Elon Musk is shredding America's government as he did Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is shredding America's government as he did Twitter

economist.com

56 pointsmikhael32 comments

I’m observing that critical submissions about this news subject are being flagged, even when there is no editorializing of the headline.

I think the charitable interpretation is that there are people who want HN To contain only things with a compelling connection to technologies, science, or other kinds of curiosity that involve the natural world. If they consider it "off-topic", then the guidelines do state that a story being "off-topic" is an occasion for flagging.

Note: This does not preclude the existence of another group of people, who are misusing flagging because they dislike the conclusion or viewpoint of the story.

That said, moderation is hard, and if posts like "Twitter moves headquarters" are OK because it's related to the software/IT, then we ought to also be able to talk about IT security policy getting screwed up in other large organizations, including the US government.

The guidelines for what’s considered on topic:

> anything good hackers would find interesting

> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosities

IMO this story qualifies on both counts

P.S.: I just ran across a not-so-charitable version.

Going through new items, I noticed someone [flagged] this submission, but I read it, vouched for it, and even left a detailed explanation... But now I see it's gone to [flagged][dead] anyway, presumably because it happened to have certain words in the title.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42937533

Edit: So, I noticed it's resurrected again, so... thanks? That wasn't my intent linking it here, I just think it's a good "tracer bullet" for discussing moderation, an example that attracts false-positives.

It's been going for a while now.

I do understand the reason - it's mostly inflammatory discussions and HN want be tech focused. Makes sense.

The downside of it, is that for example if you search for "Tesla" in HN Search, the following top 7 articles are:

- Tesla Cybertruck

- All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

- Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook

- Tesla Roadster

- Tesla Energy

- Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

- Tesla Semi

Do they give and accurate view of Tesla ? Hundreds of articles about how Tesla Roadster, Semi, Full Self-Driving are nowhere to be seen 5-10 YEARS after the supposed released are silenced and flagged.

So again, I understand why, but I would argue that it actually enables this fraud.

> even when there is no editorializing of the headline

It's almost like that's an excuse and not a reason.

Everything related to Musk/Trump is been censored

Because it's political, has no place here on HN, and should be flagged.

"Because it's political" is facile. You propose banning stories about:

* H1B visa legislation

* How internet traffic metadata is collected by governments

* Biological science if it somehow refers to evolution, unusual chromosome mixes, or embryonic development.

* GNU/GPL/free-software efforts

* Encryption

And Much Much More!™

Most things are at least a little bit political--or can be made political by someone who makes it their politics--that it amounts to to a heckler's veto.

I don't make the rules here on HN:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Is it so hard to miss the "Most" at the beginning of the sentence?

He seems very unintelligent to me. Was born into a wealthy family and bought his way into more wealth, never done any real work in his life

https://archive.ph/DdLSb

Another connection: Expect Musk to selectively gather a biased selection of government documents and then leak them to sympathetic mouthpieces, which would be a direct repeat of his hoax with the "Twitter Files."

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/the-twitter-files-playbo...

_______

> [Musk's] playbook then was simple: hand-pick credulous journalists, give them selective access to internal documents, and let confirmation bias do the rest.

> We reported extensively on what was revealed in “The Twitter Files” and the answer was abso-fucking-lutely nothing. The documents revealed thoughtful policy discussions and principled content moderation approaches, not the scandal Musk promised.

> Yet thanks to relentless repetition by right-wing media and congressional allies, many remain absolutely 100% convinced the Twitter Files exposed massive wrongdoing on an epic scale.

> Now, we should expect the same with this government takeover.

> Now he is trying to do the same thing with over 2m federal employees, in an attempt to cut $1trn—more than half of all discretionary spending—out of the federal budget.

That's not even a balanced budget.

Since Twitter is running just fine several years later despite the shredding (which many said it will crumble its operations), maybe he has a point?

Twitter has bleed so many advertisers strictly because it no longer offers a competitive ad platform.

It's a myth that twitter is running fine. People always wonder why these companies need so many people and it's because of all the back operations. Sure, it takes 1 guy to make a static webpage or whatever singular feature you think the company does. The company has tens of thousands of features you're missing though so you end up with tens of thousands of people.

>Twitter has bleed so many advertisers strictly because it no longer offers a competitive ad platform

That's irrelevant to its technical operations which was the concern I addressed though.

>It's a myth that twitter is running fine.

Seems like a reality in my daily use. Any operational issues you're seeing that I don't?

> That's irrelevant to its technical operations which was the concern I addressed though.

It's not irrelevant. If you're running a company you're have to take in more revenue than your expenses. Sure, you can run a deficit for a long time using outside investment like Uber as you grow revenue to exceed expenses. But, if you are a profitable company like Toys-R-Us and instead increase expenses (via interest payments) while not increasing revenue then you are going to go out of business eventually.

>It's not irrelevant. If you're running a company you're have to take in more revenue than your expenses.

It's irrelevant to the discussion, not irrelevant to running a business in general.

The context being whether the "shredding" of government size "like he did Twitter" is workable. And the observation I added being that, from an operational standapoint, Twitter works fine, despite the doomsday scenarios when Musk started his shredding.

Government doesn't have to attract advertisers - or even turn a profit. Just to reduce it's spending. So if it can do that while (as Twitter) maintaining the same operational capacity, that's a win.

Dude you're still using Twitter?

Like hundreds of millions. I don't flow with the fads. Any other question?

> I don't flow with the fads.

So why did you start to use it in the first place.

I for example never did (apart from testing the API for professional reasons).

You understand that what you've just stated is an oxymoron right

>like hundreds of millions

>I don't flow with the fads

Like this is textbook trend following

Fad requires a recent and shortlived fashion or trend. The use of a 20 something old platform that's pretty much standard fair is as opposite as it gets. So if that's "textbook fad following" for you, invest in better textbooks.

Dictionary: "A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze".

Well then I wish you and the few hundred million other free thinkers like you on the most popular social media apps in the world the best of luck in your free thinking.

I haven't really noticed any issues to be honest and I'm not aware of any objective data supporting that Twitter is losing advertisers because it's a private company

Presumably, Musk would not sue advertisers for leaving if they hadn't left.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...

""Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,” Musk admitted." https://www.pcmag.com/news/report-musk-says-x-is-barely-brea... That's not objective either, of course.

Twitter is just fine only for a particular subset of people. A government has to be fine for all of the people.

Twitter is... running... but the kind of disruptions that happened there hit differently at country scale. For example, Musk fired so many people they just let critical systems go offline and certificates expired. Not the end of the world when we're talking about accessing tweets, but lapses like this at the federal level means systems critical to people's health and safety go offline, leading to security breaches and death. It's a different ballgame entirely.

is it?

Depends on your definition of "fine"

I'm thinking more of "this is fine...."

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