us only noticed last November, and for the majority of the people, that breaking point is still in the future.

edit: noticed you were being downvoted and I don't like that, you make a good point

Doesn't the admin of a decentralized Mastodon instance have similar powers?

If you don't trust any other admins, you can run your own. Or pay a managed host like mastohost where you'll have a contract that is more in your favor than the typical social network "we reserve every right".

People give up ownership in the hopes of a reciprocal relationship, even an unbalanced one.

Grabbing the X account just feels petty.

These are made up user accounts, you can just make two X accounts with different IDs in the database. It's not like real estate where the locations are bound by the laws of physics.

And it's Elon's modus operandi. He screwed over his relations with the tesla founder in similar fashion.

He really would benefit from hanging out with Gaben and spend less time courting controversy.

>People give up ownership in the hopes of a reciprocal relationship

I think this is it. With your account, you get an easy platform to post on. The platform gets to use your content to presumably get more visitors to show ads to and publicize itself.

> People give up ownership in the hopes of a reciprocal relationship, even an unbalanced one

Yeah, and you can go 10 years on a platform thinking you're in a good relationship with them, but one day the ownership changes and you have absolutely no say in what happens

This is a weird take. It’s not practical for everyone to self host and if you don’t do that you’re not really decentralized (eg. Gmail account lockouts).

Social media handle ownership is normally pretty stable and reliable because otherwise they wouldn’t be able retain users. The odd account repossession is a very low probability event compared to ATO or other type of lockout.

What makes this case unique is that the rebranding of Twitter was random and shockingly brand destructive. I happen to know Gene X (he’s a well known and beloved photographer in SF) and as soon the announcement was made we all immediately guessed this would be the outcome. Annoying yes, but also not a failure mode to optimize against.

> It’s not practical for everyone to self host

It's not practical given the current state of the software stack.

> Annoying yes, but also not a failure mode to optimize against.

The failure mode in question is being a digital sharecropper and not owning anything, even your persona. And that is a failure mode very much worth optimising against.

It's an inconvenient take, but [Stallman(strikeout)]/[Corey Doctorow] was right, the shittification is real.

It's been really nice letting VC funding pay for people with no money or technical knowledge participate, and I don't want to be an "Eternal September" gatekeeper, but every platform like this has it's glory day when it's happiness and rainbows, and then one day, we need to maximize profits, and it all goes to shit when we need to MONETIZE MONETIZE MONETIZE.

We need to figure out some model where people have ownership of their identity instead of selling it to some "free as in beer" corporation. This also goes for all the "Google deleted my gmail which I use for 2FA because I uploaded a video of my kids birthday party with copyright music in the background" type worries

Back in the late 90's in my European country, the post office had a vision of giving everyone their e-mail identity (verified by sending a post card to their address). Then the post office got privatized. We need more non-VC, non-Unicorn thinking like these (not necessarily giving power to governments...)

It hasn't been long ago where there was news about right-wingers being kicked off of platforms and then the response by the HN public was "they're a private platform, they can kick people off for any reason they want. Nobody owes you a platform". Why wouldn't that same argument apply here?

The first time I learned about Mastodon was years ago when some libertarian-leaning podcasters I listened to moved there along with their audience due to being unhappy about centralized Twitter moderation (and no, not at all related to Gab or Truth or any of those).

They're silenced or defederated from most other instances because a lot of their kin are douchebags I also wouldn't want to associate with, but they still have their own place to be and I respect that they actually walked with their eyeballs away from the centralized service while all their outrage-starved brethren stayed while complaining about the platform they kept on boosting.

Those right-wingers broke the ToS. Which ToS did the previous account owner of @X break exactly?

> World’s richest person offered no money to previous owner of @X

As you would expect.

Previous owner was compensated proportionally to the value of Twitter.

In an act of kindness, Elon Musk didn't make him pay.

Reminds me of Homer Simpson getting bought out by Bill Gates.

Gates: “Buy him out boys”

Gate’s goon trash Homers office

Homer: “What is going on”

Gates: “I didn’t get rich writing a lot of checks”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE

This makes me even less interested in buying a Tesla while he's in charge. Imagine what he can do with your Tesla, with all of its telemetry.

This is a very large part of why modern cars aren't of interest to me. It's not just Tesla. The same problem exists with all EVs as near as I can tell, and more modern ICE vehicles.

This happens shortly after Twitter pays out five figure sums to users that amplify Musk's own posts. Obviously they're within their rights to do this and also to take @x but it's not a great look.

He is just a bully - why some people on HN worship him is puzzling.

What are you talking about? This forum is 98% mindless Musk hate just like all the other left-leaning forums.

It's so unnecessarily callous and such an unforced error. Why do this? Why accrue all of this bad PR for no reason?

Fuck Elmo. What a dick.

Isn’t it concerning that short domain names and handles are generally the weapon of choice of people who have literally zero money to spend on promotion?

It’s something people who are just starting out do in the hopes that the ability to quickly find their username/website would help them go viral.

Make your company into a verb and or a noun is much more valuable , Twitter has all that, at least until last week.

‘President Trump tweeted’ was the most frequrntly repeated newsflash story 2016-2020

Can you imagine if a company did this for something really important, like your email? Is there protection against this?

> Is there protection against this?

No. People call these "their accounts", but they don't own them. They only exist as long as the company allows them to.

Given that a user can purchase a "verified" account--although you may be correct--the company just eliminated the value proposition of doing so.

Depends on the exact action.

But generally yes you can go to court. Historically people have done that with Google to figure out the exact ban reason (or to get unbanned) but that's often with Adsense / YT accounts where you have clear financial harm.

The article mentions they did offer some company merchandise… depending what that was I actually think that was nearly appropriate. Paying for it made no sense - it’s a private company and can do what it wants.

But in order not to be appearing as a roughshod callous company, giving a token of appreciation makes sense AND an actual paper card saying apology signed by musk. The token could be one of their old logo statues, its not like they need them anymore. That would have been reasonable.

Paying for it makes sense because it establishes that the company agrees that accounts have value, and that the company will be even-handed in managing that value.

Appropriating it with an offer of some laptop stickers or a Twitter coffee mug says "this is all crap and anyway we can take it away anytime we feel like it, so you'd be a fool to invest any serious effort or resources into this ecosystem."

It’s not nice to twist my words and ignore what I actually said in order to try to make a point.

I specifically cited a Twitter statue as the example and also said a hand signed note from musk. That’s not not even close to “laptop stickers and a coffee mug” garbage that I’ve been falsely accused of saying.

For reference, the auctioned Twitter logo statue sold for $100k, which is crazy. So actually that might be too much, I’d assumed it was a few $K not $100.

A bunch of junk he now has to dispose of and a meeting with the management team running twitter straight into the center of the Earth?

So, they wanted him to pay them for taking @x ..

I don't understand what the outrage is. Somewhat of a Dick move? Maybe. But illegal/unethical/immoral hell no.

It's not illegal, but how is this not unethical?

What is unethical about it?

Took someone’s identity on the platform, even worse because they have established it for 16 years. Taking it because they rebranded to X on a whim is silly.

How is that unethical?

Wow, I can’t believe you can’t see what is unethical about it.

As it turns out a minor insult is actually not an argument for why something is unethical

It's like if I took your email account you've used since 2007 because I changed my name to yours because I liked it better.

Yeah, he's the owner of the company, legally he can do it. Doesn't make it any less unethical and poor taste.

Because it's breaking at least an implicit promise - that your account is under your control.

The TOS doesn't say anything about that https://twitter.com/en/tos

> We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time for any or no reason

Implicit promise. I know the TOS doesn't promise it - it never does, anywhere. Still, there's an expectation that the account is yours, not a plaything for the owner's whims. And there's an expectation that "for any or no reason" means something more than no reason.

And, yeah, "a verbal promise is worth the paper it's written on" (that is, none). And this wasn't even a verbal promise. Still, I maintain that the expectation really exists, and that companies like exTwitter are perfectly well aware that it exists. That's why doing this is a jerk move.

I honestly don’t know how most people determine if something is ethical. At this point when someone says “unethical” it usually seems equivalent to “mean”.

I think that when people say something is "unethical", what they mean is that thing is not compatible with their ethical code. That's the criteria they're using.

> it usually seems equivalent to “mean”.

Isn't it possible that being "mean" is against their ethical code?

You said it yourself. It's a dick move. Dick moves are inherently unethical.

The definition of unethical seems to have been incredibly weakened if a dick move is unethical.

Lets say I tip 0% instead of the expected 15% for normal service at a restaurant, would that be considered unethical? I expect generally Americans would consider it a dick move. Is anything that could be possibly construed as negative be considered unethical?

Sophistry will get you nowhere. There is an objective truth regardless of whether you choose to participate in seeing it.

I was unaware that after thousands of years of the debate over ethics, that we had settled on a objective set of universal ethics.

Can you please tell me what those universal objective set of ethics are first?

And following that, how this is unethical

Gene X. Hwang's @x account appears to have been paid, hence "verified" according to Twitter/X. So taking a so-called "verified" account and re-assigning the identity behind it is deceptive. So that's how it's unethical.

In the early days I managed to register administrator@gmail.com. It was of course taken from me.

"without paying the previous owner for the one-letter account"

(1) paying for transferring a T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ account is against the TOU

(2) the "previous owner" was never the owner of the account, read the TOU

Finally: why is this news?

You know why this is news.

Because Elon Musk is a douchebag and this is another brick in that wall.

It further devalues the idea--such as it was--of "verified" accounts.

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