A journalist has his account on X suspended after writing critique of platform | Hacker News Reader

A journalist has his account on X suspended after writing critique of platform

irishtimes.com

71 pointsstanislavb33 comments

"I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means". - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?lang...

The alleged article https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-4132... https://archive.is/Vs0jy

I feel like your average twitter user tweets more scathing criticism of twitter on a regular basis, so there might be more too this.

I don't know about this case specifically but X has certainly not lived up to Elon's free speech claims. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise - people with big egos often have thin skin and can't live up to their supposed principles when it affects them in some way.

Actually a lot of people have trouble living up to their principles when it affects them. Human nature I guess.

> Human nature I guess

Sorry, plenty of people and companies live up to their principles. Including many of Musk’s. Free speech was simply never a value of his, and that’s pretty clear if you observe how he’s hired and fired.

Everyone billionaire needs to control a media outlet to protect themselves and project their ideology.

It was never about free speech

> Everyone billionaire needs to control a media outlet to protect themselves and project their ideology

Most billionaires who owned newspapers did so as patrons. They were fiercely defensive of the press, e.g. Kay Graham, or left things alone, e.g. Bezos. This independence is historically what separated journalism from tabloids.

I worked in journalism for a decade. Owning publications allowed them to catch and kill, publish their own opinions and defend their strategic positions in ways people never noticed.

Larry Page literally attempted to block his name from Google News.

It was not at all like you think.

> worked in journalism for a decade

Can you say where you worked? I know a number of journalists, and none has described something like that, though they’re all at reputable publications. (The New York Post, on the other hand, obviously engages in those shenanigans.)

Gave an explicit example already. Also the nyt famously caught and killed several whistle blowers because the owners family wanted to stay tight with the administration. WSJ regularly publishes Murdoch op-eds and cutouts. On and on. This is not uncommon. Many journalist I worked with were nice enough reporters but not very smart about Corp situations behind the scenes.

> Gave an explicit example already

Google News doesn't have journalists. Tech company CEOs have never been expected to keep things impersonal.

> the nyt famously caught and killed several whistle blowers because the owners family wanted to stay tight with the administration

Scummy, but not an editorial decision.

> WSJ regularly publishes Murdoch op-eds and cutouts

Sure, owners and the editorial board put their slant on opinion sections. Granted. You’ve not really given any indication that the actual journalism is being toyed with.

The best examples you might have put forward would be the Murdochs. But their nonsense tends to focus around TV.

You seem to be focused on arguing rather than just accepting the point within reason.

Also patently wrong, the nyt case was absolutely and editorial decision made by “Keller” under pressure from the ownership family. So I don’t think you’re really gonna concede any rational point here.

You're likely then to be familiar with Dennis Potter and his scathing skewering of Rupert Murdoch's debasement of Fleet Street then.

Point being that #NotAllMedia owners run tabloids or obsessively micromanage their journalists .. although it'd be a rare owner that didn't try to bend a narrative a few times here and there.

Some owners are scum, the Murdochs and the Conrad Blacks take that dial to 11 for starters and then bend the needle further. Others are far less hands on and can actually seem to support free and fearless journalism (mostly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Potter

> O’Reilly said if he did not get his account back it would be “personally, quite annoying but professionally quite depressing” as Twitter was his route into his current profession as a journalist and author. He used it as a “shop front” in ways, he said.

I do feel bad for everyone who was using Twitter professionally like this. That said, everyone is now on notice that they can't be dependent on a single platform (or even two or three) regardless of how well it is going. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I hope that the outcome of all of this is that regular working professionals start asking for, and advocating, open source products and community led protocols, and for all the major networks to interoperate.

The tech pessimist in me says that won't happen, in some ways due to how openness kicked off this whole AI arms races (commoncrawl is the source of OpenAIs dataset, which got most of its corpus in the early days from Reddit), and now people are locking down their platforms to secure their own data fiefdoms to feed their AIs.

There might be a case for countries with a tradition of a free press banning their leaders and agencies from posting on Twitter/X.

On free speech Elon draws the line at the mere reference of other Twitter competitors like Mastodon. Paul Graham was suspended for such behavior.

I think that we should not judge by what one says. I think that we should judge actions more closely.

Twitter is the free-speech wing of the free-speech party alright.

Some context on the author, who's probably Ireland's foremost Twitter celebrity (in the sense of being famous due to stuff done on Twitter, not a famous person who is on Twitter): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html

tl;dr - accidentally ended up talking to the then-president while on ketamine.

> So at this point I'm thinking, wellll, I'm definitely fired but this will one day make a great story on an Nazi-riddled microblogging platform.

Six years later, the microblogging platform decided that it preferred the Nazis to the presidential ketamine stories :(

Not entirely sure I believe everything here. Curious how it plays out. Lot of narrative-affirming content.

“In the Examiner article, O’Reilly made reference to a “scam bot [that] had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out”.

Is the argument here that someone is creating an army of paid accounts and spamming with them? And this is a major source of bots? Is this actually happening? I think that is probably unlikely given how expensive it would be?

Doesn't Twitter use localized payment? So it would be extremely cheap if you localize your account in Zimbabwe or something.

If it doesn't, I guess that explains why the last time I went on,twitter seemed even more American than before.

Does anyone know why this was flagged?

HN posts are generally flagged by users clicking flag. Posts which make Naughty Old Mr Car look silly are almost always rapidly flagged; the Muskovites are very protective of the inventor of free speech.

Twitter must be free of your speech

"The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said"

I.e. be careful of criticising Musk, the king of FREE speech, if you wish to use X/Twitter.

p.s. in the meantime, you will be OK with posting hate speech, Nazi speech, porn, etc...

On the bright side, Elon Musk is very effective at promoting alternative platforms. The people follow the content, after all.

The corporate press is brought to you by pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors, neither of whom market to consumers. You can't write yourself a prescription nor buy an F-35. These companies advertise to ensure unfavorable coverage is immediately killed.

If you keep the "mainstream" media on your payroll, then you can easily dismiss one or two independent news reports as fringe or conspiracy-riddled.

> corporate press is brought to you by pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors

What press are you reading and in which decade?

If you pay for your news, you’re likely getting it from a provider that makes most of its money from subscriptions.

> companies advertise to ensure unfavorable coverage is immediately killed

Again, what news are you paying for and reading? The Times and Journal and Bloomberg are relentlessly critical, in my opinion to a fault, of the American military, defence contractors and pharmaceutical industry.

He allows a madman who in the past terrorized dead children's parents, but draws the line at proficient journalism by NPR. There's no free speech on X/Twitter, it's a platform dictatorship.

What online platform subject to American law doesn't remove user submitted content if it falls outside their ToS?

There's no "free speech" on any legal website. Try posting a cat picture to this website. Is dang the platform dictator in this case?

Elon draws the line at referencing other social media platforms — Paul Graham had his account suspended for this, all awhile live updating the rules. Another time Elon joined a live chat with other reporters. He didn't like their tones and he immediately had the entire feature suspended mid-chat.

This is the same guy who thinks it's fair play to accuse emergency rescue workers of pedophilia when he feels insulted.

There's a fundamental paradox at the heart of free speech and in the concept of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant, everything goes to crap. So how can Twitter tolerate this "journalist" who says negative things about it? Elon is protecting his delicate little antisemitic sheep from this big mean lie-teller. What a hero.

Free speech for Vladimir Putin and censorship for Séamas O’Reilly is all you need to know about Elon Musk's intentions. I get those who support Musk, as I do in some part, but please let's cut the b.s. that he's a noble fighter for free speech and liberty for all.

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