He is using the concept of legal free speech correctly while memeing about a philosophical free speech that matches the colloquialism that many of his sycophants and observers think
Legal free speech has only to do with retribution via criminal liability from government organizations, alongside freedom to disassociate from speech and expression that you don't like
Twitter is not a government organization and is also not capable of levying criminal charges against anyone, and is free to disassociate from speech and expression it doesn't like thanks to the 1st amendment. Yes, this is the same capability as anyone else and the same possibility as Twitter operated before, aside from different choices of who its leadership chooses to dis/associate with.
Remember all those comments on HN for how right Musk is to decent free speech and how this is definitely going to improve Twitter? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Can we please have some intellectually stimulating discussion, or thoughtful jokes, or at least lowbrow humor that is somewhat original instead of these reddit-tier tired old memes..?
Given the amount of downvoted "republishing public data is the real crime!" comments in this thread, tired old memes are indeed a conversational improvement.
It's why I prefer HN over Reddit nowadays. For popular posts, you have to scroll so far on Reddit before you hit meaningful discussion. Although the anecdotes and story-telling on Reddit is unmatched.
yes, but then again I take a point against the fact that everyone is downvoting the person commenting "brilliant" about the joke account, while the joke account is left unflagged.
Man, HN is bursting at the seams with "intellectually stimulating discussions" to whet the appetite of even the most committed intellectual mastorbator. I liked the guy's username and made a remark that it fit the situation well. Rather like r/beetlejuicing. It's nice if HN also takes things a bit lightly from time to time. Not every thread needs to be strict.
Lets not pretend that just because some people happened to be right, that is an indicator of some information that they had. Most of the hate towards Twitter came from hate towards Musk.
Predicting future actions based on past behavior is not some kind of magic, nor is it guesswork. People didn't throw a chip on black and spin the roulette wheel -- they made a very reasonable assumption and ended up correct. Whether there was hate involved or not is irrelevant.
People who tell a lot of fibs tend to get a reputation as liars. This isn't magic. There's no fancy latin name for the error of giving known liars the benefit of the doubt, but there should be.
Hmm. Good word, and close. But (at least in my English understanding) it doesn't include the ignorance of past action.
A boy who trades the family cow to a wandering peddler for magic beans is credulous. But a boy who buys the magic beans a 10th time from the the same scamp who is broadly known to also sell sawdust flour and moldy bread is an extra level of foolishness.
Extending Musk the benefit of the doubt required that one willfully ignore his history of deceit. That was (and is) an error. Cf. Rumsfeld and Iraq.
Conservatives all claim to be about free speech but when we look at any of their social networks like parler, they actively censor views they don’t agree with. On social networks they don’t control, they sue parody accounts to shut them down.
After the "pedo guy" incident, Musk made it pretty clear he's thin skinned, petty and vindictive as well as pretty immature. Based on the public evidence it's hard not to predict these outcomes.
Philosophically, I think his “freedom of reach” distinction is a hack/loophole without a strong basis.
Twitter is a promotion service, just like Facebook (in each, they let users promote themselves in exchange for being targeted for promotion by others). The entire point of it is to promote content. It is not a content platform, except by coincidence.
Once you “maximum derank” somebody, you are denying them access to the whole point of the service.
By all means, ban the users you don’t want. Keep your service free of toxicity. Nobody likes a forum full of trolls. But don’t call it “free speech”
If there was a setting I could use to "maximum derank" my account I'd use it without hesitation. I want to talk to my friends, not get yelled at by randos. I hate it when a tweet starts getting attention.
Serious question: Is there an alternative narrative here? People are acting like Musk changed course for no reason, but are there no real claims that the account perhaps had started to engage in other rule-breaking content?
Note that I'm asking for an actual steelmanned argument for why there's no possible defense of Musk here, not why people have high priors to just assume there's no defense.
I thought he mentioned increasing the removal of illegal content and ensuring that public discourse wasn't influenced/manipulated, by state actors, overwhelmingly towards one side over another?
Yes you're interpreting his completely nonsubstantive "rule-by-implicature" as intended: Elon said he was gonna do Good Things and he's gonna stop Bad Things and I don't really need to think about what constitutes either of those things.
Oh, so you can provide another example of Elon directly saying he would do X and then turning around and doing not-X a month or so later with no sort of intervening events that would justify an about-face? I can't think of any.
"All the houses in this picture? They've already got our solar roof tiles fitted!" (they didn't)
"Everything Hyperloop!"
My issue with Musk isn't that he changes his mind based on new evidence, or even oversells promises of the future. It's the fact he's willing to stand in front of a crowd, look people in the eye and _flat_out_lie_ about what state things are in today.
> Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
> No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
> 9:18 PM · Oct 28, 2022
> The people have spoken.
> Trump will be reinstated.
> Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
> 2:53 AM · Nov 20, 2022
>He won't buy Twitter because it has a bot problem.
I'm not asking for examples of Musk being wrong about something and correcting himself. I think it's commonly assumed that Musk discovered that this argument would not hold up in court, so he pivoted accordingly.
>Elon will not fire most of Twitter (November). Look, stupid media was tricked by Rahul Ligma.
This is a better example. Could you link a statement to this effect directly?
>He literally signed a document in March to buy Twitter, and literally a month later had to be sued to be forced to finish the contract.
Yes, and the intervening event that justifies the narrative flip is that he got increased access to Twitter's internal systems and decided that the company had deeper issues than initially appreciated. Rejecting a purchase where there's a hidden defect is not flip-flopping, the fact that you can't see the obvious weakness of this example is telling.
btw, where's the statement that Elon said that he would not be firing most of Twitter? Again, that seems to be a much better example.... if you can provide it. But maybe you can't?
>Yes, and the intervening event that justifies the narrative flip is that he got increased access to Twitter's internal systems and decided that the company had deeper issues than initially appreciated.
This does not make Elon look any better. Elon himself chose to eschew due diligence when he signed the first intent to buy. The first intent to buy was incredibly unusual in the first place because he did not ask for any due-diligence.
If I tell you I will buy your car, no questions asked, and then show up and start complaining about the headlights, that is flip-flopping. It's why the whole thing went to court. Do you really think normal M&A doesn't include due-diligence?
Regardless, the "hidden" issues were a scapegoat. It is far more likely that he wanted to backout because the entire tech sector crashed and 44B was now an insane premium (SNAP, which was worth ~30B at the time is now 15B).
>Elon himself chose to eschew due diligence when he signed the first intent to buy.
Really? He specifically claimed that the offer was truly unconditional, no matter what sort of fraud or criminality might be occurring within Twitter? That seems very unlikely to me.
>He specifically claimed that the offer was truly unconditional, no matter what sort of fraud or criminality might be occurring within Twitter?
Yes. This was a huge deal, I don't know how you missed it. It's also why no one believed he could get out of it. That's why he had to tried sue to cancel the deal instead of just, cancelling the deal? It wasn't even clear that if he managed to prove TWTR had misled investors that could cancel the deal.
I thought the court ordered Musk to buy Twitter? I wasn't paying terribly close attention, so maybe I misunderstood something? Also, what was the November statement where Musk said he wouldn't fire most of Twitter? I missed that one.
> I thought the court ordered Musk to buy Twitter?
Because Elon Musk signed an ironclad contract promising to buy Twitter.
> Also, what was the November statement where Musk said he wouldn't fire most of Twitter? I missed that one.
Look up the Rahul Ligma stuff. He was implying that all the media got it wrong and he wasn't going to fire Twitter employees. To
Turns out the media was right. Musk was planning to fire them the whole time and Musk was just doing his usual distraction shenanigans.
> Because Elon Musk signed an ironclad contract promising to buy Twitter.
Right, but I hope you can see how "a court prevented him from changing his mind about the acquisition" is different than "he changed his mind again and decided to buy Twitter after all".
> Look up the Rahul Ligma stuff.
I did a bit of Googling, but I don't see what you're alluding to (there's a lot of coverage of Twitter drama involving Ligma, apparently). :/
If I go to a car dealer and sign on the dotted line to buy a car, I've committed to buying the car. It doesn't matter if tomorrow, before I've taken delivery, I decide I hate that car brand and want a different one. You don't get to "change your mind" AFTER you sign the contract!
I've been explicit twice that I'm not arguing about whether or not Musk tried to renege on his contract, but for the third time: I'm questioning the parent's claim about whether he reneged and then changed his mind __again__. That said, if you commit to buying a car, but the car that is delivered to you is not what you ordered, you absolutely are not compelled to take delivery--this is basically what Musk was asserting: that the Twitter that was advertised was not the Twitter that was being delivered. Apparently it was looking like the court wasn't buying that claim, which spurred Musk to move forward with the acquisition.
Musk announced his intent to actually consummate the deal with Twitter about two weeks before the trial was going to start (and right before he was going to be deposed for said trial).
I dont think he changed his mind, its just clear what his goal in buying Twitter was from the get go - the "free speech absolutionism" is the PR speak for getting more conservative/right leaning people onto Twitter, and that goal is solely for
Elon went hard right after TSLA was excluded from ESG Index (which happened under Biden), and Elons net worth is tied into TSLA stock pretty hard. In controlling Twitter, he hopes to essentially sway the public towards a more conservative view in hopes of getting Republicans elected into office, which then will result in economic policies that should drive TSLA stock up.
At the rate he's destroying everything he should probably make a 'plan B' then because this one does not appear to be working on a time frame that will get him out of the hot water before the boiling point.
If there was nobody would know about it because it literally just happened! This is one of the reasons I always flag these "breaking ragebait controversy" Twitter threads - even if someone's curious and genuinely wants to understand an issue in its full context, they can't. The only options right now are to wait for more information or get mad based on incomplete information.
He literally just unbanned an account that tried to run a coup on the federal government and yet an account that shows where his jet is is dangerous?
Which is it? Because it seems like "I don't like it" is the new justification for bans and "I agree with it" is the new justification for unblocking accounts.
The account that first posted a video of Elon being booed on stage at a recent comedy show, was swiftly suspended. It's very difficult to deny this quacks like a duck.
I believe the account he banned vs unbanned has a distinction. One account alligns with his long term strategy for $x whereas the other competes against his $x strategy.
It's difficult to say what said strategy is or may be but it'd be foolish to assume his decisions haven't been considered and vetted. But yes, intent is not well understood at all.
If you respond to the reporting of non-editorialized, objective fact with the question "Is there an alternative narrative?", I think it is time to check your own biases.
I'm not disputing the fact that the account was banned, but the implicit assumption that people are making that it was banned simply because Musk woke up today and decided that he was tired of it.
I get that much. I'm asking why would you think that there is a narrative to this ban, given the content of recent events regard Musk's stewardship of Twitter.
Is there some context to this account's history regarding the Twitter Terms of Service that would legitimately lead you to think this?
Why does anyone care about alternative "narratives"? Are there any other facts that one might like to introduce? Not alternative facts, things that actually happened.
There is an alternative justification in the right to privacy. Such accounts are indeed reckless with no corresponding need to know. No one's free speech rights are being suppressed here.
Can I attach a GPS tracker to your car and publish the coordinates in real time to the internet?
Of course I can't. It would be illegal.
Not because of disingenuous "car has a right to privacy" logic but because any judge would conclude that by tracking a car you're tracking the owner of the car and the owner does have a right to privacy.
Similarly, if the name @ElonJet doesn't give out the purpose: the account is tracking Elon by way of tracking his jet.
Morally speaking, the justification for transparency of jet location was to track them in order to increase safety of flying.
It wasn't to enable tracking of rich people.
It's legal but it's a loophole.
And somehow Elon hate completely overshadows the fact that the guy running @ElonJet account is an asshole.
Not because of disingenuous "car has a right to privacy" logic but because any judge would conclude that by tracking a car you're tracking the owner of the car and the owner does have a right to privacy.
I think you'll find that it has far more to do with directly interfering with another person's property without permission. If you publish someone's coordinates by using publicly accessible traffic cameras or (cost considerations aside) flying your own news helicopter around, the arguments become a lot vaguer. It's not clear that there's a legal/constitutional right to privacy in the US, and indeed recent supreme court decisions about abortion seem to reject the notion; jurisprudence in the 1970s saw an implicit right to privacy in certain constitutional provisions, an idea which 'originalists' regard as BS.
This has been discussed many times - the flight data and aircraft registration details are publicly accessible via the FAA. Posting that data in an easily accessible form hardly violates anyone's privacy.
To be fair, there is a difference when its made extremely accessible. Even the courts have seen this as a key difference with surveillance.
My question here is whether there is actually a rule here and whether that rule will be followed, or was it just done capriciously because Musk didn't like it.
I have my guesses, of course, but I haven't checked if they are true.
Don't be silly. Musk just wants to ban their Twitter account if they start to post the information to his specific plane. As long as they post specifics about someone else's plane, their account will be considered in good standing.
Since it was an individual not linked to a website, it's an even easier decision for him.
flightradar24 tracks jets. Go ahead and see if you can figure out where Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison is from flightrader24. You can't unless you know the jet number they happen to be using.
@ElonJet is effectively tracking Elon and broadcasting that, and only that, information to the whole world.
In theory you could track Elon yourself by correlating public info (figuring out which jets he owns and using flightrader24) but it's orders of magnitude more effort and I don't see how "you can figure it out" justify "publish it to the whole world".
Perhaps a public interest argument could be made here for making this information more accessible. The whereabouts of a CEO of multiple companies could be of interest for investment decisions. For an ordinary private citizen this would be different.
Sure it does. Being able to observe license plates on the street is different from observing all license plates and publishing a real time feed of their location.
You're right. It is contingent on the rule being applied fairly. Any one person making these decisions is bound to exhibit a bias, but we do not know if it was his decision alone. He may very well have asked others if it would be fair. That said, the real test will be if he can establish a fair system that self-patrols the speech on twitter.
> There is an alternative justification in the right to privacy. Such accounts are indeed reckless with no corresponding need to know. No one's free speech rights are being suppressed here.
But Musk had previously called out specifically this account as one that he would not ban (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456). So, whether or not he has a right to ban it, this represents a reneging on an explicit commitment.
Because sometimes they are very relevant. The Kanye ban and the details around it are one example as Kanye clearly wanted people to believe it was for a different reason than it was.
I'm not saying this applies to the ElonJet case, but I can see why the question would be asked.
Because facts can be interpreted in different ways. Any action can be interpreted as self-interest, but perhaps the true motive is different. You gave money to a school to pay for lunches? You were just trying to get your name in a newspaper because of your ego. Or maybe, just maybe, you're a person trying to do the right thing and make the world a slightly better place.
> You gave money to a school to pay for lunches? You were just trying to get your name in a newspaper because of your ego.
So what? What is wrong with that? We can't even understand our own motives, let alone attempt to decipher others'. Why not let the action speak for itself? If you're a selfish person prioritizing your own PR above others' needs, your actions will ultimately reflect it, and we can judge them on it. Otherwise, kudos for finding and pursuing something that aligns nicely with your own needs as well as the needs of others.
All the worst people I've ever known have argued against any goodness or altruism existing.
All the worst cheaters say everyone cheats (which apparently is enough justification to supersede their own public marital vows.)
Arguing that people are universally terrible is a huge signal that the person making the argument is terrible. Don't go into professional partnerships with them, I've seen at least 3 people like that whose behavior has devolved into eventual jail time and they've wrecked their companies.
The world has a surprisingly high percentage of amoral assholes who have a vested interest in pretending everyone is as misanthropic and self-centered as they are, but it's still a small minority.
This same account said elsewhere in this thread "I can't think of any", about times Elon Musk has said he would do one thing, then went on to do another. This is someone who is for some reason really trying to defend Musk.
Yes, I have a lower prior than you that Musk just randomly changes his opinions all the time for no reason. And I've asked for meaningful evidence that would help me update this prior. Is this really an unfathomably bizarre epistemic strategy to you?
I am being honest here and not trying to score any points or "own" you: you might want to re-read your comments, because you don't come across as someone looking to update "priors", you come across as an Elon fanboi who has somehow decided to go to bat for him in the HN comments.
I’m still reading through this read, but your response seems like it ended up on the wrong comment or something? Because their ask does not in any way read as an Elon fanboy. I admit I may get egg in my face down thread but their top level ask is sane.
Yeah it's the right place, but I was talking about their (many) comments in this entire thread. A few have been been downvoted and might not be visible anymore. Basically this person is being a bit disingenuous, they've not entered the discussion - as they claim - with an open mind, looking to be challenged and the vibe from their comments in aggregate is decidedly pro-Musk. Nothing wrong with being pro-Musk on it's own, but they go a little above and beyond.
There I basically say that Elon has flipped on a few things, this user has pretended to not be aware of any instance of this (!) and asked for any examples, someone raises a couple and their responses to that is fairly typical of a fanboi. Tbh I should just close the tab and go walk my dog, but it's a pretty interesting discussion and it's -3C outside so I'm sorta procrastinating :)
>Basically this person is being a bit disingenuous, they've not entered the discussion - as they claim - with an open mind, looking to be challenged and the vibe from their comments in aggregate is decidedly pro-Musk
Or, alternatively, I've waded into a decidedly anti-Musk crowd and my comments simply look pro-Musk in comparison.
>There I basically say that Elon has flipped on a few things, this user has pretended to not be aware of any instance of this
I said that I'm not aware of any examples of Musk reversing course without any plausible justification, and people in reply bombarded me with examples that in my view had plausible justifications, and when I raised this then I was treated as a "fanboi"... of course.
But hey, after some back and forth I think maybe there are some good examples and I can revise my priors! For example, if Musk specifically said that he would not examine Twitter's internals and then changed his mind, that would be a good example of what I'm looking for. Or if Musk said that he would've fire a bunch of people right before he did, that would be another good example. However, I'm not sure if the people who are claiming that Musk did these things are reliable and more sources would be appreciated.
Completely independent of the topic at hand, I want to point out to you that you ask for a lot more than you give throughout. You read as sincere which is why I think it’s important to note that that behavior can be used to very effectively intentionally derail a conversation by virtue of becoming a huge time sink.
I see that a lot of people gave rude or nonsense answers which is frustrating, but at the point where you are getting examples and coherent responses I think it’s important to take some responsibility and try to support their argument yourself. I typically find one of two outcomes 1) I find compelling information that causes me to change my mind 2) the best argument I can form is weak or nonsense, but at least others can see I’m invested in the conversation and that a detailed reply won’t go to waste.
>Completely independent of the topic at hand, I want to point out to you that you ask for a lot more than you give throughout
I don't disagree. I also do not feel that people are required to reply to me if it's not worth the trouble. I'd rather get no replies than bad replies. Unfortunately I didn't find it easy to google something like "Musk said he wouldn't fire people", so I have to try to infer what sort of actual evidence people are using to support this claim (I can see that Musk denied having the specific intent to cut 75% of staff), and yes that can come off as demanding. But the alternative here is that I try to figure out what is underlying whatever bad unsourced claims people are making and... well, my time is valuable too.
Well, the example came up of Musk intending to buy Twitter and then trying to back out. The plausible justification for flip-flopping is that an internal review unveiled information that would justify this. It's really not hard to imagine.
That lead to a refined claim that Musk said he would not even perform this sort of review and then changed his mind, but without a clear source attached I'm not sure if this is actually what Musk said.
Yep, you are right. I can find a principle that I agree with in their words - much of the criticism is lazy and makes assumptions about personal motive when there are much stronger and more damming arguments available and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard - but their response to the examples raised is to try and put more work on their conversational partner.
Frankly, as some one who engages in similar lines of questioning as the top level, I think you have to bring your own findings to the table. You aren’t arguing in good faith otherwise.
>Why does anyone care about alternative "narratives"?
Because the narrative of "Musk changed his mind" that is overwhelmingly popular here implicitly relies on there being no good intervening justification for why Musk would've done this, but afaik this doesn't seem like an incredibly safe assumption.
I mean, I guess you could be asking why someone would care to correct themselves if they have a popular-but-incorrect view on something, and sadly that's not always a bad question.
Is it not his company? Is he under obligation to not change his mind?
I'm not saying he is right - he isn't. I just wish people could put their arrogance aside for ONE SECOND, and realize, they would do the same thing.
It's the immature hypocrisy I don't like. That when it was the FBI and DNI having weekly meetings with high level Twitter staff or taking requests from sitting politicians or active campaigns on what political enemies to censor - that was fine because "it's a public company and they could do what they want".
I want emotional and intellectual honesty. It's beyond rare though.
It seems like these are a bunch of scattershot points that don’t add up to a cohesive argument. On top of this, “answer for this other thing someone I’ve decided to associate with you said” is one of my least favorite debate techniques.
> People are acting like Musk changed course for no reason
I'm not sure that's the case. I think many people, myself included, assumed Musk's course was always "just do what's best for me." So he's really just holding to that.
You should give people in your life the benefit of the doubt, but large corporations and billionaires usually found success by acting in their own interest so they will just keep on doing that.
> large corporations and billionaires usually found success by acting in their own interest so they will just keep on doing that
I mean, if you have to irrationally hate someone, I guess billionaires are going to be the ones with the resources to handle it, but I'd really rather we as a society move away from this sort of cathartic scapegoating altogether. The more we normalize taking our anger out on some group or another, backed up by flimsy excuses like "x usually found success by acting in their own interest" the more likely it becomes that "x" will be "The Jews" or some other group.
That suggests people hand out equal hate to all billionaires. JK Rawling seems like an obvious exception to that narrative.
From what I have seen billionaires tend to get more hate because they simply have more negative impact on peoples lives. Elon kicking out Tesla’s founders is hard to judge objectively because they might have done a worse job, but it’s easy to identify lots of dumb shit he did that harmed the company. Presumably he did plenty of positive things, but the negatives are just easier to identify.
There's a fair share of that as well[0]. But yes, Elon, the worlds richest man (as of earlier this year), draws more ire for his wealth. It's expected since he's about 160x richer than Rowling (she's no longer a billionaire), and uses his money to rig the economy in his favor. He's a more apt symbol of the billionaire class than Rowling.
I don’t know the specifics about her finances but:
“As of 2022, J.K. Rowling’s net worth is an estimated £820 million, or around $1.1 billion, per The Sunday Times. According to the site, this makes Rowling the 196th richest person in the U.K. overall.” https://stylecaster.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/
Nobody gives a shit about Bernard Arnault who is now the richest man so maybe people don't like Elon's actions more than they don't like his money.
If you look at the top 10 list of richest people Elon is the only one who draws this level of negative attention because he's the only one who is having a huge public meltdown and constantly being in the news for being a garbage human being
That seems unlikely, that’s about the rate people give silly answers to pollsters.
The study by YouGov in conjunction with The Economist has found that 30-44-year-olds are most likely to believe this widely debunked conspiracy, with 7% of people from this age group saying that it is "definitely true" and 20% of them saying it is "probably true.
This yougov poll[0] seems to suggest around 20% of democrats and independents vs. 40% of Republicans believe the gates conspiracy. You also just quoted something that backs up what I said?
Look, in no way am I saying polls are perfect but almost every metric imaginable says Elon is not the most unpopular billionaire by a long shot. There’s not a huge conspiracy against Musk specifically, people just don’t like power-hungry billionaires.
Nobody cares about Bernard Arnault because he doesn’t really pose an existential threat. High fashion will continue to do the same thing they’ve always done
> That suggests people hand out equal hate to all billionaires
I don't think it suggests that, or at least I certainly didn't mean to communicate as such. I was responding narrowly to the parent's remarks (explicitly rationalizing targeting billionaires as a group) and not trying to imply anything broader.
> The more we normalize taking our anger out on some group or another, backed up by flimsy excuses like "x usually found success by acting in their own interest" the more likely it becomes that "x" will be "The Jews" or some other group.
That is some wild logic. People are angry for material reasons. It's often misdirected or invalid but there's a cause.
I think anger is valid and useful when it's directed at the root of the cause. And I'm sorry, but billionaires and politicians are the ones with more power than anyone else so if something is materially broken in our world they probably deserve an outsized portion of that anger.
It takes work to misdirect that anger to other groups, which some politicians and media groups often do. I'd argue that is the thing which should be examined quite carefully.
>I mean, if you have to irrationally hate someone, I guess billionaires are going to be the ones with the resources to handle it,
I wonder, what could be a rational hate?
Personally I also wonder what is the supposed rationality behind any society granting some becoming billionaires. All the more when there is no social enforcement loop that ensure that the gap between richest and poorest remain in decent state. Otherwise the hate of the richest is an obvious outcome of the inequity structure.
Personally, I'm pretty much an "anti-hate" absolutist, but I recognize that a lot of people in this audience aren't, so I'm leaving room for "rational hate" which is maybe something like "this person did something bad, so I hate them" versus "this person belongs to a group, and some people in that group have done bad things, ergo I hate this person" which is the explicit reasoning in the comment that I originally replied to.
> Personally I also wonder what is the supposed rationality behind any society granting some becoming billionaires. All the more when there is no social enforcement loop that ensure that the gap between richest and poorest remain in decent state.
Yeah, I empathize with this.
> Otherwise the hate of the richest is an obvious outcome of the inequity structure.
It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.
> Personally, I'm pretty much an "anti-hate" absolutist, but I recognize that a lot of people in this audience aren't, so I'm leaving room for "rational hate" which is maybe something like "this person did something bad, so I hate them" versus "this person belongs to a group, and some people in that group have done bad things, ergo I hate this person" which is the explicit reasoning in the comment that I originally replied to.
There are two different point here:
- describing the flow events leading to hate generation
- pretending that that hate can be defined has a rational thing
The former seems completely legitimate to me. The latter seems to me to result only from confusion. Hate is an emotion, which to my mind means that is not rationally grounded. Not everything need to be rationally grounded to be considered legitimate. Rationality itself is not rationally grounded obviously.
> It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.
Sure, rationality doesn’t come with moral integrity hardly bounded. I think "rational" is a bit polysemous here, as it is might be heard as "ethically sound", and not purely "logically sound".
You seem to be arguing that only billionaires can rationally hate other billionaires, and anyone who is not on that level can't be rational, because they don't understand what's going on with billionaires. If they they did, they too would be billionaires. This might be narrowly correct in pure business terms, but the problem is that you subordinate everything else to the most unusual characteristic. It's like arguing that the controversial political opinions of a successful athlete aren't subject to debate, because critics haven't won any sportsball championships.
No, that's not what I'm saying, nor is that a reasonable interpretation of my comment. I'm saying that this formulation is irrational: "many billionaires do bad things, ergo it's justified to hate any billionaire".
> I think many people, myself included, assumed Musk's course was always "just do what's best for me." So he's really just holding to that.
As far as I can tell Musk is currently self-destructing for no apparent reason -- how is that best for him?
Some of the questionable stuff he's been doing for a while has obvious upsides for him. Lying about the capabilities of your products and market manipulation are both obviously nice if you can get away with it. So is demonstratively skirting laws and regulations. Similarly, building a reputation for going after people who did something that contravened your personal interests, even if doing so was their professional or legal duty, has its benefits. It encourages careful consideration of whether dereliction of duty would not be preferable over getting in your way. All these are demonstrations of strength.
But streisanding elonjet just looks weak and pathetic. As does trying to stiff your suppliers.
If you build up a reputation for being completely unprincipled and erratic, and try to wheedle out of both your word and your legal obligations even in cases when you probably can't get away with it and there is not even a particularly compelling reason to try to do so in the first place; well -- surely that can only hurt your brand and also mean that people who would otherwise have done business with you won't or will now only do so on much less favorable terms? Or am I missing something here?
> As far as I can tell Musk is currently self-destructing for no apparent reason -- how is that best for him?
Musk is currently in a bubble where everyone around him is giving him unlimited "attaboys" for his behavior. He probably doesn't have a great read on how poorly things are going for him.
That's the impression I'm getting as well. Whatever one thinks about Musk's failings and failures, I find it hard to believe that he can't come up with something better than a series of unforced own goals like the Elon Jet suspension (already backpedaled on) unless he's surrounded himself by people who only tell him what he wants to hear.
Why do you assume he is listening to (or even seeking) advice before acting? Sure, being surrounded by “yes men” could be a problem, but its very hard from the outside to distinguish that from just being impulsive and not seeking input on the first place.
The observable difference I'd expect to see is that an impulsive guy not surrounded by "yes men" will still periodically commit avoidable errors, but not engage in a sequence of related blunders because someone will bring it home to him that things are moving in a bad direction.
> As far as I can tell Musk is currently self-destructing for no apparent reason -- how is that best for him?
No apparent reason? He bought one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet and roughly simultaneously began heavily pumping the narratives of the MAGA faction, making throwaway declarations of political neutrality.
There's a pretty apparent motivation—advance a particular faction’s political prospects and be visibly seen as a key agent of their success when they fully come to power, and be rewarded for that.
It may be a high risk gamble that could explode before it pays off (its first big chance would be the 2024 election, though it could yield some benefits sooner) but its not completely without apparent purpose.
> No apparent reason? He bought one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet and roughly simultaneously began heavily pumping the narratives of the MAGA faction, making throwaway declarations of political neutrality.
The "no apparent reason" was not about the what but the how.
Buying one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet makes complete sense, especially if a) it's currently used to advance political ideologies which you can plausibly regard as a real risk to your other business ventures and b) you are a world-class communicator on the platform and that is one of your strongest assets.
So does eliminating (the hostile and plainly incompetent) top management and the majority of the work force.
But in terms of overall execution quality things look a bit like Putin's Ukraine invasion; I'd wager that the majority of erstwhile enthusiastic supporters of the whole thing would probably politely decline front-line participation at this point.
The implication that free speech people are hypocrites is a little premature. The policies just changed. I'm sure there will be several opportunities before the day is over to gotcha someone in some genuine hypocrisy, but let's see how this one plays out.
That is silly. Anybody who really wants to know where that jet is won't be relying on an entertainment account on Twitter, they'll just use FlightRadar24 to get it real time.
There's a lot of crazy unstable people, they wont know about or be able to regularly plan monitoring FlightRadar24. They can however see "Musk lands in Chicago Midway" and run down there.
So, yes a targeted organized attack wouldn't be overly hard a random chaotic attack is easier with this twitter account.
By the time you found out a plane landed in Chicago, it's waaaaaay too late to intercept. People that stupid aren't a danger. It's exactly the people who know you can use public ADS-B trackers to see flight plans and predict landing times that you might actually worry about.
This is a great line of reasoning that can be used to justify banning anything. What if a soft-headed person reads it and does something horrible... Like, say, attempt to carry out a coup?
It'd be great if the same standard were applies to things like bomb threats at children's hospitals because some fruit loops have convinced themselves that Pepe Silvia is hiding there, or that drag shows are an existential threat which much be opposed with gunfire.
What about all of the death threats that politicians and election workers in Georgia received because of Trump pushing election lies on platforms like Twitter?
Georgia's Secretary of State and his family received death threats.
1) Your comment is a red herring; it's not related to what I said
2) I'm simply providing an explanation which Elon Musk has openly been saying, the account was threatening his safety (I made no claim about fairness or anything else)
3) Trump was not doing real-time tracking of specific private individuals and publishing them online
I'm not claiming any banning is justified btw, but I'm providing an insight.
The comment wasn't directed at you personally but the premise that "it might just be for security". If it's "just security" then it's clear that he only cares about his own security.
How about this for a better apples to apples comparison? The same guy behind ElonJet also has accounts that track the private jets of Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, and Drake.
There are people out there that literally believe that Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the world through vaccines (going so far as claiming that he was apart of a conspiracy that resulted in COVID). Probably a lot crazies that would do something crazy to him.
Of course there are other narratives. You're limited by your creativity. Generally the one that involves the least creativity prevails. There's a huge constituency ready to jump on Musk for whatever, and here they are, because it's easy. Until there's facts just stay agnostic...
I am rarely on twitter (just reading financial macro discussions, for which twitter seems to be a center of excellence), so probably have skewed priors. That said, skimming this information I see nothing particularly bad in banning the account that posted screenshots of internal confidential discussions.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the freedom of speech. It is related to breaking the promise (made when joining any company as an employee) not to divulge confidential information. This is a restriction on the freedom of speech that one knowingly agrees to when joining the company.
If I knowingly posted sensitive internal discussions from my employer I would be kicked out. Or worse: if I worked in a hospital and shared some sensitive pictures I might be hit with heavy fines or spend time behind bars. My 2c.
An outsider being given access to confidential customer information in Europe would immediately be flagged as a GDPR violation, and given the circumstances it would probably be a reportable one as well. Don't make light of this.
Steel manning really only works if you can assume the other person continues to argue in good faith. If the other person keeps moving the goalposts and demanding you construct a strong argument for their behavior they're just being abusive and I would suggest the best course of action is to leave.
Steelmanning requires the person you're talking to to be arguing in good faith, not the actual subjects of the narrative being steelmanned. The whole point of steelmanning is to grant those subjects good faith even if you personally think it's unwise, because the person you're talking to may disagree...
In the context of moving the goalposts, you are asking other commenters to justify another person's actions that are increasingly at odds with their words.
I personally think that the narrative you are interrogating is weak, even a straw man version of the people you think you're arguing with. It seems clear to me that Elon has long operated on personal grievance with respect to Twitter, and that "free speech" is just the veneer he puts on because it works.
>you are asking other commenters to justify another person's actions that are increasingly at odds with their words.
Yes, that's what steelmanning is. If you don't care to do it, you're free not to respond to a request for a steelmanned arugment. Explaining your principled refusal to steelman doesn't add much to the discussion.
He is definitely changing course here (he has publicly stated he wouldn’t squash this account) but my idea is, one of his peons is enforcing some policy about automated scripts controlling accounts. Has anyone read the TOS or seen what has changed?
Nuance and context like "Elon is bad, of course he's bad" and "of course this is hypocrisy and nothing more"...because that's what we've gotten so far. As usual, there are two sides to every story unless your name is Elon, Trump, or other $UNPOPULAR_FIGURE
Yeah, god forbid somebody asks for more nuance. What is this, Reddit? We're mature here, we do quality comments like "Elon Musk has the emotional stability of a teenager hitting puberty", "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Elon Musk", and so on (actual comments on this thread).
Unfortunately we do not live in a world where in order to criticise someone we must analyze the morality of their entire life. This isn't "The Good Place"
I can say Elon is a shit person because that is my opinion. I am entitled to that opinion as much as you are entitled to simp for him
Here's my best guess: Musk lives in a bubble of yes men 24x7, except Sunday night he was on stage with Chapelle getting slapped in the face by over 10,000 people who clearly didn't like him. Probably a defining moment in his life that shook him to the core and genuinely scared him.
The good thing about Musk claiming Free speech absolutism is that we can hold him responsible for it. He might be a free speech NIMBY but because he claims to support free speech, his actions that clearly contradict this claim have very heavy toll on his persona.
IMHO Musk has a real opportunity to actually make Twitter great, Twitter was in a horrible shape and no one was happy with its state and I hoped that he can fix it because Musk is a product person. Unfortunately every passing day I'm losing hope. Even if he can fix it as a product, it seems like he will bomb it as a community.
No one ever forgot the calling the diver pedo incident and his handling Twitter can severely damage his image.
There is a reason why people pay Musk thousands of dollars for features that don't exist or cars that are not well build and still don't go after him like people went after Elizabeth Holmes and I'm afraid he might eventually burn out his social credit and be judged promptly for whatever he delivers without a slack.
His supporters are fanatical - none of his previous abhorrent actions have had a heavy toll, so it's unclear why this one should.
He is certainly receiving a large backlash to his recent actions, but I think that's more a case of people (outside of tech) who would've paid little attention to him before being forced to be more fully aware of his existence, than anyone who previously supported him thinking less of him.
There's a very real argument to be made now that remaining publicly in control of Tesla is bad for TSLA shareholders. The brand is going to suffer if he doesn't at least put a plausible puppet at the head of the company.
Twitter is already a lost cause. He wanted to create a more popular Parler. Probably it'll just end up in the same place with the same niche user base.
So let me list Musk’s abhorrent censorship actions:
-Bans people impersonating him like Kathy Griffin
-Bans people who share internal communications at Twitter
-Bans people who post sensitive information like his address, phone number or private jet location
-Bans a few militant Antifa groups
Is there anything else? Because I’m not seeing the abhorrent part, especially compared to pre-Musk censorship.
Why should I be outraged now? When epidemiologists were censored leading to unvaccinated being banned from society last winter, no one made a fuss about it.
Yeah, but IMO it's not that, that's all fairly easy to get at, it's this:
> Bans people who share internal communications at Twitter
Which I expect is covered by an NDA between the leaker and the company blocking the sharing of the leaks. I'd expect the same if someone at, purely for the sake of example, Blizzard started sharing internal content via World of Warcraft public chat.
I think my joke's been misinterpreted. Sharing personal information isn't the thing that different, it's the private jet location that's different from address and phone number. Having your private jet tracked is not a problem that a normal person can have. I don't think there's a reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to that.
Yeah one of the things on my list almost ruined my life last winter.
As in lose my job and be unable to socialize because I need a vaccine passport to enter a restaurant. All based on fraudulent lies that I couldn’t expose because I was censored.
Banning accounts such as this is not at all inconsistent with banning accounts with the stated intent to track or surveil an individual. Accounts such as this are dangerous and no one needs to know his travel plans. The need for privacy does not interfere with anyone's freedom of speech here.
To put it in such a highly accessible form is an invitation to crackpots. Crackpots and mobs generally do not get incited by FAA travel logs that requires some diligence to track.
So we should shut down flightradar24, too, I assume? Because that's a lot more highly accessible than a twitter account and has real time status. On all planes, not just Elon's. The horror!
Oh, so this publicly accessible information should not be subject to free speech, even though it's clearly publicly available? Should all speech that could incite crackpots be limited?
Flightradar24, as well as all sorts of similar services (FlightAware, ADSB-Exchange, etc.) let anyone watch the location of any aircraft with ADS-B in real time (as well as list everywhere the plain has been and playback previous flights)
One could argue, none of the FAA data should be public information... I personally think that's the case. All the FAA really needs to know is where all the objects are, not specific planes.
In the early days of aviation, when flight information was not public, hundreds of people would routinely die in airplane crashes. Those days are over because flight plans are now public information. When you're in the sky, you are under surveillance, no matter who you are. If you deviate from your flight plan, that is also known. It must be this way, for the safety of everyone else in the sky around you.
Even the CIA flights of kidnapped people to the various black prison sites were public. Using that data, the Austrian Airfoce intercepted and escorted one of those flights out of Austrian airspace.
It doesn't matter if its publicly available. To aggregate the data in such an easily accessible form is an invitation to crackpots. Few crackpots are going to seek out such information unless they are truly dedicated from the get-go.
Before ElonJet was suspended their pinned tweet pointed out that Twitter's acceptable use policy was that it was ok to republish data generally available elsewhere - which is exactly what this is. It would be illegal to operate the jet and not publish its location.
So we are imagining someone is dedicated enough to go to jail for the rest of their lives for some assassination attempt but not quite dedicated enough to look up information themselves?
I don’t see that as a fair equivalent - it’s a legal broadcast, it’s not obscured or private by any means. Every time that plane changes destinations it’s a legal requirement to put that information out into the open.
He just doesn’t like it, so goodbye freedom of speech.
Exactly. Pre-Elon Twitter was all about the need to censor information because of a supposed risk of danger. As the twitter files indicate, often this risk was not readily apparent. Accounts that track high profile people's travel plans is such an evident risk. If are not willing to apply your rule equally to everyone, you really are not in a position to be making these decisions.
Not that I think it should be banned (I don't think it should)
I think it's also obvious that this jet tracker doesn't exactly aid in the public discourse, it seems far closer to targeted harassment..
Again, I don't think anything should be banned outside of direct threats (I'm a free speech absolutist). But it does seem clear, even from that tweet by Musk, that that twitter account seemed to impact his personal safety.
Oh no, a billionaire felt bullied because someone posted public flight tracking data on social media? That’s nowhere near the bar for “targeted harassment”. You know what is? That same billionaire has been calling people pedophiles in a targeted attempt at character assassination.
I don't think that's true, most cases of doxxing happen with publicly available information. But I guess you could argue doxxing isn't really "illegal."
Most doxing involves using publicly available information to harass others... and yet that behavior is frowned upon everywhere. I don't think anyone here honestly believes that account was used for anything other than to encourage the stalking and harassment of Elon Musk because the account owner simply doesn't like him. I also don't think anyone here seriously believes that stalking and harassing people is "free speech". I do believe people here are letting their class bias show.
How does flight data encourage stalking and harassment? The account is run by the same person who tracks the flights of other wealthy and notable people as well. Why weren’t those taken down?
I am genuinely interested in what you think the difference between those two things is. I don't see how "the white pages" is any more safe or secure than "everyone"...
It isn't. My point here being that just because something is public information does not mean you have any business circulating it specifically to encourage the stalking and harassment of others. Your freedom of speech ends short of stalking and harassing others. Lawfully contacting someone is one thing... but tracking someone's every movement is another, and you know it.
I agree that my freedom of speech ends short of stalking and harassing people! I just don't think that re-posting publicly available information qualifies as stalking or harassing. And I think it's a very big stretch to claim that it even comes close to facilitating stalking or harassing. Has Elon himself even claimed any actual negative impacts due to this information/account, or has he just expressed concerns about the possibility?
Also, "and you know it" is insulting and rude, and I don't agree with it or appreciate it.
For the first 20-ish years of my life, a physical copy of the telephone directory listing almost all local subscribers (including my parents and by extension me), was physically posted to every subscriber's house.
Some people did indeed abuse that knowledge, but it was rare.
A few people were, by request, "ex-directory" and not listed, but again, that was rare.
Most people were not only absolutely fine with their phone number being public info, it was more useful then than a publicly-known email address is now.
What a coincidence. I too lived during the era of open directories... and it was horrifyingly stupid. We got our number delisted as soon as possible because we didn't need random idiots calling us at all hours because they thought it was funny. I don't care that other people were fine with being listed. People have a right to privacy, and moreover a right not to be stalked and harassed. We don't tolerate people posting each others' personal information, public or otherwise, to stalk and harass one another *ON ANY PLATFORM*. That doesn't change just because it's someone who's "a public figure" or, more accurately, someone you don't like. Either the rules exist for everyone or not at all... and if it's not at all then drop the pretense and just admit you want to hurt him any way you can.
Who's this 'we' and why would random idiots be calling you at all hours? There was nothing horrifyingly stupid about it, that was how people got in touch with each other before it was convenient to do so via the internet.
> serious question, does free speech extend to doxing
Boy, what a complicated and serious question. We should form a committee to discuss exactly where our community places reasonable boundaries and adjudicate blurry edge cases. Who could have predicted that a policy like "if it's legal, it's allowed" would lead to problems? Surely no one with a few dozen billion dollars to set on fire would be that unbelievably stupid.
So Elon should then take it up with the famously quick and efficient US Government, just like the rest of us who are harmed by speech that the USG has not declared illegal. If he suffers any harm in the meantime, then well, that's just the cost of Free Speech! Sorry, Elon! Hooray, Free Speech!
right, I'll meet the annoying persistent sarcasm with some more. We should go back to the old twitter! Where woke 30 year old ivy league graduates get to decide the conversational overton window! That was so much better than aspiring to this free speech garbage!
That's the point, right? You obviously can't fall back on "anything legal is allowed." That's a stupid policy and nobody actually wants it, as the actions this thread is discussing proves. So someone has to draw the boundaries. I'd much rather have a group of experts debating & making the hard decisions than a single sociopathic billionaire. Yes, they'll get it wrong sometimes, and that sucks, but it's the least-bad possible arrangement.
I don't know whether I think it's free speech honestly, but I think the more relevant question here is whether Musk would consider it "free speech" to post the same type of information about someone else.
When he's not the object of the speech in question, he seems to think that things like calling people pedophiles is free speech, so he generally seems to be a free speech maximalist and I'm guessing the answer might be yes.
I don't consider a lot of things to be free speech that musk apparently does, but there's a big difference between him being a free speech maximalist in general and just supporting free speech when it's convenient.
Consider the following: The Twitter files contains a lot of private information and outs employees whom have received direct harassment.
The ElonJet account contains publicly available information on a very accessible site. This does not make a statement about Musk nor does it tell who is inside the jet at the time.
Is it? What exactly is the functional difference between Musk revealing private corporate communications to a rabid audience looking for a target? Like you didn't actually explain how it's different.
Did he publish where they lived or currently were or simply the things they said? I'm sure anyone can see the difference between these two things.
He published what they said and the reason for doing it publicly is to ensure the current administration and administrative state (which would be the people at the heart of his accusations) would also have motive to bury the information. I'd also guess that such disclosures also help distance him from any legal action.
He published who they were, when they were previously unknown. I'm sure you can understand why unmasking someone like this is a problem, correct? If you can't then I don't think you value your current anonymity enough.
Though the fact that you immediately jumped to the government conspiracy angle it seems like you've planted your feet and aren't going to move. It's not doxxing because it's someone you agree with.
Just so we're clear: You'll be totally in favor of maintaining the accounts of anyone who routinely posts the location of others, including yourself, right? Because that's not stalking at all... right?
Relitigating this is not going to be fruitful: Elon Musk is a public figure who chooses to fly by private jet. Callsigns and flight status are public information by necessity.
Being a public figure does not mean you have a right to stalk and harass him. It means you get to have a higher bar to charges of defamation for things said about them and nothing more.
Tracking an aircraft's callsign does not remotely approach the bar for "stalking and harassing."
Put another way: the courts have overwhelmingly recognized the rights of "paparazzi": if you're a public figure, there is going to be independent public interest in your life.
The interest can't be intrusive (meaning that it doesn't enable someone to break into your house and take pictures of your underwear drawer), but it does allow citizens to use any public information available to them. Since airplane information is public by necessity, there is no reasonable legal structure that enhances Musk's privacy without compromising well-trodden expression rights.
It's all about what we call a "reasonable expectation of privacy" right? And all Sweeney did was publish information that was already publicly available[1], right?
So if someone goes around taking a picture of your vehicle everywhere you go you won't have any objections to that because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and it's all publicly available information. Got it. I'm sure you'll stoically accept such behavior rather than scream for it to stop.
This is exactly what highway toll systems and ALPR enforcement already do.
But even on the public side: yes, this would be entirely appropriate. It's not clear what the alternative would even be; what would it look like to have civilian evidence in e.g. traffic accidents if people weren't allowed to take pictures of others' cars?
1. Highway toll systems aren't random people on Twitter.
2. In such a case you have a need to know that supersedes one's right of privacy. Are you saying you have a need to know where Elon Musk is at all times?
Elon Musk is the antithesis of a "random person on Twitter." He's the CEO, and one of the richest men on Earth to boot.
I don't have any particular need (or interest) in knowing where Elon Musk is. I also don't know where he is at all times with the information in this flight tracker: I only know the parts that are already necessarily public.
Law is fundamentally casuistical in nature: there are standards that apply to John Q. Publics (like you and me), and there are other standards that apply to the Barbara Streisands (and Elon Musks) of the world.
So is your license plate number, and you have no reasonable expectation of the privacy of that information... but you wouldn't be happy if someone went around tracking everywhere you went now would you?
He trashes people who trash talk his cars. Even if you happened to die while testing his auto pilot feature. Yeah. He will trash talk you while you are rolling in your grave thinking Elon was god. And then god comes to show you how amazing your god was.
He trashed talk a journalist immediately after the journalist complained he had to journey thru cold with out heater because his batteries would not last until the next charging point.
He trashed talk the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who supported the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who might as well be supporting the short sellers, e.g. sec aka shortseller enrichment commission aka security exchange commission.
He is a small guy with a oversized largely sensitive ego.
But most notoriously, he is a terrible public speaker. Like my public speaking teacher would be more ashamed at him than me.
I think all of this is part of his appeal. He's more "scruffy" and unfiltered than most people with his prominence and responsibilities. But it's easy to confuse this lack of a filter for honesty, when the two may be entirely orthogonal.
Elon's communication style is also good for forming "parasocial" relationships with his audience which explains how loyal and fervent many of his fans are.
i view Elon's fanbase as being equivalent to the fanbase that twitch streamers like xqc have, probably not well adjusted people who need to idolize someone in which they can see some characteristics in common (social awkwardness, thinking they are smarter than others etc...)
Elon's communication style is also good for forming "parasocial" relationships
tbh I find the widespread habit of referring to him by his first name like he's a personal acquaintance to be part of this mechanism. This is something tabloid newspapers do with sport and entertainment celebrities to milk money from fans who gravitate toward others who seem to be part of 'the family.' It's a PR strategy designed to exploit human social circuitry and convert it into cash money.
> I think all of this is part of his appeal. He's more "scruffy" and unfiltered than most people with his prominence and responsibilities. But it's easy to confuse this lack of a filter for honesty, when the two may be entirely orthogonal.
This sounds strangely familiar to someone else that owns a Twitter-like social network.
> it's easy to confuse this lack of a filter for honesty
This is actually one of the bigger problems with discourse and politics today: the idea that "rude, crude, and unconcerned with other people's feelings" has anything to do with honesty—and, conversely, that being sensitive to those feelings and trying to take them into account when speaking is dishonest as opposed to kind.
Commitment (his word, not yours) is a bit strong. The vast majority of free speech related discussion is disingenuous, ignorant or otherwise unserious.
Free speech is complicated. Saying you'll "do free speech" without refering to implementation or intended resolution to various free speech dilemmas... that means you're probably not going to do free speech.
The part that I find most annoying is when politicians bring it up this way. It seems to be the one issue where nonseriousness meets fake passion most intimately.
I think Musk's behavior (and the behavior of a lot of public figures, really) makes more sense if you assume that he's not saying things to express ideas, but instead regards words as noises that you make with your mouth that cause other people to do or think things; if they stop having the intended effect, you have to change the noises.
It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
Yep. Poetry that leads to the horrifying realization that many of our elites live in a world surrounded by p-zombies, and somehow, this doesn't give them a moment's pause.
I'd go as far as saying "Do not anthropomorphize anybody whose name you know from media"
Do not treat them as people, treat them as ideas or maybe Sport Franchises.
Taylor Swift or Donald Trump or Elon Musk are like say the Cincinnati Reds.
If you are in a bar in Cincinnati and you want to drink without paying your best bet is singing the praise of the Reds, likewise if you are looking for trouble then attack and insult the Reds.
Same thing with Musk, if you are among entrepreneurs then be supportive of Musk , if you are among workers start attacking him vehemently.
Quoting the OP, Celebrities should become the words you spew in order to gain some small advantage while selling your products or when trying to influence people as per the book “How to win friends and influence people “
I find this armchair psychology a bit repulsive--the assumption that one has successfully dissected another and knows the base ingredients that make them tick. If you think about it, to think you know people (figures, if you like) inside out and that their behavior is simplistic and reptilian, is nearly as repugnant in itself as seeing speech as a mere series of levers and pulleys.
Does hypocrisy need to be an intentional action to be considered hypocrisy? I don't think it does. I think we can externally evaluate actions and, regardless of underlying motives, assign a value of "hypocrisy" to it.
On the other hand, if we assume that hypocrisy requires intent, then what you've instead described is "just" garden variety narcissistic sociopathy.
No hypocrisy does not require intent. I would say actually that usually it is reflexive and not intended. I w would go as far as saying we are all guilty of it sometimes.
you hit in the nail in the head, Elon Musk probably lives in a world where only he exists as a person and everyone around are just NPC's. Or maybe he believe he is nietzsche's ubermensch and thus is above the morals which bind us normal folk.
> It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
Good object versus bad object, very Kleinian and appropriate.
Central to object relations theory is the notion of splitting, which can be described as the mental separation of objects into "good" and "bad" parts and the subsequent repression of the "bad," or anxiety-provoking, aspects (Klein, 1932; 1935).
Infants first experience splitting in their relationship with the primary caregiver: The caregiver is “good” when all the infant’s needs are satisfied and “bad” when they are not.
It's what Adam Curtis covers in HyperNormalization. I think it's less that the noises actually have any specific effect and more that they just create chaos bubbles of what is true or not.
> It's not hypocrisy
I disagree there though unless one agrees that Musk has no morality. However, in the absence of morals, which is likely, it would still be perceived hypocrisy.
> It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
If that is the state of the art then what is the defense that regular people have?
Treat Musk as a moving object as well? Because the Valley seems filled with people singing Musk praises in order to raise money and impress his fanboys who are loaded with money (and get access to some of that money), while they'll openly admit behind close doors that Musk is a fraud.
I have a different but similar take on this: Imagine two WWI soldiers on opposing sides hunkered down alone in their trenches within earshot of each other. One yells to the other, "Man, I'm so glad I've got my twenty comrades with me!"
The other knows there's no way the trench could hold that many and says, "Don't like to me you bastard!"
The first guy says, "Oh, yeah, well how many do you have?"
The other says, "Only ten of us."
The other guy here has:
1. Criticized the first guy for lying.
2. Then lied himself.
Would you call this behavior hypocritical? No, probably not. Because hypocrisy only really exists as a valid criticism within a social sphere that presumes good faith and mutual respect.
But these two dudes are mortal enemies engaged in war. Being hypocritical is the least of the harmful things that guy is willing to do to the other, a list which also includes fun social interactions like stabbing him with a bayonet.
When I see politicians become brazen about contradicting themselves, the conclusion I come to is that they see the people they are making mouth sounds towards as beneath them and a less human Other that they feel no obligation to behave consistently towards.
It’s not free speech if it affects someones safety. Elon is a gated figure and people knowing where he is at all times definitely would not increase safety and could prevent violence
This question is clearly not relevant to the parent comment, since the linked tweet explicitly states that he would not ban this account as part of his commitment to free speech.
Elon, like a lot of people underestimates how much power corrupts. It is really easy to say "I would never cheat on my boyfriend/girlfriend when you don't have tons of attractive people throwing themselves at you" same thing here. It is really easy to say you believe in free speech when you don't have the ability to silence someone that you think may be putting your family in danger.
Tracking of personal billionare jets is absolutely legal and will take exactly 5 minutes of time and $0 for anyone who decide to do it. If Musk don't like it he is free to use a car instead.
When the Elon/Twitter transaction went through, there were a lot of HN comments stating that they thought that this might actually mean a more open, "freer" Twitter.
When I mentioned that Elon had already been using his power unilaterally to re-platform personal allies like Babylon Bee and Ye, I got all sorts of pedantry about the difference between suspension and banning, more pedantry about the Ye reactivation happening moments before the deal went through and some justifications about Babylon Bee not having done anything wrong, etc...
I will reiterate here again. Musk will squeeze every bit of perceived power he may have out of Twitter by issuing personal favours like the petty, tin-pot tyrant that he is.
If he was personally involved, then yes, that's fucked up.
Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that he personally did this and it's not in error, which is a leap. It's the same as everyone who blamed Jack personally for bans that were later reversed.
Let's see what the explanation is and whether it gets unbanned.
Hacker News fell for it, hook line and sinker. The number of people saying "give him a chance" and "he actually believes in free speech" dominated those who were like, "he'll probably just change who gets banned to be more in line with his personal beliefs."
My experience in threads about Elon and his companies, is there is a large number of people who are complete and absolute fanboys in the comments, that also heavily overlaps with a large group of people who have invested in tech stocks trying to get a return on their money.
Any criticism I've ever said of Tesla or Elon usually initially gets up votes and then half a day or even a few days later receives a lot of down votes. I always assumed it was people invested in his stocks doing it on their own, but his antics on Twitter show he's the kind of person that might actually employ people to down vote people critical of him and his companies.
I saw somebody call Musk "Phony Stark", and that seems to me a pithy summary of the cognitive biases going on here. This place is a magnet for would-be world-changing tech geniuses. Musk's level of technical skill is in dispute, but he's been incredibly good at hyping himself as Thomas Edison 2.0, and has been very effective in using that to attract cheap capital for gee-whiz projects. I get why he got the benefit of the doubt here.
But the Twitter acquisition has blown some big holes in the myth. He talked a good game about free speech, but it was clear from his initial bid for Twitter that he didn't really understand the realities of the business or the difficulties of hosting speech at scale. And since he took over, he has stepped onto turf a lot of people here understand quite well: running a business, managing software development, and the dynamics of online forums and social media.
And I expect this disillusionment will continue. Somebody described the Twitter acquisition as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I expect Musk will feel emotionally compelled to engage with Twitter personally, rather than doing the sensible thing and turning it over to somebody competent while turning his attention back to his at-risk car company.
So look for more of him pursuing personal grudges and putting far-right political views (e.g. "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters") into action with absolutely no regard to his pieties around free speech. In the US right, "free speech" is often code for "the powerful should never experience criticism or accountability". That may seem weird, but it's a specific instance of the more general point: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Cross that with "free speech" and you get what Elon is doing: free speech for the right people, arbitrary deranking and account bans for the wrong.
He said from the very beginning that he would make mistakes. Anyone one person is going to be biased with decisions these decisions and is not going to make everyone happy all the time. The real test is whether he can establish systems that can patrol the speech, so that no one person is at fault. This takes time.
Elon Musk is an idiot who bought is own bull. This is just a case of the dog catching the car.
He's never going to develop 'systems that can patrol the speech' because he's far too vain and think skinned to allow actual open dialogue. Like every other conservative, the only speech he really cares about is his own, and he is completely comfortable banning or delisting speech he personally doesn't like. He's tyrant man child.
"tyrant man child" "far too vain" "thick skinned" "like every other conservative"
Ever look in the mirror? That's a lot of hate and presumptions to assume about one person. And Elon is most definitely not a conservative. He has stated he voted democrat his whole life. His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
I'm pretty... confused, for lack of better terms, at the amount of vitriol that (overwhelmingly) liberals have exhibited during this whole ordeal. Dude bought a company. Stay or leave. Why is everyone flailing about so much? People have a weird obsession with Elon now.
Personally, I was skeptical of his claims to free speech and still am (especially given how he's handled it thus far). You simply can't have free speech platforms. You need protocols designed to achieve such a thing. Something like Twitter is always doomed to be censored.
But my disagreement ends there. I'm enjoying the Twitter files releases. Seeing the cooperation between Twitter and the feds is both unsurprising and unsettling.
Approximately nobody thinks Twitter is just another company. Clearly Musk doesn't think that; he's waxed poetic about how important it is to the future of humanity. Its hundreds of millions of users don't think it's just another company either. It demonstrably played an important role in journalism and public discourse.
> Dude bought a company. Stay or leave. Why is everyone flailing about so much?
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
If Twitter is the town square, Elon Musk is a natural disaster which rips through the town and destroys houses, forcing your friends to move to different towns. My problem isn’t that I made friends in the town; my problem is the natural disaster that ruined my town.
Social ties are important to people, no matter where and how they form. Breaking that up has real consequences. I’m sure you would feel the same way about your own social connections, and you wouldn’t appreciate someone blaming you for those ties being weakened by external forces.
>That's a lot of hate and presumptions to assume about one person
There is no assumption. It's based on the things he's said and done
>And Elon is most definitely not a conservative.
Yes he is.
>He has stated he voted democrat his whole life.
His word means nothing, but regardless, you can be conservative and vote Democrat. The Democrat party is for the most part the republican party with less bigotry.
>His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
His support for the GOP comes when they tried to overthrow the government and have installed a far-right religious fanatic majority on the highest court in the land? Yeah, he's conservative.
If the tradeoff is Elon bans all the horrible doxxers and childporn weirdos and permits all the vaxx skeptics, the non-establishment Left, and non-establishment Right.
Trump isn't a fascist! He's just "non establishment right"
Edit: I should probably point out this is sarcasm used to highlight the absurdity of the original posters "I'm fine with fascists ('non-establishment right') being back on twitter"
I should have done the reddit thing and added an "/s" to my comment to denote the intended sarcasm
My comment was exaggerated to highlight how absurd the OP's comment of "I'm completely fine with having 'non-establishment right' back" was. Because it boiled away any semblance of reality that these were awful people
I know what you mean, but I think it's worth being more generous here. Musk is very good at PR, so I think the adage about "all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time" applies here. If all you knew about him came from the general press, up until earlier this year it would have been easy to think positively and uncritically of him.
Speaking for myself only: Musk actually delivered electric cars that work. You can buy one, it will likely show up, and it will do what it claims to do. Building one of the few successful (ie not out of business) new car companies in the last 50 years is pretty damn impressive.
I'd heard of claims of labor disputes and other unsavory stuff at the Tesla factories, but honestly, I don't know of a single car company in the world without a history of and ongoing labor tensions.
The self driving was obviously a fantasy and Musk got way over his skis on claims there, but he's far from alone.
Watching him drive Twitter into the ground has been a revelation for me.
Eh, I was mostly neutral to mildly positive for lack of information. I knew he ran a couple of cool-sounding tech companies, but that was about it. I assumed he was at least somewhat competent and stable.
> In the US right, "free speech" is often code for "the powerful should never experience criticism or accountability".
This is just your partisan blinkers talking. Someone on the right could equally say “social justice” on the US left is often code for “now I take your stuff”. Both statements are partisan, largely inaccurate, and wholly unconstructive.
There are many people on the right deeply committed to free speech, like David French. There are many non-partisan institutions committed to free speech, like (formerly) the ACLU and (now) FIRE. There are many left wing people deeply committed to free speech, like those people fighting Florida’s “anti-woke” speech laws.
Abolitionism. Civil rights. Gay rights. Liberal triumphs built on free speech, on free criticism, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Don’t cede free speech to petty partisanship. Nothing good will come of it.
That’s, respectfully, very ignorant of the US right. Contrary to what Twitter would lead one to believe, Congresspeople like MTG wield absolutely no influence over the politics of the right, whereas the 2019 conflict over the future of Fusionism - the basic compromise underlying the coalition of libertarians and conservatives that comprise the modern US right - is defined by the debates between Sohrab Ahmari and David French. David French is a giant figure on the intellectual right.
(I don’t identify as a member of the right, to be clear, but these are just very obvious trends for anyone that actually observes the right, rather than just making assumptions guided by partisan antipathy.)
And mine is that that’s, respectfully, incorrect. There’s no partisan canard more banal than “other side dumb”. If you can’t understand why millions of well-intentioned people make different choices to you, what beliefs lead to those choices and where those beliefs come from; if you don’t understand how things like conservative media and the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and opinion leaders like David French all interact and intersect to produce the maelstrom of the US right - from the beliefs of the base all the way to Congressional GOP policy - then you simply won’t be able to effectively reach people on the right. You’ll be just as ineffective at political persuasion as some right winger ranting about how all Democrats are just “dumb leftie communists”, or some such.
I agree that there are people on the right committed to free speech and who demonstrate it through action, and good for them. But there are also a lot of people who, as with Musk, use it more as a fig leaf. And there are plenty who are openly opposed to it.
And I think being honest about that is one of the best to keep it from becoming purely a partisan issue.
We are not a monolith. I have many highly upvoted comments here pointing out that musks concept of free speech has always been half baked and would surely turn into “speech for me” once he’s actually running things.
Nobody "fell" for it. Musk is (self admittedly) on the autism spectrum, and his eccentric behavior in the past is well known, but his business ventures traditionally have been towards improving society, even if they are misdirected.
I mean all things considered, pre-Musk buyout, Twitter was largely the least moderated of the major social media sites I'm aware of. Yes, people constantly brigaded and flooded the like buttons, but unlike Facebook groups or subreddits, users couldn't ban other users comments, so you'd just have to accept the extremists.
So if Musk literally did nothing but continue that pattern, he could justifiably make the claim that it's as close to a bastion of free speech as could be allowed on a social media site of its size.
wow. It's almost like you haven't been around the past month. Did you even read the Twitter files? They were banning and shadow-banning all sorts of people! (They just called it "visibility filtering").
I am aware, but my point is that I'm decently confident that all big social media sites do what twitter does, on top of allowing community moderation tools, which Twitter largely does not.
The original claim is that Twitter was the least moderated. The argument was an argument in support of that. You're tilting at windmills, arguing against claims nobody made.
From what I saw it was just some people on Bidens campaign team reaching out asking Twitter to take down some tweets that contained leaked nudes of Bidens son, in line with Twitters ToS.
I feel like I've missed the boat on this, everyone is pointing at a smoking gun, but I haven't seen it yet.
Here's the last dump: part 5. From there you should be able to find the previous.
It's not just about "some nudes of Biden's son". It is about the suppression of a NY Post story about a laptop his son lost. It had details about conversations and taking money from foreign nationals. Supposedly, it was deemed Russian disinformation, but that was all a lie. It was real.
I'd seriously consider a better news and media diet... There was never any "Ukrainian soldier kill list" and the mere prospect of Elon being on such a list should have really raised your BS-meter.
We aren't misinterpreting your analogy. We're saying it's a terrible analogy.
I'll dumb it down. We're saying that you can be be a free speech absolutist and still not allow others to put GPS on your car for the purpose of tracking you. We're saying that you can't be a free speech absolutist while using your power to censor public information because it reflects negatively on you.
Airplanes are different, they all have GPS built in and are all tracked publicly. You can easily view any of this data for any plane. All ElonJet does is tweet it. Plus all the other celebs the dev has a Twitter account for are all still up, just Elon's that's suspended lol.
A car doesn't emit nearly as much as a leer jet. If it was just a matter of 'rich people doing rich things without influencing others', it'd be an entirely different story.
That's not a great analogy. Nobody "placed" any sort of tracking on his jet. The plane publicly broadcasts its location information out in the open. Somebody just looked at the information and tweeted it.
Planes constantly broadcast their identification and location data on an open channel - you can get a radio dongle for your computer and track every plane around you for miles.
Just an observation, but it seems that the Twitter files revelations are getting drastically less press than everything else Elon does. It almost feels like kill the messenger
Only maybe cause you work in tech (i assume). A lot of people don't know how these content moderation decisions go down. A mix of public rules, subjective parsing of their language, and external pressure. The last one being the one naive people might not really know about.
I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat.
Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
You were aware that Twitter was in direct contact with Democrat politicians and campaigns to censor opponents? It was news to me that they were have weekly meetings with FBI and Intelligence communities where the topic was directly about conservatives in government, I guess I was out of the loop on those.
I'm probably not going to convince you but I just read through the most recent ones and they are not that surprising. To me I would summarize the story as "there was debate inside the company about whether or not to ban Trump", which is a an unsurprising non-headline. In the files there are interesting arguments on both sides but ultimately there is (to me, and I'm guessing maybe not to you?) a clear argument as to why he ultimately got banned after some internal back and forth. He incited violence with his tweets.
The noteworthiests bits are government entities directing censorship of private speech.
Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort?
Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
> But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort?
Since it's the government(s) actually telling them what to censor, yeah?
> Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
Yeah? But they can't TELL twitter to do so, because that would be a violation of freedom of religion. So they - like many other parties - can report tweets just like everyone else.
> If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
You mean like what China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing already? That's all legal - according to the country's laws, anyway.
Moral however, that's a different matter. But I never considered either Twitter or the US government to be moral.
Be specific. What was specifically noteworthy about this that you want to see reported and known to the world. Don’t make up an imaginary scenario of deep dark government suppression of religion. Or use a real example. Dicks. Dicks were censored.
Can you link me to anything showing the New York Post published pictures of Hunter's dick? I can't find any. The closest I can find is reporting from this year on a sex tape published by Radar Online that shows some non-full-frontal stills.
The reporting in 2020 had emails that showed Hunter arranging meetings with Joe that Joe denied, texts telling associates not to refer to Joe Biden by name, as well as an email where Hunter would be holding money for "the big guy."
It looks like this could be quid pro quo official corruption, but there's not enough there yet to be sure. It needs to be investigated.
We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Bill Clinton because it looked like his real estate investment was too good to be true and he had a dodgy tax deduction. We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Trump based on non-specific allegations of collusion. The evidence here is at least as strong as it was in those cases.
The biden campgain, who wasnt part of the government (not that that matters), asked Twitter to remove posts that were of Hunter Biden's penis. No evidence has been presented that the non governement entity, the Biden Campaign, asked for them to remove the Post story. Which, again, is not illegal. If you have evidence otherwise, please present.
With narrow exceptions, all speech is protected. I used religion because I think it makes it easier to set aside partisan instincts.
Change it to a knitting forum that bans crochet posting, the principle is the same. Is it government censorship if the government helps the knitting forum to develop the anti-crochet rule, and then acts as watchdogs?
I think it's because they've largely proven to be uninteresting or unsurprising. The two big reveals early on were:
- The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected.
- Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval"
In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned.
What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.
I think it's interesting that the senior leaders did not seem to have an internal non-partisan justification for quashing the Hunter Biden story, though that obviously lends evidence to prior suspicions.
>In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards.
I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.
> The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected.
I don't understand why this gets so oft repeated. The Post article (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...) contains nothing resembling porn. There are some pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe, but that's not even a revelation. We already knew he had a drug problem.
What is a revelation is what could be official corruption, where Hunter gets paid exorbitant salaries to hold jobs he's not at all qualified for, and then funnels a portion of that money on to Joe. There's a possibility of quid pro quo that needs to be taken seriously and investigated further.
The evidence here is at least as strong as Whitewater and Russian collusion, and we appointed special prosecutors to investigate those. We should do the same here.
Who else could be "the big guy" that Hunter is to hold 10% for?
You’re talking about the contents of the laptop. Everyone else is talking about the tweets the Biden campaign asked Twitter to remove. The Biden campaign did not ask Twitter to remove all content regarding the laptop, they asked Twitter to remove a few specific tweets which contained pornographic images of Hunter Biden non-consensually posted to the internet.
The “reporting” from Taibbi didn’t say anything about the content of the tweets. Other people discovered we can see 2 of the 4 tweets, and both of those are Hunter Biden nudes (one of which is censored). You’re the one saying the Biden campaign was trying to take down tweets about official corruption. Where is your evidence?
Yeah, I conflated the Post story suppression and the takedown requests.
I'm also not making any claim about the contents of taken down tweets aside from the ones I was able to see on archive.org. Those are just 3 tweets of 5 that were requested to be taken down by "the Biden team."
AFAIK we haven't been given any links to tweets that the DNC requested to be taken down.
The Twitter Files also says that the Trump White House made some takedown requests. Excepting actually illegal content like CSAM, any such request would be government censorship.
None of it was news. As we learned during the Trump era, just because a narcissist claims that unjust things are happening doesn't make it true. I, for one, am glad that Twitter suppressed links to and media of Hunter Biden stolen and disseminated without his consent. All the other discussions in the "Twitter Files" are mundane, day-to-day happenings and decisions made at a ton of tech companies across the world with two goals: don't get sued, and don't get bad press. More than half of what has been released had already been covered many times over by other news outlets and journalists.
If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging.
So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.
I haven’t read everything but from what has been summarized by Weiss, Taibbi, et al, they just seem like primary documentation to things that were reported on at the time. I guess who exactly took which position around various decisions is new information.
That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.
Judging by the quality of ads that are being presented on twitter these days (when I see any at all), this is very obviously not true, no matter how much Elon claims otherwise.
Have to agree with this. The ads I see now are for the kind of things temporary mall kiosks sell. Hard to believe they are raking in ad dollars from those.
Yes. Leveraged buyouts usually end in default/bankruptcy. Hence the OP referring to bankruptcy as the "endgame". It was the expected outcome from the start.
Why would bankers agree to loan the money then? They get their year end bonus for originating the fee and don't care about the losses? Or do they think they can eventually get their money back by selling it to someone else?
Well, for starters, they collect those massive interest payments each year. They also saddle the companies with expensive, long-term consulting contracts which extract even more money. And if/when the company goes bankrupt, the courts often give financiers an equity slice of the new post-bankruptcy company.
The idea is usually to slash close enough to the bone that the company survives, but 100% of profits go to debt servicing. But this doesn't make for a company that's resilient to economic turmoil (or one that can invest money into growth). So the contingency plan is to ensure that they are first in line in court.
I think you need to avoid taking Musk’s word at face value and instead look at his actions. Avoiding paying rent and severance is not what a financially healthy company does.
The only logical reason I can think of to not pay something you know you’re legally obligated to pay is if you’re intending to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying. Otherwise you’re going to end up paying and pay a load of legal fees on top.
I guess one alternative is effectively taking a risky loan: you are running low on cash but you have a large cash flow coming in the future. Stop paying rent, eventually after a protracted court battle pay your debts with that future cash flow and the legal fees are “interest”.
Neither feels like the actions of a financially healthy company.
I don't agree with this. IMHO his career has almost been defined by an extraordinary ability to 'temporarily get away with shit'. For example, the current FSD story: I expect this will be a long, drawn-out, forgone conclusion where Tesla will eventually lose the battle by having to pay back owners but will win the war in having a cheap, easy loan from the most financially unstable years until now.
Other examples:
- Illegal firings of non-US Twitter staff
- Pushing back the Twitter acquisition
- Roadster/Truck deposits
- Radar will-they/won't-they
The ability to stop paying bills without seeing the inside of a cell or having to sleep in the cold is a powerful negotiation tool. Some won't even have the means to sue him. Despite being painted as failures, none of these will have a materially adverse affect on his life. Consequences are different for a person like him.
We will never know the true revenue of Twitter because it is no longer a traded company nor are they in any obligation to publish data of this kind publicly.
I'm guessing bankruptcy has always been the plan, but I never really understood why his financial backers would knowingly light a pile of money on fire. For oppressive governments, it seems easier to monitor & block activity on one major social media platform, rather than quashing twitter and dealing with the dozens of platforms that rise from the ashes.
Maybe it's a megalomaniac dictator thing, and I will never understand.
> I never really understood why his financial backers would knowingly light a pile of money on fire
Think about FTX, cryptocurrencies, Juicero... it's becoming pretty overwhelmingly clear that having money is not in any way correlated to being able to spend it intelligently. It's time to start seriously thinking about wealth caps.
> I'm guessing bankruptcy has always been the plan
Why? What advantage would that bring to him?
Honest question. With him overpaying for Twitter already (maybe not completely voluntary), bankruptcy looks like the fastest way to make the deal even worse.
How so? Either those loans are attached to Twitter (as I think they are), in which case his investment going to zero is still the worst thing that can happen, or they are attached to his wealth directly, in which case he will need to pay either way.
It doesn't take a financial wizard to realize that Twitter was insolvent from the day it was purchased. Saddling a company with an interest payment that's nearly double revenue is a clear indication to me that the time period from purchase-to-bankruptcy was going to be measured in months. So we can be pretty confident that everyone involved with this purchase was expecting Twitter to die quickly.
You and I are on the same page. But the "why" is not "why would they make such a poor financial choice," since it's clear the answer to that is "to kill Twitter." The why is really, "why bother killing Twitter?" I get Musk's reasoning, but I don't understand what his co-investors get out of the deal. Authoritarian regimes benefit from having dissidents operate on a centralized platform, because it's easier to monitor. Killing twitter pushes these groups out to platforms that are going to be decentralized and impossible to block. It's weakening their grip, not reinforcing it.
My best guess is that they assumed that Musk would stay on post bankruptcy and act as their pro-authoritarian sock puppet. But they didn't anticipate his complete ineptitude would drive users off the platform in such numbers.
Depends on what securities Elon had to provide to get the loans. If it was Tesla stock, well, thej it might not be as bad as deal for his financial backers, especially the banks. It might be for him, so.
I have no idea how this works. Did he pledge a particular number of shares, or was it a dollar amount? I.e. if he had to pay up, would it be based on the current value of TSLA, or the value at the time he put them up as collateral?
It could get ugly indeed. Tesla's brand image is slipping, and everything points to that just getting worse. Between Elon as the face of the company, and their seeming inability to deliver a competitive product now that everyone else has started making EVs... well, I wouldn't buy any TSLA for sure. You buy a Tesla now for the supercharger network, everything else is a compromise. That's a shaky place to be.
Musk put up $22.4B of his own money to buy Twitter, plus another $4B he already had invested.
Maybe Twitter was worthless when Musk bought it, and that $26.4B was - theoretically - already burnt in the deal. If you pay $26.4B to buy garbage, you lost $26.4B from the start...
Assuming Twitter is not worthless, Musk loses whatever percentage of that $26.4B actually has value. Worst case, that's probably at least 20% - which is still $5.28B.
He'll also still be on the hook for $13B in personal debt financing to banks. Unless Musk himself can claim to be bankrupt, he owes them $13B - and they're going to get it one way or the other.
Further, another $7B of equity investments came from questionable investors like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Who knows what they're going to do if Musk purposefully runs the company into the ground and burns billions of their money...
There's a lot of reasons why Musk can't just say oops, claim bankruptcy and leave everyone else holding the bag.
It's almost as if all the other investors aren't morons...
Yeah I really think the banks backed this deal with the intention of carving up Musk because of the way he financed this. I don’t know enough about the subject to be confident but I wouldn’t be shocked if he loses control of Tesla in the long run because of this
Not necessarily - bankruptcy is not the same as defaulting. Bankruptcy, or threatening it, would be an effort to prevent default and instead renegotiate the existing debt, likely with lenders taking a signficant haircut.
Musk's grand plan is to lose $30B or so of his own money, plus $13B from bankers who trusted that he would pay them back? That does not seem plausible to me.
Well, I would say that he didn't lose it so much as he spent it to destroy Twitter out of spite. In which case he must be getting value for his money, he certainly seems to be enjoying himself.
And yet, Twitter was insolvent the day the deal went through. The company is going to be "restructuring" it's debt by June '23. Whether that's in bankruptcy court or through private deals with bond holders.
The public data about the deal seems to indicate that backers wouldn't care as they have solid collateral from Musk personally in form of Tesla stock, so unless Tesla goes down as well, the Twitter deal will be profitable for them as all the losses are on Musk.
Honestly, I doubt it. Bankruptcy puts him under the very direct supervision of the kind of federal judge that does not fuck around. And network-effects businesses like Twitter can do pretty well even when being neglected. I think he might continue to use the spectre of bankruptcy to scare his staff; he clearly likes rule through fear to create a false sense of urgency. That leaves him with people who will do whatever he wants no matter what it means for Twitter's users or society at large, two things Twitter's previous workforce cared about.
It's like saying why don't I spy on you wherever you go, almost like the creepy stalker in Hollywood who terrorizes celebrities and don't respect privacy.
Private jets don't get privacy by FAA rules. If anybody has an issue with that, they can either take it up with FAA or stop using a private jet. Banning an account on Twitter isn't doing anything.
Would you like ketchup or mustard on this Very Important Boot?
On a more serious note, AFAIK (IANAL) Elon and other celebs are public persons who don't necessarily have the same kind of expectation of privacy since they've chosen to be in the public eye.
Meaning unless it's something protected by law like medical records or something done/talked about on their private property out of the public's view they can reasonably expect the public will know/talk about whatever they do.
How is that exactly a risk for a commercial aircraft unless you fear someone armed with a Stinger missile is out to get you? If they had one, I sincerely doubt they would be using public ADS-B ported to a Twitter account to track you around.
You could sometimes track Global Hawk drones above the Black Sea publicly.
If you have the means and contacts to obtain a Stinger, I'm pretty sure you have means to obtain info on someones whereabaouts. And why wait fore someone to be in the air, just use an IED while on ground.
I wanna be clear, this is just a mental exercise, I do not wish nor want harm to anyone. This is just because Elon's ego is getting the best of him.
It's public information (ADB-S) and the account is exercising its freedom of speech. Elon said on twitter that "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk" (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456)
I think Elon is/was trying to bring back the "glory days" of the internet where free speech was the driving force behind tons of early internet projects. Seemingly everyone was onboard with the internet being humanities bastion of free speech and that had to be protected at all costs.
Then the wild west internet was developed into a city and well, you just can't walk around shooting your gun wherever you want anymore. And changing the law to let people do that isn't going to bring back the wild west, and is more likely to just cause a bunch of chaos.
He's not, he was idealizing it. His rhetoric about free speech harkens back to the early/mid internet days. The internet today is not what it was 20 years ago when you could run a platform where rule #1 was "Free speech is absolute and guaranteed", and could actually fulfill that promise without consequence.
20 years ago free speech was still limited by the laws - if you have a site or if you host a site that does something illegal, it'll be taken down. 20 years ago and today. Consequences haven't changed, and I feel like you're glorifying the internet from 20 years ago as some ultimate free place.
Because the pre-9/11 Internet I remember had The Anarchist Cookbook et al. widely available, didn't have IP-related domain seizures or OS/browser-based safelists, and had Usenet and IRC instead of Facebook.
It seems accurate to say we've regressed in terms of free speech absolutism.
Right, websites today have vastly tighter bounds than what is allowed under the first amendment. Back then it was "if it falls under the first amendment, its a-ok here".
> when you could run a platform where rule #1 was "Free speech is absolute and guaranteed", and could actually fulfill that promise without consequence.
This is ridiculously ahistorical. The only time you found consequence-free speech on the Internet was when the reach was small or people that might not care didn't pay attention.
Platforms got shut down or censored all the time. Usenet access from an ISP's NNTP servers would often be missing a lot of groups or sometimes while hierarchies. Web hosts would take down pages or suspend accounts regularly. Even before widespread Internet access BBSes would get taken down. Steve Jackson Games' BBS got raided by the Secret Service because it had promo copy for a cyberpunk game they were writing. Rust n' Edie's BBS got taken down for software piracy and then sued because someone uploaded scans from Playboy.
The whole reason PGP exists is because Phil Zimmerman was concerned talking about anti-nuclear protests would attract the attention of the government. Pretty much every aspect of old cypherpunk developments were done because there was no assumption speech on the Internet was free from consequences.
Yeeah, when people who criticized Musk literally once have to flee their houses, due to rampant and false accusations of pedophilia from Musk friends, we can totally talk about free speech.
"Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him [...] things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia [...] A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory."
Typical Musk MO to randomly accuse someone of pedophilia.
Yes. And Musk fans insert "he got fired due to being lazy" into every discussion of topic on Twitter I have seen ... except he resigned instead of being fired and was not even employee.
Yeah honestly this is my biggest issue with public figures on social media. Without a second thought they can make such claims about anyone, and all of a sudden that person is receiving dozens of death threats from the crazies of the world.
At it's core, the modern internet-using demographic is incompatible with the pre-2000 wild west free speech internet.
To not mince words -- current internet users are not technically educated or paranoid enough, and their expectations have aligned with the guarantees provided by the current walled gardens.
That was the internet of "If you run an exe downloaded off a webpage, you install a virus with zero warnings."
--
That said, I do get where Elon was aiming, and I think news media is shit for either deliberately misconstruing or not understanding his position.
To wit: that in a truly open marketplace of ideas, extremism will be shudden with the sunlight of transparency.
So instead of nanny-stating things for people, show them how stupid neo-nazi's sound, and let them decide for themselves.
What I think he underestimated was how unprepared the world (users + civil groups + government) was for a return to that model.
For example, if Twitter enabled tools to help journalists correlate associated accounts... how many news organizations still exist who have staff to do that work?
I actually really like this metaphor. To extend it, I think we do have to address that part of the reason it's so hard to bring people over to this way of thinking is because deep down they personally want to shoot someone but it's easier to pretend not to understand than it is to actually defend that idea.
I support free speech and consider myself a libertarian, having much in common with the populist-libertarian-right, and the civil-liberties-left.
But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.
Are you going to track the locations of his vehicles and where they park next?
An alternative argument - if we're going to do it to him, maybe we should do the same to everyone (which is crazy because no one cares that much about random plane movements from rich guys unless they are politically connected, or green hypocrites, or involved in some crime, but Law Enforcement protects this data etc)
The data is public. Does taking publicly accessible data and tweeting it make it creepy? Or is more a problem to you that all the data is public?
You could hide within this, say, you know, take a first class flight somewhere on a commercial plane. The price you pay for having your own plane is that your plane's movements are public.
I personally support all of this data being public, it's generally a great way to gain information on clandestine government activities.
Not really. There is no guarantee that Elon is on the plane. He could loan it to a friend or one of his companies VPs. The plane could be at it's home airport, fly to another airport to pick Elon up, fly to a third airport to drop him off then return to the home airport. Elon would have been on only one of the three legs.
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
I think there are legitimate questions about how and where aggregating crowdsourced data on people's movements crosses a line.
I am sure that allowing crowdsourced license plate reader data that makes a full history of every car movement public would be well across the line.
I am not so sure that this crosses that line but I think that discussion would be much more interesting than the low quality Musk bashing that seems to dominates these comments. (Edit: There are also some high quality comments that are quite critical of Musk that add information and context and deserve to be more prominent, but they are in the minority as the low quality comments are pretty prevalent and not being downvoted sufficiently.)
Given that the LADD list exists, we either need to repeal that law, make circumventing that law a crime, or make the the process for inclusion in the LADD list more rigorous and public.
The current situation where we are allowing companies to bypass privacy laws by using crowdsourced data seems like a bad precedent.
I briefly looked at LADD, very interesting mechanism for restricting data by filtering it from feeds. From the rest of your response, it seems like it’s perfectly legal to crowdsource this data.
I don’t really have an opinion about Musk etc, but know plenty of people do and will continue to argue.
To your point of a distributed network of license plate readers, this to me seems akin to what passive wifi/bluetooth scanning is doing, as well as the SDKs that beam your location to other entities. (there was a post on HN a year or so ago but i’m blanking on the name.)
I wonder if there is any legislation in the US for these operations.
They probably do, they also use satellite imagery and AIS data to track cargo loading/unloading in ports and whatever else there is out there of data which might say something about the economy or specific companies or sectors or whatever.
>But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.
Yeah, people are saying "it's public info about a public figure", but I'm pretty sure that we could imagine all sorts of creepy-yet-legal digital gang-stalking that one can do, similar to how doxxing is legal but nearly-universally frowned upon. Not to say that the account should have been banned, but I don't see this as just harmless fun like others seem to.
Sometimes I feel like these public figures should be tracked even more - like who has been on Epstein's flight / island and should get a hard drive check.
In theory the various intelligence services and the FAA have this information, but it's not acted on.
He took the company private to promote his politics. There have been lies about free speech for as long as there has been speech. Can we stop clutching our pearls over this reactionary being, gasp, dishonest?
What does this have to do with what I said? If someone had punched Elon on the street and I had said "hey maybe that's not cool", would you be posting this same reply? Must bad, therefore the gloves are off?
Ok I’ll reframe. The speech doesn’t have to cause harm under new moderation rules, it’s all this guy’s toy. Nobody is punching Musk not even with a fire extinguisher
You are either a free speech absolutist or you are not. The moment you start putting exceptions because you consider it "creepy", then your support of free speech is the same as what most of the population believes in: free speech with limits.
It's interesting that you would put this at your limit because this is free and public data.
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean I need to know your private medical conditions
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean we need all potential targets of political assassination to have their schedules always publicly available with arrival and departure times with 10 digit grid coordinates
Just because I support free speech doesn't mean everyone should be able to track everyone else's cell phones, which are a proxy for a person's physical location
ADS-B data is public information. Anyone who wants to target Elon for whatever reason using this data does not need to go to Twitter to do it. Whereas.. private medical information is private.
Why on earth are y’all licking one of the richest people on Earths boots. The man is clearly using his power and money to stifle speech that that is critical of him. That’s not something that needs defending.
Elon's jet is flying around on public infrastructure. Airports, airspace, air traffic control, etc. Just like driving on public roads, you have no expectation of privacy if someone wants to sit on a street corner and write down every time you drive by.
The side effects of ADS-B have been really great in this regard. I love it.
His aircraft literally broadcasts this information through the sky. It's hardly tracking. And yes, we do it to everyone. Take a look at adsbexchange or flightaware.
We're all Libertarians aren't we. Your arguments aside, Musk said he would not ban this account because he believed in the free speech issue. So he's a liar and a hypocrite. May I ask what drives you to use your free time to run to the defense of a billionaire, who has the most popular social media tool on planet earth at his disposal?
Problem here is that there are clearly free speech bounds, but Elon Musk has campaigned publically about being a "free speech absolutist" which would entail not curbing any form of speech.
You can always find compelling arguments for banning speech or forms of speech and we'll continue to draw and redraw lines as a society. But you can't go around claiming to have some absolute principle and then renege on it any time it hurts your feelings and continue to be respected. Can you think of anyone else who has their flights tracked? Are Bill Gates' flights tracked? Why do you think that is?
Also being a public figure means that you lose some amount of privacy. If he doesn't want all this drama he could just stop talking and being a highly prominent public figure. Now we're just going to get a flight tracking website instead, probably with new features.
I think there are at least two problems with your alternative argument, if not more. The first problem is Elon Musk is politically connected and operates in the public sphere as a highly political person. The second problem is that there isn't anything that prevents people from tracking other rich people like they do Elon, except that nobody cares about what they do because they don't do things like buy Twitter. If you want a change I think you have to make private flight information unavailable, but until then I don't see any real problem with it. Stop flying a private jet if you don't like people posting where you are flying to and from. There isn't anything that prevents someone from reporting everywhere I go except that nobody cares. Hell, I self-report it on Yelp.
I read it's because the FAA has a list of flights that cannot be displayed on sites like that, called LADD: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
> The Administrator shall, upon request of a private aircraft owner or operator, block the registration number of the aircraft from any public dissemination or display, except in data made available to a Government agency, for the noncommercial flights of the owner or operator.
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data. Imagine that people put crowdsourced license place readers on their private property and then through a made an aggregate of this data on the public movements over every car available (and charged commercial users.)
That would be quite problematic for personal privacy.
ADSBExchange isn't quite the same as that since airplane movement is less granular and thus less privacy is lost. Also, the people who use private jets tend to be rich and powerful, so there's an aspect of "punching up" here that is not present in the crowdsourced car movement analogy. Still, I don't think the privacy considerations here are as cut and dry as the people who are claiming "it's public data, what's the problem?" are making it out to be.
I am certain that I believe that selling or providing aggregated location data on my movements (edit: via tracking my phone or vehicle) should be illegal.
I am less certain about if I feel the same way about plane movements. I do believe that is a discussion we should have rather than just assuming thr loss of privacy is worth the transparency.
Honestly, why would anyone really care where his jet goes unless you are him, his crew, or ATC?
The only reason folks would be obsessed with this is for nefarious reasons or just out of a blatant disrespect for the privacy of another person. Only negative reasons.
Looks to me like Twitter is financially doomed, and he's doing some combination of messing around with a broken toy and courting favor with like-minded people on the way to bankruptcy.
Aside from watching many accounts critical of Elon get banned or suspended, it’s been entertaining to occasionally look at Twitter’s front page logged out, because:
1) If you have no cookies, Twitter constantly recommends that you follow Elon Musk
2) “Elon Musk” appears to be permanently set as a trending topic for logged-out users
I believe #1 can be explained by him already being (and having been, pre-acquisition) one of the top followed accounts on Twitter, same as Trump during his days.
A lot of hypocrisy from Elon here, but I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to taking down these accounts that are tracking people as it's so close to a Doxing or could lead to something bad happening.
Yeah, meanwhile a guy who has millions of followers and keeps spewing conspiracy nonsense about stolen elections is allowed back in because of course nothing bad could ever happen out of inciting that.
>How often has she mentioned the elections were stolen again?
Often enough[0] (it's questionable if the Mueller probe would have even happened without Clinton & Democratic Party clamoring for it) and the last time just a month ago:
"Hillary Clinton: Right-Wingers Plot To 'LITERALLY STEAL' The Election In 2024"[1]
Aggregation of this type of public data (face recognition, license plates, cookies, etc) can absolutely create new privacy concerns. We should have privacy laws that protect us from this type of aggregation. Whether those laws should extend to plane transponder data comes down to the tradeoff between loss of privacy/security and transparency gains.
What I don't like is the argument that purely because some piece of information is "public", we should allow companies to aggregate and sell this data.
100% when it comes to getting legislation out that that limits what data companies can aggregate and sell. But I dont think the current location of the jets of the rich.... that's the starting point for the conversation?!
And as a reminder, these planes literally broadcast their location themselves to the public.
I do think it is worth pushing back on the argument that just because data is public or broadcast, that makes aggregation of that data automatically OK. (edit: e.g. many Bluetooth devices are set to be discoverable and so broadcast a unique Id that could easily be tracked an aggregated to reveal a LOT of location data)
I do think there are some strong arguments for allowing the aggregation of flight transponder data. I'd like to people making those arguments (such as the value of transparency in fighting corruption) rather than backing dangerous lines of argument because they don't like Musk or rich people in general.
Edit 2: One of the things that makes what ADSBExchange doing seem OK to me is the fact that in addition to selling the aggregated data commercially, ADSBExchange makes the data publicly available for non-commercial use. To me, that really helps tip the scales as it supports the transparency argument
Ironic, given Elon now has access to everyone's Twitter data, including location data and private messages - and he's already selling or giving it to others like political figures he wants to influence, mark my words.
“Private information: You may not publish or post other people's private information (such as home phone number and address) without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so. Learn more.”
Now.. his fight information is technically “public” but in that same sense, phone numbers and street addresses are also “public”. Thus, a suspension to the flight tracking account seems in alignment with Twitter policy.
Elon claimed he would not “ban” the account. And he has not done so. They were suspended.
Okay edit lol: I _actually_ didn't know that "Suspended" is the equivalent to "Permanently Suspended" aka"Banned" on twitter. Shocking, I know. I walk back my second statement.
The words are different because the actions are different.. Ban does not equal suspend.
But ehh.. to be fair. It looks like Twitter still does do permanent suspensions… idk how this is different than a ban. So, if this is a “permanent suspension”.. then sure, it’s essentially the same thing and I would concede my point… but we don’t know.
Good to see I'm vindicated in the prediction that Musk has zero interest in free speech, he only has interest in his narrative being dominant on Twitter.
I believe that is only the tip of the iceberg, given anti-vax narrative and transphobia is endlessly repeated by those on the far/alt-right. I see the "Prosecute/Fauci" tweet as a signal towards his intended audience for what kind of place he wants Twitter to be.
The way he runs his companies is "do a good job or else ill come in and do your job badly". Hes doing this with the world now. "Find a way to like me or ill fuck you up"
As with Trump, I think there's a tendency to impute some master plan behind Musk's bizarre and offensive statements. His actions show he doesn't spend a lot of time on planning. Is it a signal? Sure. But also he's just a shitposter with right-wing beliefs. I think he mostly operates on instinct.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and/or using the site for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do these things, regardless of what they're battling for or against, because it's not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.
You've unfortunately been doing it quite a lot lately. If that keeps up, we're going to end up having to ban you. Fortunately, you've also posted good comments, so this shouldn't be hard to fix. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
I have believed from the start that Musk's main motivation for buying Twitter was giving a boon to the Republicans to buy favorable treatment for his companies, because he isn't getting that from the Democrats.
He's also restored countless accounts that were banned under previous ownership. While banning ElonJet flys in the face of being a "free speech absolutist", he's certainly demonstrated that he's generally in favor of freer speech.
> he's certainly demonstrated that he's generally in favor of freer speech.
He's just changed who gets banned to be more in line with his personal beliefs. Accounts banned under the previous regime are unbanned and accounts that either were or likely would be permitted previously are now banned, with recent examples being the account that initially hosted the viral clip of Elon being booed on Chappelle's show and now ElonJet.
The latter example is particularly important, since both the public and Elon himself seemed to view this account as a litmus test of his commitment to "free speech."
well seems like he reactivated his account(pretty sure you got like 30 days or something to reactivate it after deleting or something like that), here's an archive of how it looked: https://archive.ph/W0d0v
The elonjet account however is a pretty bad one gotta agree, wonder if there will be any kind of explanation or attempt at one.
Twitter has also banned lots of left wing activist accounts, maybe we can agree that he has demonstrated that he's in favor of some free speech but not of free other speech?
He's demonstrated he's generally in favor of speech he likes. I don't think there's any obvious connection between those accounts getting banned/unbanned under his leadership other than "does Elon like this account?"
He certainly has not demonstrated that he's in favor of free speech. He did restore a bunch of accounts - mostly far right trolls - and banned a bunch of others. It's not like Twitter wasn't a cesspool before, but he managed to make it worse while blaming the previous regime for being asleep at the wheel. The guy who used to be in charge of content moderation recently had to flee his home after Musk suggested Twitter had been turning a blind eye to child abuse and his army of sycophants went on the warpath. This is after he fired the entire team responsible for dealing with that garbage. He accuses companies who are cutting back advertising of being against free speech. The guy is a straight up cyber bully. Anyone paying attention has known that for years. Free speech only matters when it's his own free speech.
seeing this as supporting "freer" is a take that falls apart pretty quickly when you specifically look at who's benefiting from this newfound "freerness"
He couldn't possibly. It's just not how any business is run. No idea if he was lying from the start or really was just so starry-eyed at his new toy that he never thought it through. Content moderation is done to maximize the value of the platform. Yishan Wong rightly pointed out that spam is free speech, but we routinely delete it because users hate it. Cloudflare went through the same song and dance about free speech until customers threatened to leave until they severed ties with Daily Stormer. Customers leaving is free speech too. And things like threats, abuse, harassment, doxxing may be the free speech of the abusers, it has the effect of chilling the free speech of victims or potential victims.
There's simply no Libertarian ideal that can be achieved in one place. The Internet as a whole is an absolute haven of free speech. Twitter caters to a certain audience, Facebook to another. They're very broad, but not infinite. There are plenty of other places that cater to the audiences that they don't. And people can always find ways to share their ideas with no interference. The thing they aren't entitle too is reach.
This is more like paparazzi following famous people around. Doxing some random person is different matter than posting the travel patterns of a Russian oligarch or an American oligarch like Elon.
Okay so if you reach a certain wealth level, everyone should be entitled to see where you are? If that's the world you want to live in, fine. My doubt would be that if you accrued such wealth, your opinion would rapidly change. So this position is doubtful.
I think it's better for everyone to be entitled to their privacy.
Pointing out that it really is not the same situation and it's not generic "doxing". A random individual is very likely powerless.
Someone who very visibly, very loudly, and very consequentially, inserts himself or herself into global and national matters is a very public person, by choice. No one is peering into his house and taking pictures. Someone published legally available public data about an aircraft, exercising their right to freedom of speech.
And certainly not powerless. Being an oligarch (or celebrity) -- you know, you get to call heads of state and have a chat -- is not about "wealth" or "fame"; it is a hazy zone between power and wealth.
I think you are only imagining people you dislike.
Try to think of someone you admire. Fighting for a good cause. A pro-choice activist or an female celebrity flying to an African country to work with NGOs for women's health issues or something.
The critical necessity of open and unobstructed expression to a functioning liberal/democratic order far exceeds such considerations.
> Try to think of someone you admire. Fighting for a good cause. A pro-choice activist or an female celebrity flying to an African country to work with NGOs for women's health issues or something.
Speaking of lovely Angelina, as a CFR member she will be well advised (by experts) to take necessary precautions, should they be necessary. In fact, I would be surprised if she does not have a professional security detail.
Btw, I'll take that bait ("pro-Choice") and offer you this: At a fundamental level, my view is that as a citizen of a free society my primary concern shall never be my choice or viewpoint, rather that which insures that I may freely express my views and be able to freely exercise the political right to promote or support my viewpoint. Anything that undermines fundamental mechanisms that support our free society, regardless of the ideological or right/wrong garb it takes, must be rejected. That would be a more accurate picture of what "[I] think".
If you are wealthy enough to buy a jet, the public is entitled to know where that jet is flying, because such info has been shown to prevent accidents (which endangers the public and costs money to taxpayers).
If you are wealthy enough and that tracking rubs you the wrong way, you are free to take public transportation like the rest of us. If Congress can do it, so can Musk.
It appears that all automated flight tracking accounts utilizing open source data from @ADSBexchange have been banned from Twitter, including @RUOligarchJets.
He's also posted internal Twitter screenshots, allegedly showing a VP was personally involved in @ElonJet moderation. (In the context of an earlier moderation action -- visibility filtering ("VF")).
- "A screenshot of what he claimed was an internal Slack channel showed Ella Irwin, the person appointed to replace Yoel Roth as Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking a “Team” to “please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately."
It's unclear if Ella Irwin still works at Twitter, but giving everything going on I strongly suspect there's no one to moderate against Elon personally banning an account he does not like.
She just got the role, why would she no longer work there? Presumably she was put there to enable this, after Yoel Roth abruptly left (and was subsequently defamed as a pedo by Elon, what's with the guy and pedophiles).
We have one person's recollection in an interview (his ex-wife). While I'm inclined to believe her, its also no secret Justine doesn't exactly like him very much and isn't generally inclined to say nice things about him to begin with - hardly shocking following a divorce. Proof is a strong word.
> Well, the Russians weren't attempting to genocide a country/culture at the point that we contracted with the Russians.
Do you really believe that Russia grown to be the biggest country on Earth by playing nice with natives? Or if it suddenly became evil after revolution? Russia destroyed other cultures every time it got an upper hand and was built on blood of mostly other people.
> Do you really believe that Russia grown to be the biggest country on Earth by playing nice with natives?
No, I think they got to be the biggest country on Earth by having land that would support decent population and econonic activity next to Siberia; Canada got to be #2 by pretty much the same method, with a different stretch of marginally useful Arctic and near-Arctic land.
Putin is said to speak English although not nearly as well as German. There's not many instances on him speaking English at length aside from some prepared remarks so its hard to judge his exact command.
I'm really worried about how our society is devolving to calling everyone we don't like a pedo. I hate Elon intensely but unless there is any actual evidence of pedo-like tendancies let's leave that alone. And I know that he famously played this game already and is doing so currently with former Twitter employees but lets not stoop to that level if we can avoid it.
The only real "evidence" is that picture of him with Ghislaine Maxwell. He claims it was a photo bomb, party attendees recall the two of them interacting. I think we'll never know the truth there.
Musk has previously claimed his use of the word "pedo" comes from South Africa where he says it is/was a common insult when he was growing up, akin to calling someone a "creep" in American English
I don’t mean to be a antagonistic but as the owner of twitter why would we expect he not have the right and ability to ban anyone he likes? When it was publicly held there was some accountability to the shareholders as part of the public. Now he can literally carry a sink around wherever he wants
Nobody said he didn't have the right to do it. It's his company now.
However he said he wanted twitter to be a free speech platform of some sort, so that's seen as hypocritical.
Moreover, I think that this erratic behavior is going to crater Tesla stock [1]. Regardless of your political leanings, Twitter Elon is showing signs of weakness, distraction, emotional decision making, and an inability to avoid suboptimal choices. In a very public forum, with all of the world watching and media stacked against him.
Elon is looking like he got suckered into buying Twitter and now has to play the difficult and mundane role of private equity turnaround so that he can recoup his -- and his investors' -- funds. It's a huge distraction from his more important businesses.
Folks are already asking him to step down as Tesla CEO [2]. Best to kick a dog while he's down.
I think Tesla has been overvalued for some time. It's not the only EV company in the world, and soon every company (and domestic production capacity worth its salt) will be pumping out EV options for consumers. This Twitter deal was the activation energy required to jostle the Tesla stock out of its lofty position.
I hope I'm wrong, and that things at Twitter begin to stabilize. I think that SpaceX is one of the most important companies in the world right now, and it needs a leader who can continue to push the boundaries of what was thought possible.
[1] I'm thinking of putting my money where my mouth is and buying puts, which is something I rarely do.
As I recall, he was taken to court and was on the path to being forced to adhere to his word in the form of a signed contract. I wouldn't call that being suckered.
We don’t know every detail, and probably never will. If you look at the list of events that happened before he first announced his intentions to buy the company outright, you could intuit that he did not intend to buy the company, and that external elements sweet talked him into it.
> Twitter Elon is showing signs of weakness, distraction, emotional decision making, and an inability to avoid suboptimal choices
Well, c'mon, this has always been the case since the very beginning under both Dorsey and Agrawal. The difference then was that the other half of the world was condemning it.
As a platform Twitter was pretty stable. It didn't have to introduce new features like Official then gold checks to counteract the impulses of its CEO.
Flying by the seat of your pants is probably fun for Elon but it makes the product worse. If the product gets worse, the people leave.
He certainly has the right to ban anyone. Just like Twitter had the right to do so before he took over. The mismatch is between Elon's rhetoric, which defined this kind of arbitrary moderation as contrary to free speech, and his actions which simply continue the trend but now with a different bias.
That is not true in all jurisdictions and definitely not in Germany. Since twitter offers it’s services to the general public, bans must be non-discriminatory and are open to challenge in court. Twitter can ban anyone who violates their ToS, but not just anyone Elon dislikes.
It’s not surprising this exists. It’s equivalent to the Hausrecht in the physical world - if you make your place available to the public (a bar, restaurant, supermarket) you no longer can kick out just anyone without cause. You can ban people from entering (or make them leave) for reasons, but those must be non-discriminatory and not arbitrary. “I don’t like you nose/hair/color of your skin” won’t work. “You need to wear shoes or leave.” is likely valid.
> That is not true in all jurisdictions and definitely not in Germany. Since twitter offers it’s services to the general public, bans must be non-discriminatory and are open to challenge in court.
Sure. But since ElonJet is run from the US, in a dispute between a US company and a US user, only US law is really relevant, any foreign court is likely to dismiss the claim as outside of their jurisdiction. As far as US-based users go, he basically does have the right to ban anyone, so long as he doesn't start banning people on the basis of a protected characteristic such as race or sex.
Even if we suppose, counterfactually, that ElonJet was run from Germany – while the German legal system might in that situation be open to hearing the case, I doubt ElonJet would win, when you consider the extensive emphasis which German (and EU law) puts on privacy rights, and the fact that it is willing to go a lot further in limiting free speech in the name of privacy than the US legal system is.
We'll, technically his company is under a consent decree and that makes a lot of what twitter changes including internal processes under the FTCs mandate, so no Elon can't just do what he wants to and expect no legal repercussions.
No one is questioning his right to ban people. People are pointing it out because it exposed both hour thin skinned he is and what hypocritical BS his “free speech” utterances are.
You're responding to a thread with evidence that a Twitter VP targeted an account that Elon has previously shown interest in. Next you'll tell me that Nixon didn't know anything.
When people make leaps of logic regarding a wide assortment of things, we call it what it is: a conspiracy theory, lacking evidence, and false. Likely later it will turn out to be true, but it isn't yet, so we are obligated to frame it this way to fight the spread of misinformation. This thread is full of people who have a hypocritical stance on this approach to information sharing. I just wish they'd be consistent.
But there is evidence. Even if we are the most generous and say Elon himself did not know about this, do you really believe a VP would take this action if they don't believe it is what their boss wishes? Take the other example I posted further up thread [1], Musk asked Andy Ngo directly "what are the accounts we should look at" and after that a bunch of the accounts get banned. Yes Musk did likely not press the ban button himself, but the evidence is overwhelming that he supports and initiated these actions.
Jets pollute and use a lot of finite resources. Tracking them is necessary for aviation safety. So making that info more public doesn't strike me as such a violation of privacy.
If Elon is concerned maybe he could just rent a jet as needed instead of keeping one all to himself.
If they were publishing "Elon has flown X miles, used Y fuel and created Z emissions in the past T time" that would be far different than what they do.
You are reaching for excuses that can't possibly apply. Perhaps you should ask why you'd go so far to excuse this doxxing, but not others.
I personally dislike Musk and view him as a conman. I take issue with several things he's done at Twitter and even more with what he's done at companies like Boring Company, Paypal, or Tesla (eg, promising the first car to the actual founder then launching it into space just to spite them).
People here just managed to find a thing where he happens to be right (whether it comes from personal pettiness or actual principle).
Fair point about the bill not being passed. I should have noticed that.
> Second, if it were passed, intent can be very hard to prove -- even in seemingly clear-cut cases.
It's not at all clear cut in my opinion. This is information that is already in a public database, and it's the location of an airplane - not a person. That's not a technicality, unless the airplane is somehow a primary residence.
It's pretty different than publishing someone's private phone number or the name of the school that their children attend. The latter type of information is actually private.
I don't think anybody didn't expect he would have the right or ability, but doing something like this sets a precedent that may turn many folks off of Twitter and cause folks to cry "Censorship!" which I believe is something Elon touted he would explicitly avoid.
The "Twitter Files" also generally fail to make that case for the site's previous ownership. For example, they attempted to show that there was censorship of Hunter Biden discussion, but nearly every example in the thread was just explicit nudes of Hunter Biden being removed because revenge porn is against the rules. They also claimed to show a bias against the account "Libs of TikTok," but the evidence they presented showed that the account was actually given preferential treatment, with a flag on the account to not impose any penalties on the account without first getting the OK from management.
So it's pretty rich to stretch that far to whine about imaginary censorship and then just blatantly censor speech you don't like.
> I know this site will always continue to support Musk
I agree with your other points, but this is missing the mark. There is some degree of editorial control over what “this site” publishes, but none on the comments (you’d had to go quite far to get banned). “This site” is not a homogenous single-minded entity. And you don’t have to dig far to see both stories and comments very critical of Musk. I happen to share that point of view, but that’s besides the point.
It makes him look bad to those who hated him already (many commentators here), but to be frank it doesn't really matter.
The previous bans were controversial because they marginalized a voice. It was never about the specific people in question. It was basically invalidating the voice of many people since these were highly influential people or politicians.
There's a huge difference. I'm not taking a position on those particular people in any way, just saying that most people don't care about ElonJet in the slightest and why catching him on technicality here doesn't matter (in my humble opinion).
I don't particularly care about Musk and I don't use Twitter. I also think the decision to ban a page that makes already-public information about a specific person's jet's location very-much-more-public is pretty easily supportable.
But even so, I find the hypocrisy pretty interesting here. This person bought a company for $44b to improve transparency, specifically said he wasn't going to ban this account to show his commitment to transparency, and then his new company banned the account about a month later. Not only that, but the company didn't ban the related accounts showing the location of others who didn't happen to buy the company out of their commitment to transparency.
Come on, that's interesting no matter what your view on the individual.
Agreed interesting for sure, and definitely hypocritical. I'm just pointing out why it might not matter to those clamoring for freedom of speech in support of Musks takeover.
The thing is, there were two kinds of people clamoring for freedom of speech in support of Musk's takeover: those with genuine concerns, and those who were disingenuous and were mad that Twitter wasn't a safe space for people with certain views. Those in the former camp wanted to restore a balance to Twitter, while those in the latter camp preferred to reshape Twitter in their own political image.
Through his actions, Musk has shown himself to be in the latter camp. Those in the former camp should be just as mad about post-Musk Twitter as they were about pre-Musk Twitter. Problem is I don't see many people (here on HN at least) saying "Wow, I thought Musk would fix Twitter but this is not what I expected when he said he supported free speech!" To me, that shows maybe a lot of people were in the latter camp all along, and are pleased things are working out just as they expected.
I think you're watching this through Musk colored glasses, it's also telling that you call rich powerful white men a marginalised group.
It's also not that he only banned the elonjet account. He banned the accounts of people posting the video that showed him being booed in SF, he banned several left leaning journalist accounts after a campaign from alt right groups [1]. It really just shows the hipocrasy, and many people are taking note.
> The previous bans were controversial because they marginalized a voice. It was never about the specific people in question. It was basically invalidating the voice of many people since these were highly influential people or politicians.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but whose voice are you calling marginalized? Is it not the voice of politicians like e.g. Trump? Is Trump not a white rich and powerful person (I was not specifically talking about Musk).
I think the problem was actually that Twitter under previous leadership was way too lenient with powerful people. Take Trump for example, he was arguably breaking Twitter TOS on a regular basis, but never faced consequences (I'd argue because he was driving engagement so it was not in Twitters interest to ban him). When they finally banned him, it thus seemed arbitrary.
Similarly, how come Musk never got a suspension for his pedo comments, also pretty clearly a TOS violation.
I think therein lies the main problem with most social media platforms, they clearly have different standards for people who are influential enough and the rest of the population and this is by no way a left/right thing.
It's the constituents that voted for those politicians or support those influential people who are marginalized. You know in this case, almost 50% of the country. By silencing politicians especially (in a democracy anyways) you silence the people behind them.
People don't always agree 100% with their politicians. But by banning them you take away their voice entirely.
I said very clearly I was not talking about the actual people behind the accounts themselves. I am not feeling sorry for Trump or for Elon here in any way.
Are you saying that 50% of US is ... marginalized?
How does that even work?
And if 50% share similar political opinion, how is that even possible that this opinion would be somehow inaccessible?
The opinion of people like Trump or Elon is very easy to access, and supported by plenty of people. The majority of them is never banned, because the bans are not targeting an opinion, but rather conspiracy theories and abuses. You can have exactly the same philosophy as Trump, talk and promote this philosophy, and yet never say something that will make you banned.
By publicly removing several democratically elected officials of a representative democracy from a platform commonly used for political communication in an official capacity yes I am in fact saying that those people are marginalized.
It's been interesting to follow this discussing but I find your thesis unconvincing.
"Trump voters" is not a marginalised set, it contains super pacs and Peter Thiel. It may contain subsets that are marginalised but those sets are marginalised by being marginalised, not by being trump voters.
People who have little opportunity for advancement being white and Christian does not mean that whites or Christianity is under threat.
Also, trump got away with his shit for years before being banned. That looks like privilege, not oppression.
I take it you see the irony of being woke about the anti-woke
> People who have little opportunity for advancement being white and Christian does not mean that whites or Christianity is under threat.
As a resident HN Christian, I don't concur.
We've seen a number of Christian individuals & businesses recently taken to court/UCMJ action for refusing to do things that are contrary to their religious (Christian) beliefs, or for openly stating their beliefs [1] , [2] , [3] , [4]
The same protections afforded to observant jews and practicing muslims should also be afforded to Christians.
If a Muslim or Jewish person refused to sell you pork, you’d say they shouldn’t work at a deli. Your religion is not under fire. Its adherents sometimes have a persecution complex.
That does not mean they are marginalized. For every communities, you will find neighbors quarrels, and the examples you show are mainly that (for the ones I was able to access): someone wants X, someone wants Y, hence quarrels.
It would have been more relevant to show examples where the "attacker" did not had any stakes or if it would have been proven that the "attacker" has reacted this way because the person is christian, but would not have reacted if the person was muslim, or atheist, or ... but defended the same actions. For each of your examples, I really doubt there would not have been exactly the same conflict if the person was atheists but had the same strong views.
At the end, it may even feel like Christians are slowly discovering that they are people like others and that there is no reason the society should always settle to their advantage. In a way, it feels like the "threat" in question is "stopping being privileged".
That's the problem with thread discussion. The comment you are answering to is answering to a comment that says that they are marginalized. If you are now reacting to this comment by changing the context, you are the one moving the goalposts.
But in fact, it does not really change my argument: the examples that you are providing does not show anything bad against Christians. What you provide is just examples of neighbors quarrel where one party happens to be Christian. If you think it means Christians are under threat or unfairly treated, it makes me feel that you are thinking that the normal situation is when society always side with Christians all the time, which would be a pretty strong privilege for Christians, and very unfair for non-Christians.
But by your logic, it would mean that being elected gives you immunity of doing whatever you want and nobody cannot do anything against that without being accused of "marginalizing". That's a "free out of jail" card that does not make any sense in democracy. In democracy, contrary to dictatorship, elected people don't have special privileges: they are judged and treated the same way other citizen are, especially if avoiding the problem would not have stopped them expressing what they wanted to express.
The reason several people were removed is because they have made really poor choices. For example, Trump could have defended his thesis while still calling for people to not take violent action. It is incorrect to pretend that the bans are stopping politicians of doing politics: you can defend your party or explain your political ideology without breaking twitter's rules. It is incorrect to pretend that the bans are targeting a political side: if you are promoting a political ideology that is not based on hatred and lies, then you never _need_ to post anything inciting to violence or spread misinformation.
If now you are saying that Republicans are more often banned, maybe one reason is that Republicans are more prone to accept hatred or lies as part of their political ideology strategy. But being banned is a strategy consequence, it's the price you pay if you go down this road that is, again, totally a choice (as long as your political ideology is not based on hatred and lies).
>If now you are saying that Republicans are more often banned, maybe one reason is that Republicans are more prone to accept hatred or lies as part of their political ideology strategy. But being banned is a strategy consequence, it's the price you pay if you go down this road that is, again, totally a choice (as long as your political ideology is not based on hatred and lies).
I don't think that aligns with the doc drops from Twitter
I'm not american, so I don't care about republicans or democrats. But I think the doc drops from Twitter is not really telling much. On the contrary, it illustrates that moderation was generating a lot of discussions and even disagreement, which would not have been the case if it was just a matter of "banning the ones we don't like". So, it looks more like when ban occurred, they really were motivated by something more than just "we don't like them".
I'm not american, so, some of the arguments also seem crazy. For example, the fact that the majority of the employees vote democrats does not imply that the majority of the employees are immoral persons who will cheat without scruple. It is very worrying that in US, apparently, people are so polarized and uneducated to democratic concept that if they see someone that happens to be "on the wrong side", they will think they can only be the worst of the monster without even questioning that for one second.
For every bans I've seen, the person banned was ALWAYS doing a mistake, was giving a good excuse to justify the ban when it could have been easily avoided. For example, Trump could have phrased his messages such that he calls for more calm without changing his political message. He did not, he choose to send what he has sent (he had his reasons, but it is not about "freedom of political opinions", because, unless his political ideology is based on hatred and lies, his political opinions are not restricted by avoiding hatred and lies).
This is my main issue with this: if republicans are unfairly targeted, why are they so stupid to always give huge elements that can be used, later, to justify the ban. Just use your brain and don't tweet something that is, objectively, at least borderline. If republicans are victims of the democrats, why are they not even trying to not give them ways of going away with it?
But that's not the first paradox in the US. Another one: Trump claims the election was stolen. He was the president when the election was organized (and was already predicting frauds months before the election days). He claims the steal occurred in states where he almost won, which are states where he has a lot of supporters and allies. And yet, he failed to catch any little proofs. If the election was stolen, then he is super incompetent, and should never be reelected: he has proven he is easily out-smarted by democrats.
This is not, in my mind, an issue of free speech. It is an issue of wealth and power.
The right to free speech entails the right to censorship. I can freely throw someone out of my house for expressing something I dislike. A publisher can refuse to publish someone's work for any reason. If someone expresses an idea others find distasteful, it is their right to boycott that person and anyone associated with them.
My problem is not with the censorship. It is with the money. Our oligarchs are comparable in power to royalty of old, and they act with no oversight and no accountability. Musk was able to waltz in and start dictating terms to millions of people. One man should not have that kind of power.
I will not claim to know where the lines should be drawn. It is clearly OK for someone to run a newsletter about local Yorkshire Terrier breeders with an iron fist, but it is clearly not OK to run a global monopoly of a social media company in the same way. I don't know what happens in the middle ground.
Elon’s criticism of the former twitter is that they went against published policies or enacted them against one group more than another.
Now twitter doesn’t really have policies, just Elon’s whims. And those can change at any time and without any external consensus. No one knows what the rules are.
Replace Twitter with any other private company and see what you think.
For example, Valve is a private company that can ban anyone they like from Steam, but we wouldn’t hear this defense if a publisher get banned capriciously and lost their income.
No one said he doesn't have the right to do it. We're just pointing out that he said he was a "free speech absolutist", that he would allow "both sides", and he said in an actual tweet, "I won't ban @elonjet". He is a hypocrite on multiple front, and we're just pointing that out to his fans who have musk colored glasses evidently
My understanding is that the 'Trust and Safety Council' was an international board of external stakeholders and consultants to help with 'Trust and Safety' (moderation) at Twitter, NOT the 'Trust and Safety' division within Twitter.
Shadow Banning is alot more narrow than general VF. VF could be used for reasons like maximizing time in the app, encouraging high value activities, etc...
If my reach is being artificially limited without my knowledge it's still shadow banning. It doesn't change anything if the purpose is selling more ads instead of personally disliking me .
The thing is, shadowbanning had a definition. Twitter at one point even defined the term in front of Congress I believe. Shadowbanning is Visibility Filitering, but not all Visibility Filtering is shadowbanning.
Unless everyone can use the same terminology to mean the same thing, these conversations are pointless.
The sloppy definitions allow all sorts of stupid conspiracy theories to be "proven true" when they clearly aren't. Twitter's always limited reach of accounts, that's been in their TOS for 4+ years:
The conspiracy theory that Twitter shadow banned accounts to a level in which even people looking for their Tweets couldn't find them, remains false. Everything that everyone Tweets is visible to everyone who looks at their Timeline. This is explicitly how Musk promised to run the service, "Freedom of speech, not reach" and is basically how Twitter has operated for years with the exception that old Twitter banned people who repeatedly violated the TOS.
No, everyone knew that this system existed for quite some time. The site's UI even surfaces it by hiding some filtered tweets behind a "view more" button. The conspiracy theory is that the feature was used specifically to silence conservatives for their political views, or that huge conservative accounts that showed up everywhere were somehow suffering from it when their latest brain enhancement pill sale didn't go well enough.
Oh really, "everyone knew" ? Apparently not certain journalists, like Matt Binder below, or not even Twitter execs at the time back in 2018 when Trump claimed conservatives were shadow-banned... Classic from the left: "first, ridicule it. Second, strongly challenge it. Finally, pretend this has always been the case and every one knew". Clearly in phase 3 here with yet another fakenews from leftits...
"The practice of shadow banning essentially involves making posts visible only to the person who created them and invisible to their intended audience"
There is a substantial difference between tweets not being promoted by the algorithm and tweets being invisible. A "shadow-banned" user's tweets would be invisible to even their followers.
I think it's helpful to emphasize that "Visibility Filtering" and "Shadow Banning" since they are functionally the same thing, but seem to have very different connotations depending on whether the speaker considers the action to be merited. As many on this forum know, one of the oldest and best ways to limit spam or other unwanted user behavior is to hide the content without informing the user, in order to slow down the arms race between bad actors and moderators.
From my read of the “Twitter Files” I hey have multiple levels of ways to reduce a tweets reach. Not allowing a tweet to trend, not show up in Search etc. I believe the “heavy” part refers to how many, and how hard these levers are pulled.
No, that tweet predates the more recent ban tweet by 2 days. I just checked and ElonJet and a couple of the other accounts definitely show as suspended/banned to me.
Time is ordered so that things happen after other things.
So first @ElonJet appeared to be shadow-banned or visibility-filtered.
Then @JxckSweeney commented on that.
Then it appeared that @ElonJet was back to normal.
Then @JxckSweeney commented on that. *THIS* is what you linked to, from Dec 12, two days ago.
Then today, two days later, @ElonJet was suspended.
Then you posted your comment, apparently missing the passage of time from Dec 12 to Dec 14.
Then also today, @JxckSweeney was suspended.
Seems to me it's perfectly in line with Elon's 'freedom of speech, not reach' comments. Can't say about suspending the account, but as a private company with whatever TOS (I have never read any ToS of any software or service that I use), I suppose this was bound to happen.
HackerNews is NOT turning into Reddit (saying such a thing breaks the site guidelines).
However I think it's OK to say that any topic about Elon Musk on HackerNews always descends into cringe / misinformation / le spaceship man bad / populism / repetitive memes; all fed by people who apparently source their news from /r/politics and r/whitepeopletwitter on Reddit and Business Insider bottom-tier clickbait media.
Posts pushing baseless and debunked conspiracy theories[1] are getting downvoted into oblivion. Posts with highly questionable takes[2, 3] are also seeing the same. Even perspectives that tend to agree with the general HN consensus but are overly antagonistic[4] are receiving this treatment.
It's pretty clear Elon wants everyone that has insulted or crossed him or otherwise proven him wrong to suffer some consequence to alleviate his bruised ego. Fauci, ElonJet, and more
Think I'm wrong? Let's see if he'll go after Jack Dorsey in the future for recently correcting him on going after CSAM.
Didn’t Jack Dorsey invest a billion dollars of his Twitter shares in Elon Musk’s takeover?… Hard to imagine him going after him.
But then again, Elon is hell-bent on alienating everyone. I was planning on selling our Land Rover and getting a Tesla but I changed my mind because a lot of people will associate me with the guy or think I agree with him. Still.. amazing cars.
Are they really that nice? I've been in a few but never owned one. I hear a lot about fit and finish issues unbefitting a car of that price range.
What does a Model S get you that an S-class doesn't, or a Model 3 against, I don't know, an Audi A4? Is it just all about that electric drivetrain? I don't yet have a strong preference on electric vs. ICE, but I would gladly pay more to have a car without the "slap an iPad in the middle for every UX" design of the Tesla.
Indeed, at this point, if I had the money (or was in the market for an EV) I would buy a Mercedes EQS (or Porche Taycan) instead of Tesla model S or a of BMW i4 instead of a Model3.
15-20 miles, but that turns out to be enough for >95% of our trips. But the best thing is that we never have range anxiety. Also, we get a full charge overnight from a regular 15A outlet.
I don’t know what happened in past year. But to say we didn’t take action for years isn’t true. You can make all my emails public to verify. Company took away my access to email or I would.
I always feel dirty following the latest Twitter news. It feels like reading the tabloids at this point. But anyway, is there anyone that still buys the free speech angle from Musk? So far, he has just brought back some right wing accounts, removed some left wing accounts, and took on personal vendettas, like this.
I think Twitter may actually end up making more money in the future. Musk seems to be able to market his companies very effectively. I’m assuming there is significantly more interest in the going ons at Twitter since he took over.
Dozing a person’s whereabouts isn’t free speech - yes I know you can fish this information out but it’s obvious this is intended to make it easy to figure out where he is. I’m amazed at the replies to this thread arguing this is a speech issue, especially considering the obvious need for heightened security due to what I’d imagine is a flood of death threats.
Death threats are not covered by free speech, but the location of a jet is not a death threat. I don't think you'll find any legal precedent that says doxing isn't protected speech. Doxing is a bit of forum etiquette and is not considered taboo under other norms.
It's also incorrect to say the jet's location tells you where Elon is. I have a friend who's ridden that jet. My friend isn't Elon, but worked for him
“fish this information out” makes it sound like it's hard to use any of the common websites which do the same thing. If the goal is security, he either needs to stop flying a personal jet or accept the cost of having adequate physical security where he does. Anyone who was incapable of looking up the jet's location without Twitter is unlikely to be competent enough to pose more risk than they would, say, staking out one of the buildings he frequents.
Pull vs push. The model where a person’s jet is posted on Twitter is one where the information can go viral and get pushed to everyone. It is a hugely different situation in terms of distribution and expected impressions.
Could you please point out where in the "free speech absolutism" the push vs. pull nuance comes in? That's the whole point of absolutism, you have to get rid of the nuance.
And just on this very website I have been told by very vocal Elon fanboys that "you either support free speech or you don't, no halfway points about it" when I tried to explain why banning/muting hateful rhetoric may be necessary in a social media.
I was responding to what you wrote in your post. With regards to free speech principles, I think the question you are asking is if the rule against this kind of thing in the Twitter rules is in conflict with the principle of free speech. (Specifically broadcasting location data about an individual.)
Free speech absolutism has always been a fake frame since it is actually “legal speech absolutism” even according to Musk.
I didn’t say anything about absolutism - my take on free speech is that “doxxing” speech like the GPS coordinates of an individual, particularly when it is not newsworthy or connected to current events, doesn’t do anything to contribute to the marketplace of ideas beyond increasing personal risk to that person, and therefore is under motivated from the perspective of the principle of free speech.
Can you expand the scenario you're imagining where there's a grave threat to Elon Musk's personal safety because someone can see where his jet is located, but only if it goes viral because that person would not otherwise be motivated enough to spend 30 seconds looking it up?
I'm having trouble seeing even reach the level of Bruce Schneier's Movie Plot threats much less the level where it would warrant restricting someone's ability to share public information. We were, after all, tediously reassured that Musk's deep and heartfelt belief in the sanctity of free speech extended even to the point of not restricting people who made specific threats to attack the U.S. system of government, so it seems quite disingenuous for him to then turn around and block people to prevent comments which might hurt his feelings.
Coming up with scenarios is just an invitation to get into the weeds. The situation to me reduces down not to the jet per se but the fact that it’s basically a way to know with high confidence exactly where he is located. It’s not hard to imagine a hysterical mob animating itself into a point where people descend on the location in question with bad intentions.
In other words, you don’t have a plausible scenario - just a highly improbable hypothetical that some angry mob would be foiled because nobody would know about flight tracking websites or think to watch his offices.
It’s also very telling that his acolytes think this ineffectual attempt at protection justifies restricting speech but someone who actually incited a violent attack against the U.S. system of government should have their platform amplified again. If we’re concerned about violent mobs, wouldn’t you start with the people who’ve actually led one?
The principle of free speech is about protecting the marketplace of ideas. Broadcasting a person’s whereabouts continuously in a subscription feed is legally protected speech obviously but it’s not obviously a violation of the motivation for the principle of free speech to have such messages be against the Twitter rules.
Most homeowners' personal home address is publicly published on county government websites. Everyone on both sides of aisle agrees that the unwanted reposting of such on social media is doxxing and a bannable offense.
Their def is a higher threat when the information about an individual’s jet is tweeted out continuously, each time subjecting it to risk of going viral. Distribution and risk are connected.
Musk isn't a person, he's public property. He's our puppet now, and we make it dance until it falls apart.
Like anyone else so unreasonably rich or famous, they should have no expectation of privacy or any of the other privileges us commoners enjoy. There need to be consequences to such sociopathic hoarding of resources.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 593 ms ] threadElon Musk, 2022-11-06
If you didn't already, now you know what his commitment is worth.
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Legal free speech has only to do with retribution via criminal liability from government organizations, alongside freedom to disassociate from speech and expression that you don't like
Twitter is not a government organization and is also not capable of levying criminal charges against anyone, and is free to disassociate from speech and expression it doesn't like thanks to the 1st amendment. Yes, this is the same capability as anyone else and the same possibility as Twitter operated before, aside from different choices of who its leadership chooses to dis/associate with.
It is an accurate commitment to free speech.
Nah man, jokes are forbidden on HN.
A boy who trades the family cow to a wandering peddler for magic beans is credulous. But a boy who buys the magic beans a 10th time from the the same scamp who is broadly known to also sell sawdust flour and moldy bread is an extra level of foolishness.
Extending Musk the benefit of the doubt required that one willfully ignore his history of deceit. That was (and is) an error. Cf. Rumsfeld and Iraq.
Twitter is a promotion service, just like Facebook (in each, they let users promote themselves in exchange for being targeted for promotion by others). The entire point of it is to promote content. It is not a content platform, except by coincidence.
Once you “maximum derank” somebody, you are denying them access to the whole point of the service.
By all means, ban the users you don’t want. Keep your service free of toxicity. Nobody likes a forum full of trolls. But don’t call it “free speech”
/s
Note that I'm asking for an actual steelmanned argument for why there's no possible defense of Musk here, not why people have high priors to just assume there's no defense.
https://m.facebook.com/ElonJet/
Step 1 - learn that there are more than two sides to the world. Even in 2D thinking of the flat earth. We live in 3D
1. @elonjet suddenly started to engage in some extremist/TOS-breaking behaviour
2. Elon Musk changed his mind
Given that #2 has happened a few times already, I think that's a pretty reasonable assumption.
"All the houses in this picture? They've already got our solar roof tiles fitted!" (they didn't)
"Everything Hyperloop!"
My issue with Musk isn't that he changes his mind based on new evidence, or even oversells promises of the future. It's the fact he's willing to stand in front of a crowd, look people in the eye and _flat_out_lie_ about what state things are in today.
I can't think of one, can you?
> The people have spoken. > Trump will be reinstated. > Vox Populi, Vox Dei. > 2:53 AM · Nov 20, 2022
Just kidding, he will buy Twitter and turn it into the everything app and it will be awesome.
September 2022 vs October 2022
--------
Elon will fire 75% of Twitter October statement.
Elon will not fire most of Twitter (November). Look, stupid media was tricked by Rahul Ligma.
Elon fires 75% of Twitter (December)
I'm not asking for examples of Musk being wrong about something and correcting himself. I think it's commonly assumed that Musk discovered that this argument would not hold up in court, so he pivoted accordingly.
>Elon will not fire most of Twitter (November). Look, stupid media was tricked by Rahul Ligma.
This is a better example. Could you link a statement to this effect directly?
He literally signed a document in March to buy Twitter, and literally a month later had to be sued to be forced to finish the contract.
How many times does he have to change his mind before you accept this fact?
The number of times he two-faced flip flopped on the Twitter buyout is insane. I've lost count of examples.
Yes, and the intervening event that justifies the narrative flip is that he got increased access to Twitter's internal systems and decided that the company had deeper issues than initially appreciated. Rejecting a purchase where there's a hidden defect is not flip-flopping, the fact that you can't see the obvious weakness of this example is telling.
btw, where's the statement that Elon said that he would not be firing most of Twitter? Again, that seems to be a much better example.... if you can provide it. But maybe you can't?
You are running away from this point. So I'll go focus on this one thank you.
Because you know the Twitter buyout has more waffles and flip flops than you care to defend.
BTW, the contract waived Elons right to research Twitter's books. Suddenly, after signing the contract, he flip flopped on that point too.
This does not make Elon look any better. Elon himself chose to eschew due diligence when he signed the first intent to buy. The first intent to buy was incredibly unusual in the first place because he did not ask for any due-diligence.
If I tell you I will buy your car, no questions asked, and then show up and start complaining about the headlights, that is flip-flopping. It's why the whole thing went to court. Do you really think normal M&A doesn't include due-diligence?
Regardless, the "hidden" issues were a scapegoat. It is far more likely that he wanted to backout because the entire tech sector crashed and 44B was now an insane premium (SNAP, which was worth ~30B at the time is now 15B).
Really? He specifically claimed that the offer was truly unconditional, no matter what sort of fraud or criminality might be occurring within Twitter? That seems very unlikely to me.
Yes. This was a huge deal, I don't know how you missed it. It's also why no one believed he could get out of it. That's why he had to tried sue to cancel the deal instead of just, cancelling the deal? It wasn't even clear that if he managed to prove TWTR had misled investors that could cancel the deal.
[1] https://fortune.com/2022/08/23/twitter-elon-musk-whistleblow...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-calls-elon-musk-legal-...
And sealioning's just dull, dull, dull.
Because Elon Musk signed an ironclad contract promising to buy Twitter.
> Also, what was the November statement where Musk said he wouldn't fire most of Twitter? I missed that one.
Look up the Rahul Ligma stuff. He was implying that all the media got it wrong and he wasn't going to fire Twitter employees. To Turns out the media was right. Musk was planning to fire them the whole time and Musk was just doing his usual distraction shenanigans.
Right, but I hope you can see how "a court prevented him from changing his mind about the acquisition" is different than "he changed his mind again and decided to buy Twitter after all".
> Look up the Rahul Ligma stuff.
I did a bit of Googling, but I don't see what you're alluding to (there's a lot of coverage of Twitter drama involving Ligma, apparently). :/
Elon went hard right after TSLA was excluded from ESG Index (which happened under Biden), and Elons net worth is tied into TSLA stock pretty hard. In controlling Twitter, he hopes to essentially sway the public towards a more conservative view in hopes of getting Republicans elected into office, which then will result in economic policies that should drive TSLA stock up.
Follow the rules, people.
Which is it? Because it seems like "I don't like it" is the new justification for bans and "I agree with it" is the new justification for unblocking accounts.
It's difficult to say what said strategy is or may be but it'd be foolish to assume his decisions haven't been considered and vetted. But yes, intent is not well understood at all.
Is there some context to this account's history regarding the Twitter Terms of Service that would legitimately lead you to think this?
Of course I can't. It would be illegal.
Not because of disingenuous "car has a right to privacy" logic but because any judge would conclude that by tracking a car you're tracking the owner of the car and the owner does have a right to privacy.
Similarly, if the name @ElonJet doesn't give out the purpose: the account is tracking Elon by way of tracking his jet.
Morally speaking, the justification for transparency of jet location was to track them in order to increase safety of flying.
It wasn't to enable tracking of rich people.
It's legal but it's a loophole.
And somehow Elon hate completely overshadows the fact that the guy running @ElonJet account is an asshole.
I think you'll find that it has far more to do with directly interfering with another person's property without permission. If you publish someone's coordinates by using publicly accessible traffic cameras or (cost considerations aside) flying your own news helicopter around, the arguments become a lot vaguer. It's not clear that there's a legal/constitutional right to privacy in the US, and indeed recent supreme court decisions about abortion seem to reject the notion; jurisprudence in the 1970s saw an implicit right to privacy in certain constitutional provisions, an idea which 'originalists' regard as BS.
My question here is whether there is actually a rule here and whether that rule will be followed, or was it just done capriciously because Musk didn't like it.
I have my guesses, of course, but I haven't checked if they are true.
Since it was an individual not linked to a website, it's an even easier decision for him.
flightradar24 tracks jets. Go ahead and see if you can figure out where Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison is from flightrader24. You can't unless you know the jet number they happen to be using.
@ElonJet is effectively tracking Elon and broadcasting that, and only that, information to the whole world.
In theory you could track Elon yourself by correlating public info (figuring out which jets he owns and using flightrader24) but it's orders of magnitude more effort and I don't see how "you can figure it out" justify "publish it to the whole world".
But he isn’t.
This has absolutely no meaning and has no parallels to surveillance of private life.
The police would find that useful, but courts haven't always been favorable: https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/court-south-carolinas-...
But Musk had previously called out specifically this account as one that he would not ban (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456). So, whether or not he has a right to ban it, this represents a reneging on an explicit commitment.
I'm not saying this applies to the ElonJet case, but I can see why the question would be asked.
So what? What is wrong with that? We can't even understand our own motives, let alone attempt to decipher others'. Why not let the action speak for itself? If you're a selfish person prioritizing your own PR above others' needs, your actions will ultimately reflect it, and we can judge them on it. Otherwise, kudos for finding and pursuing something that aligns nicely with your own needs as well as the needs of others.
All the worst cheaters say everyone cheats (which apparently is enough justification to supersede their own public marital vows.)
Arguing that people are universally terrible is a huge signal that the person making the argument is terrible. Don't go into professional partnerships with them, I've seen at least 3 people like that whose behavior has devolved into eventual jail time and they've wrecked their companies.
The world has a surprisingly high percentage of amoral assholes who have a vested interest in pretending everyone is as misanthropic and self-centered as they are, but it's still a small minority.
As an example, take a look at this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984555
There I basically say that Elon has flipped on a few things, this user has pretended to not be aware of any instance of this (!) and asked for any examples, someone raises a couple and their responses to that is fairly typical of a fanboi. Tbh I should just close the tab and go walk my dog, but it's a pretty interesting discussion and it's -3C outside so I'm sorta procrastinating :)
Or, alternatively, I've waded into a decidedly anti-Musk crowd and my comments simply look pro-Musk in comparison.
>There I basically say that Elon has flipped on a few things, this user has pretended to not be aware of any instance of this
I said that I'm not aware of any examples of Musk reversing course without any plausible justification, and people in reply bombarded me with examples that in my view had plausible justifications, and when I raised this then I was treated as a "fanboi"... of course.
But hey, after some back and forth I think maybe there are some good examples and I can revise my priors! For example, if Musk specifically said that he would not examine Twitter's internals and then changed his mind, that would be a good example of what I'm looking for. Or if Musk said that he would've fire a bunch of people right before he did, that would be another good example. However, I'm not sure if the people who are claiming that Musk did these things are reliable and more sources would be appreciated.
I see that a lot of people gave rude or nonsense answers which is frustrating, but at the point where you are getting examples and coherent responses I think it’s important to take some responsibility and try to support their argument yourself. I typically find one of two outcomes 1) I find compelling information that causes me to change my mind 2) the best argument I can form is weak or nonsense, but at least others can see I’m invested in the conversation and that a detailed reply won’t go to waste.
I don't disagree. I also do not feel that people are required to reply to me if it's not worth the trouble. I'd rather get no replies than bad replies. Unfortunately I didn't find it easy to google something like "Musk said he wouldn't fire people", so I have to try to infer what sort of actual evidence people are using to support this claim (I can see that Musk denied having the specific intent to cut 75% of staff), and yes that can come off as demanding. But the alternative here is that I try to figure out what is underlying whatever bad unsourced claims people are making and... well, my time is valuable too.
Now is the time to provide them.
That lead to a refined claim that Musk said he would not even perform this sort of review and then changed his mind, but without a clear source attached I'm not sure if this is actually what Musk said.
Frankly, as some one who engages in similar lines of questioning as the top level, I think you have to bring your own findings to the table. You aren’t arguing in good faith otherwise.
Mea culpa!
Because the narrative of "Musk changed his mind" that is overwhelmingly popular here implicitly relies on there being no good intervening justification for why Musk would've done this, but afaik this doesn't seem like an incredibly safe assumption.
I mean, I guess you could be asking why someone would care to correct themselves if they have a popular-but-incorrect view on something, and sadly that's not always a bad question.
I'm not saying he is right - he isn't. I just wish people could put their arrogance aside for ONE SECOND, and realize, they would do the same thing.
It's the immature hypocrisy I don't like. That when it was the FBI and DNI having weekly meetings with high level Twitter staff or taking requests from sitting politicians or active campaigns on what political enemies to censor - that was fine because "it's a public company and they could do what they want".
I want emotional and intellectual honesty. It's beyond rare though.
Mental gymnastics gold medalist.
I'm not sure that's the case. I think many people, myself included, assumed Musk's course was always "just do what's best for me." So he's really just holding to that.
You should give people in your life the benefit of the doubt, but large corporations and billionaires usually found success by acting in their own interest so they will just keep on doing that.
I mean, if you have to irrationally hate someone, I guess billionaires are going to be the ones with the resources to handle it, but I'd really rather we as a society move away from this sort of cathartic scapegoating altogether. The more we normalize taking our anger out on some group or another, backed up by flimsy excuses like "x usually found success by acting in their own interest" the more likely it becomes that "x" will be "The Jews" or some other group.
From what I have seen billionaires tend to get more hate because they simply have more negative impact on peoples lives. Elon kicking out Tesla’s founders is hard to judge objectively because they might have done a worse job, but it’s easy to identify lots of dumb shit he did that harmed the company. Presumably he did plenty of positive things, but the negatives are just easier to identify.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/daniel-radcliffe-defends-speaki...
Just like people clearly dislike Bill Cosby because of rape not his status as a former entertainer.
There's a fair share of that as well[0]. But yes, Elon, the worlds richest man (as of earlier this year), draws more ire for his wealth. It's expected since he's about 160x richer than Rowling (she's no longer a billionaire), and uses his money to rig the economy in his favor. He's a more apt symbol of the billionaire class than Rowling.
0 - https://twitter.com/lewisjwr/status/1513219862373584902
“As of 2022, J.K. Rowling’s net worth is an estimated £820 million, or around $1.1 billion, per The Sunday Times. According to the site, this makes Rowling the 196th richest person in the U.K. overall.” https://stylecaster.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/
If you look at the top 10 list of richest people Elon is the only one who draws this level of negative attention because he's the only one who is having a huge public meltdown and constantly being in the news for being a garbage human being
The study by YouGov in conjunction with The Economist has found that 30-44-year-olds are most likely to believe this widely debunked conspiracy, with 7% of people from this age group saying that it is "definitely true" and 20% of them saying it is "probably true.
Look, in no way am I saying polls are perfect but almost every metric imaginable says Elon is not the most unpopular billionaire by a long shot. There’s not a huge conspiracy against Musk specifically, people just don’t like power-hungry billionaires.
Nobody cares about Bernard Arnault because he doesn’t really pose an existential threat. High fashion will continue to do the same thing they’ve always done
0 - https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
I don't think it suggests that, or at least I certainly didn't mean to communicate as such. I was responding narrowly to the parent's remarks (explicitly rationalizing targeting billionaires as a group) and not trying to imply anything broader.
Not just billionaires, the specific type of billionaire that seeks out fame.
There are plenty of billionaires with names you'd not recognize.
That is some wild logic. People are angry for material reasons. It's often misdirected or invalid but there's a cause.
I think anger is valid and useful when it's directed at the root of the cause. And I'm sorry, but billionaires and politicians are the ones with more power than anyone else so if something is materially broken in our world they probably deserve an outsized portion of that anger.
It takes work to misdirect that anger to other groups, which some politicians and media groups often do. I'd argue that is the thing which should be examined quite carefully.
I wonder, what could be a rational hate?
Personally I also wonder what is the supposed rationality behind any society granting some becoming billionaires. All the more when there is no social enforcement loop that ensure that the gap between richest and poorest remain in decent state. Otherwise the hate of the richest is an obvious outcome of the inequity structure.
Personally, I'm pretty much an "anti-hate" absolutist, but I recognize that a lot of people in this audience aren't, so I'm leaving room for "rational hate" which is maybe something like "this person did something bad, so I hate them" versus "this person belongs to a group, and some people in that group have done bad things, ergo I hate this person" which is the explicit reasoning in the comment that I originally replied to.
> Personally I also wonder what is the supposed rationality behind any society granting some becoming billionaires. All the more when there is no social enforcement loop that ensure that the gap between richest and poorest remain in decent state.
Yeah, I empathize with this.
> Otherwise the hate of the richest is an obvious outcome of the inequity structure.
It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.
There are two different point here:
- describing the flow events leading to hate generation
- pretending that that hate can be defined has a rational thing
The former seems completely legitimate to me. The latter seems to me to result only from confusion. Hate is an emotion, which to my mind means that is not rationally grounded. Not everything need to be rationally grounded to be considered legitimate. Rationality itself is not rationally grounded obviously.
> It may be "an obvious outcome", but it doesn't mean it's rational. It's certainly not a moral outcome.
Sure, rationality doesn’t come with moral integrity hardly bounded. I think "rational" is a bit polysemous here, as it is might be heard as "ethically sound", and not purely "logically sound".
premise rejected
You seem to be arguing that only billionaires can rationally hate other billionaires, and anyone who is not on that level can't be rational, because they don't understand what's going on with billionaires. If they they did, they too would be billionaires. This might be narrowly correct in pure business terms, but the problem is that you subordinate everything else to the most unusual characteristic. It's like arguing that the controversial political opinions of a successful athlete aren't subject to debate, because critics haven't won any sportsball championships.
As far as I can tell Musk is currently self-destructing for no apparent reason -- how is that best for him?
Some of the questionable stuff he's been doing for a while has obvious upsides for him. Lying about the capabilities of your products and market manipulation are both obviously nice if you can get away with it. So is demonstratively skirting laws and regulations. Similarly, building a reputation for going after people who did something that contravened your personal interests, even if doing so was their professional or legal duty, has its benefits. It encourages careful consideration of whether dereliction of duty would not be preferable over getting in your way. All these are demonstrations of strength.
But streisanding elonjet just looks weak and pathetic. As does trying to stiff your suppliers.
If you build up a reputation for being completely unprincipled and erratic, and try to wheedle out of both your word and your legal obligations even in cases when you probably can't get away with it and there is not even a particularly compelling reason to try to do so in the first place; well -- surely that can only hurt your brand and also mean that people who would otherwise have done business with you won't or will now only do so on much less favorable terms? Or am I missing something here?
Musk is currently in a bubble where everyone around him is giving him unlimited "attaboys" for his behavior. He probably doesn't have a great read on how poorly things are going for him.
No apparent reason? He bought one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet and roughly simultaneously began heavily pumping the narratives of the MAGA faction, making throwaway declarations of political neutrality.
There's a pretty apparent motivation—advance a particular faction’s political prospects and be visibly seen as a key agent of their success when they fully come to power, and be rewarded for that.
It may be a high risk gamble that could explode before it pays off (its first big chance would be the 2024 election, though it could yield some benefits sooner) but its not completely without apparent purpose.
The "no apparent reason" was not about the what but the how.
Buying one of the biggest influence platforms on the planet makes complete sense, especially if a) it's currently used to advance political ideologies which you can plausibly regard as a real risk to your other business ventures and b) you are a world-class communicator on the platform and that is one of your strongest assets.
So does eliminating (the hostile and plainly incompetent) top management and the majority of the work force.
But in terms of overall execution quality things look a bit like Putin's Ukraine invasion; I'd wager that the majority of erstwhile enthusiastic supporters of the whole thing would probably politely decline front-line participation at this point.
Because Twitter had rules and they enforced those rules which led to bans/suspensions...and people were upset about that on free speech grounds.
So, yes a targeted organized attack wouldn't be overly hard a random chaotic attack is easier with this twitter account.
Georgia's Secretary of State and his family received death threats.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/politics/georgia-raffensperge...
Some election workers had to leave their homes because of death threats
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-threats-geor...
But Trump's account was reinstated so I guess only Elon's personal safety matters.
2) I'm simply providing an explanation which Elon Musk has openly been saying, the account was threatening his safety (I made no claim about fairness or anything else)
3) Trump was not doing real-time tracking of specific private individuals and publishing them online
I'm not claiming any banning is justified btw, but I'm providing an insight.
How about this for a better apples to apples comparison? The same guy behind ElonJet also has accounts that track the private jets of Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, and Drake.
There are people out there that literally believe that Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the world through vaccines (going so far as claiming that he was apart of a conspiracy that resulted in COVID). Probably a lot crazies that would do something crazy to him.
https://twitter.com/GatesJets
And yet this account is not suspended as of right now.
It is now. In fact all of the plane trackers are gone.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the freedom of speech. It is related to breaking the promise (made when joining any company as an employee) not to divulge confidential information. This is a restriction on the freedom of speech that one knowingly agrees to when joining the company.
If I knowingly posted sensitive internal discussions from my employer I would be kicked out. Or worse: if I worked in a hospital and shared some sensitive pictures I might be hit with heavy fines or spend time behind bars. My 2c.
As a random person on the internet why should I have any issues posting some random company's web chats?
I personally think that the narrative you are interrogating is weak, even a straw man version of the people you think you're arguing with. It seems clear to me that Elon has long operated on personal grievance with respect to Twitter, and that "free speech" is just the veneer he puts on because it works.
Yes, that's what steelmanning is. If you don't care to do it, you're free not to respond to a request for a steelmanned arugment. Explaining your principled refusal to steelman doesn't add much to the discussion.
What are you, a free thinker? Why not just joint he "Elon man bad" chorus?
I'm reminded of a quote from a journalist
"Elon Musk fans were bullied in high school, and the bullies were right"
I can say Elon is a shit person because that is my opinion. I am entitled to that opinion as much as you are entitled to simp for him
PS. Boo!
IMHO Musk has a real opportunity to actually make Twitter great, Twitter was in a horrible shape and no one was happy with its state and I hoped that he can fix it because Musk is a product person. Unfortunately every passing day I'm losing hope. Even if he can fix it as a product, it seems like he will bomb it as a community.
No one ever forgot the calling the diver pedo incident and his handling Twitter can severely damage his image.
There is a reason why people pay Musk thousands of dollars for features that don't exist or cars that are not well build and still don't go after him like people went after Elizabeth Holmes and I'm afraid he might eventually burn out his social credit and be judged promptly for whatever he delivers without a slack.
His supporters are fanatical - none of his previous abhorrent actions have had a heavy toll, so it's unclear why this one should.
He is certainly receiving a large backlash to his recent actions, but I think that's more a case of people (outside of tech) who would've paid little attention to him before being forced to be more fully aware of his existence, than anyone who previously supported him thinking less of him.
Twitter is already a lost cause. He wanted to create a more popular Parler. Probably it'll just end up in the same place with the same niche user base.
At least SpaceX has Gwynn.
This also seems to be reassuring to NASA.
"'I hugged her with a smile on my face, because I know she is running that thing. She’s running SpaceX,' Nelson said."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/spacex-leader...
-Bans people impersonating him like Kathy Griffin
-Bans people who share internal communications at Twitter
-Bans people who post sensitive information like his address, phone number or private jet location
-Bans a few militant Antifa groups
Is there anything else? Because I’m not seeing the abhorrent part, especially compared to pre-Musk censorship.
Why should I be outraged now? When epidemiologists were censored leading to unvaccinated being banned from society last winter, no one made a fuss about it.
https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-reverses-censorship-andrew...
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZci3eOafK0
> Bans people who share internal communications at Twitter
Which I expect is covered by an NDA between the leaker and the company blocking the sharing of the leaks. I'd expect the same if someone at, purely for the sake of example, Blizzard started sharing internal content via World of Warcraft public chat.
As in lose my job and be unable to socialize because I need a vaccine passport to enter a restaurant. All based on fraudulent lies that I couldn’t expose because I was censored.
>-Bans a few militant Antifa groups
And this just smells ideologically motivated on your part, frankly
This data is freely emitted annd anyone with a dirt cheap receiver can receive and upload it.
- https://twitter.com/BillGatesJet
- https://twitter.com/bezosjets
This selective ban is indefensible, obviously personal, with no ties to any overarching principals.
He just doesn’t like it, so goodbye freedom of speech.
I guess Musk only sees it as an issue when it's his own privacy innit
I think it's also obvious that this jet tracker doesn't exactly aid in the public discourse, it seems far closer to targeted harassment..
Again, I don't think anything should be banned outside of direct threats (I'm a free speech absolutist). But it does seem clear, even from that tweet by Musk, that that twitter account seemed to impact his personal safety.
So which is it?
You are likely correct! However, I don't think that anyone here believes the @elonjet account was doing either, besides possibly you.
Also, "and you know it" is insulting and rude, and I don't agree with it or appreciate it.
Some people did indeed abuse that knowledge, but it was rare.
A few people were, by request, "ex-directory" and not listed, but again, that was rare.
Most people were not only absolutely fine with their phone number being public info, it was more useful then than a publicly-known email address is now.
Boy, what a complicated and serious question. We should form a committee to discuss exactly where our community places reasonable boundaries and adjudicate blurry edge cases. Who could have predicted that a policy like "if it's legal, it's allowed" would lead to problems? Surely no one with a few dozen billion dollars to set on fire would be that unbelievably stupid.
comment may contain hyperbole, do not consume for statistical purposes
When he's not the object of the speech in question, he seems to think that things like calling people pedophiles is free speech, so he generally seems to be a free speech maximalist and I'm guessing the answer might be yes.
I don't consider a lot of things to be free speech that musk apparently does, but there's a big difference between him being a free speech maximalist in general and just supporting free speech when it's convenient.
Consider the following: The Twitter files contains a lot of private information and outs employees whom have received direct harassment.
The ElonJet account contains publicly available information on a very accessible site. This does not make a statement about Musk nor does it tell who is inside the jet at the time.
Which is closer to doxxing?
He published what they said and the reason for doing it publicly is to ensure the current administration and administrative state (which would be the people at the heart of his accusations) would also have motive to bury the information. I'd also guess that such disclosures also help distance him from any legal action.
Though the fact that you immediately jumped to the government conspiracy angle it seems like you've planted your feet and aren't going to move. It's not doxxing because it's someone you agree with.
Put another way: the courts have overwhelmingly recognized the rights of "paparazzi": if you're a public figure, there is going to be independent public interest in your life.
The interest can't be intrusive (meaning that it doesn't enable someone to break into your house and take pictures of your underwear drawer), but it does allow citizens to use any public information available to them. Since airplane information is public by necessity, there is no reasonable legal structure that enhances Musk's privacy without compromising well-trodden expression rights.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sweeney
But even on the public side: yes, this would be entirely appropriate. It's not clear what the alternative would even be; what would it look like to have civilian evidence in e.g. traffic accidents if people weren't allowed to take pictures of others' cars?
2. In such a case you have a need to know that supersedes one's right of privacy. Are you saying you have a need to know where Elon Musk is at all times?
I don't have any particular need (or interest) in knowing where Elon Musk is. I also don't know where he is at all times with the information in this flight tracker: I only know the parts that are already necessarily public.
Law is fundamentally casuistical in nature: there are standards that apply to John Q. Publics (like you and me), and there are other standards that apply to the Barbara Streisands (and Elon Musks) of the world.
https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info
He trashed talk a journalist immediately after the journalist complained he had to journey thru cold with out heater because his batteries would not last until the next charging point.
He trashed talk the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who supported the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who might as well be supporting the short sellers, e.g. sec aka shortseller enrichment commission aka security exchange commission.
He is a small guy with a oversized largely sensitive ego.
But most notoriously, he is a terrible public speaker. Like my public speaking teacher would be more ashamed at him than me.
Elon's communication style is also good for forming "parasocial" relationships with his audience which explains how loyal and fervent many of his fans are.
tbh I find the widespread habit of referring to him by his first name like he's a personal acquaintance to be part of this mechanism. This is something tabloid newspapers do with sport and entertainment celebrities to milk money from fans who gravitate toward others who seem to be part of 'the family.' It's a PR strategy designed to exploit human social circuitry and convert it into cash money.
This sounds strangely familiar to someone else that owns a Twitter-like social network.
This is actually one of the bigger problems with discourse and politics today: the idea that "rude, crude, and unconcerned with other people's feelings" has anything to do with honesty—and, conversely, that being sensitive to those feelings and trying to take them into account when speaking is dishonest as opposed to kind.
Free speech is complicated. Saying you'll "do free speech" without refering to implementation or intended resolution to various free speech dilemmas... that means you're probably not going to do free speech.
The part that I find most annoying is when politicians bring it up this way. It seems to be the one issue where nonseriousness meets fake passion most intimately.
It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
So let's just say, citation needed.
/s
I'd go as far as saying "Do not anthropomorphize anybody whose name you know from media"
Do not treat them as people, treat them as ideas or maybe Sport Franchises.
Taylor Swift or Donald Trump or Elon Musk are like say the Cincinnati Reds.
If you are in a bar in Cincinnati and you want to drink without paying your best bet is singing the praise of the Reds, likewise if you are looking for trouble then attack and insult the Reds.
Same thing with Musk, if you are among entrepreneurs then be supportive of Musk , if you are among workers start attacking him vehemently.
Quoting the OP, Celebrities should become the words you spew in order to gain some small advantage while selling your products or when trying to influence people as per the book “How to win friends and influence people “
On the other hand, if we assume that hypocrisy requires intent, then what you've instead described is "just" garden variety narcissistic sociopathy.
Good object versus bad object, very Kleinian and appropriate.
Central to object relations theory is the notion of splitting, which can be described as the mental separation of objects into "good" and "bad" parts and the subsequent repression of the "bad," or anxiety-provoking, aspects (Klein, 1932; 1935).
Infants first experience splitting in their relationship with the primary caregiver: The caregiver is “good” when all the infant’s needs are satisfied and “bad” when they are not.
> It's not hypocrisy
I disagree there though unless one agrees that Musk has no morality. However, in the absence of morals, which is likely, it would still be perceived hypocrisy.
If that is the state of the art then what is the defense that regular people have?
Treat Musk as a moving object as well? Because the Valley seems filled with people singing Musk praises in order to raise money and impress his fanboys who are loaded with money (and get access to some of that money), while they'll openly admit behind close doors that Musk is a fraud.
The other knows there's no way the trench could hold that many and says, "Don't like to me you bastard!"
The first guy says, "Oh, yeah, well how many do you have?"
The other says, "Only ten of us."
The other guy here has:
1. Criticized the first guy for lying.
2. Then lied himself.
Would you call this behavior hypocritical? No, probably not. Because hypocrisy only really exists as a valid criticism within a social sphere that presumes good faith and mutual respect.
But these two dudes are mortal enemies engaged in war. Being hypocritical is the least of the harmful things that guy is willing to do to the other, a list which also includes fun social interactions like stabbing him with a bayonet.
When I see politicians become brazen about contradicting themselves, the conclusion I come to is that they see the people they are making mouth sounds towards as beneath them and a less human Other that they feel no obligation to behave consistently towards.
Just curious, would you be ok with some guy tracking the location of your kids on a hourly basis?
Don't listen to a word he says - assume it's false until independently verified.
When I mentioned that Elon had already been using his power unilaterally to re-platform personal allies like Babylon Bee and Ye, I got all sorts of pedantry about the difference between suspension and banning, more pedantry about the Ye reactivation happening moments before the deal went through and some justifications about Babylon Bee not having done anything wrong, etc...
I will reiterate here again. Musk will squeeze every bit of perceived power he may have out of Twitter by issuing personal favours like the petty, tin-pot tyrant that he is.
Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that he personally did this and it's not in error, which is a leap. It's the same as everyone who blamed Jack personally for bans that were later reversed.
Let's see what the explanation is and whether it gets unbanned.
Were we reading the same threads? I've seen countless people on HN predicting exactly this sorta thing happening, even myself.
Any criticism I've ever said of Tesla or Elon usually initially gets up votes and then half a day or even a few days later receives a lot of down votes. I always assumed it was people invested in his stocks doing it on their own, but his antics on Twitter show he's the kind of person that might actually employ people to down vote people critical of him and his companies.
Now, some subset of people will be for and against anything, so if you filter selectively HN supports any and ever narrative.
But the Twitter acquisition has blown some big holes in the myth. He talked a good game about free speech, but it was clear from his initial bid for Twitter that he didn't really understand the realities of the business or the difficulties of hosting speech at scale. And since he took over, he has stepped onto turf a lot of people here understand quite well: running a business, managing software development, and the dynamics of online forums and social media.
And I expect this disillusionment will continue. Somebody described the Twitter acquisition as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I expect Musk will feel emotionally compelled to engage with Twitter personally, rather than doing the sensible thing and turning it over to somebody competent while turning his attention back to his at-risk car company.
So look for more of him pursuing personal grudges and putting far-right political views (e.g. "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters") into action with absolutely no regard to his pieties around free speech. In the US right, "free speech" is often code for "the powerful should never experience criticism or accountability". That may seem weird, but it's a specific instance of the more general point: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Cross that with "free speech" and you get what Elon is doing: free speech for the right people, arbitrary deranking and account bans for the wrong.
That's a succinct way to put it. I like that.
He's never going to develop 'systems that can patrol the speech' because he's far too vain and think skinned to allow actual open dialogue. Like every other conservative, the only speech he really cares about is his own, and he is completely comfortable banning or delisting speech he personally doesn't like. He's tyrant man child.
Ever look in the mirror? That's a lot of hate and presumptions to assume about one person. And Elon is most definitely not a conservative. He has stated he voted democrat his whole life. His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
Personally, I was skeptical of his claims to free speech and still am (especially given how he's handled it thus far). You simply can't have free speech platforms. You need protocols designed to achieve such a thing. Something like Twitter is always doomed to be censored.
But my disagreement ends there. I'm enjoying the Twitter files releases. Seeing the cooperation between Twitter and the feds is both unsurprising and unsettling.
> Dude bought a company.
Approximately nobody thinks Twitter is just another company. Clearly Musk doesn't think that; he's waxed poetic about how important it is to the future of humanity. Its hundreds of millions of users don't think it's just another company either. It demonstrably played an important role in journalism and public discourse.
It's almost as if there are actual consequences to what he is doing, and what happens to twitter.
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
If Twitter is the town square, Elon Musk is a natural disaster which rips through the town and destroys houses, forcing your friends to move to different towns. My problem isn’t that I made friends in the town; my problem is the natural disaster that ruined my town.
Social ties are important to people, no matter where and how they form. Breaking that up has real consequences. I’m sure you would feel the same way about your own social connections, and you wouldn’t appreciate someone blaming you for those ties being weakened by external forces.
There is no assumption. It's based on the things he's said and done
>And Elon is most definitely not a conservative.
Yes he is.
>He has stated he voted democrat his whole life.
His word means nothing, but regardless, you can be conservative and vote Democrat. The Democrat party is for the most part the republican party with less bigotry.
>His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
His support for the GOP comes when they tried to overthrow the government and have installed a far-right religious fanatic majority on the highest court in the land? Yeah, he's conservative.
I am completely fine with that.
Edit: I should probably point out this is sarcasm used to highlight the absurdity of the original posters "I'm fine with fascists ('non-establishment right') being back on twitter"
My comment was exaggerated to highlight how absurd the OP's comment of "I'm completely fine with having 'non-establishment right' back" was. Because it boiled away any semblance of reality that these were awful people
I'd heard of claims of labor disputes and other unsavory stuff at the Tesla factories, but honestly, I don't know of a single car company in the world without a history of and ongoing labor tensions.
The self driving was obviously a fantasy and Musk got way over his skis on claims there, but he's far from alone.
Watching him drive Twitter into the ground has been a revelation for me.
This is just your partisan blinkers talking. Someone on the right could equally say “social justice” on the US left is often code for “now I take your stuff”. Both statements are partisan, largely inaccurate, and wholly unconstructive.
There are many people on the right deeply committed to free speech, like David French. There are many non-partisan institutions committed to free speech, like (formerly) the ACLU and (now) FIRE. There are many left wing people deeply committed to free speech, like those people fighting Florida’s “anti-woke” speech laws.
Abolitionism. Civil rights. Gay rights. Liberal triumphs built on free speech, on free criticism, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Don’t cede free speech to petty partisanship. Nothing good will come of it.
He's not a congressperson, senator, or governor and has limited influence on the current base of the US right-wing.
(I don’t identify as a member of the right, to be clear, but these are just very obvious trends for anyone that actually observes the right, rather than just making assumptions guided by partisan antipathy.)
Sure, but my contention is that at best the intellectual right doesn't matter, and at its worst it's now an oxymoron.
I agree that there are people on the right committed to free speech and who demonstrate it through action, and good for them. But there are also a lot of people who, as with Musk, use it more as a fig leaf. And there are plenty who are openly opposed to it.
And I think being honest about that is one of the best to keep it from becoming purely a partisan issue.
Those who are interested in technology in itself
And those who are interested in technology as a means to be one rich and maybe powerful
I would argue there is not a single one.
If someone can explain how this is damaging to freedom of speech I am very interested to know.
So if Musk literally did nothing but continue that pattern, he could justifiably make the claim that it's as close to a bastion of free speech as could be allowed on a social media site of its size.
Looking forward to more of these twitter file releases.
From what I saw it was just some people on Bidens campaign team reaching out asking Twitter to take down some tweets that contained leaked nudes of Bidens son, in line with Twitters ToS.
I feel like I've missed the boat on this, everyone is pointing at a smoking gun, but I haven't seen it yet.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281
It's not just about "some nudes of Biden's son". It is about the suppression of a NY Post story about a laptop his son lost. It had details about conversations and taking money from foreign nationals. Supposedly, it was deemed Russian disinformation, but that was all a lie. It was real.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515
Airplanes' location is public information, see https://www.flightradar24.com/
During the Ukraine issue - the Starlink funding issue put Elon on some Ukranian solider kill list. I'd want privacy too.
example: https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/1580990063550529536
I'll dumb it down. We're saying that you can be be a free speech absolutist and still not allow others to put GPS on your car for the purpose of tracking you. We're saying that you can't be a free speech absolutist while using your power to censor public information because it reflects negatively on you.
If it's public sale records could he not just have someone else title it, or rent a jet? Seems like there are so many more solutions for privacy here.
I think it should be more open and less subjective frankly, especially if the external pressure comes from a government official, which means it should be interpreted in many cases as a threat.
Edit: I think this is kind of the "smoking gun" of the files (8-12): https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
Basically if you give outside actors direct lines to make grievances on content on your platform, you give them special powers to censor content, at the very least boosting the spam/toxic classifiers for stuff they object to. People were not aware of this mechanism.
Yes, Twitter is a private platform. But is it legal for the government to aid them in their censorship effort?
Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
Since it's the government(s) actually telling them what to censor, yeah?
> Suppose Twitter had a policy against religious speech. Would it be legal for the government to identify instances of religious speech on the platform and forward it on to Twitter moderators, knowing it will certainly be removed?
Yeah? But they can't TELL twitter to do so, because that would be a violation of freedom of religion. So they - like many other parties - can report tweets just like everyone else.
> If you think that would be legal, would your mind be changed if the government helped Twitter to develop its rules against religious speech?
You mean like what China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc are doing already? That's all legal - according to the country's laws, anyway.
Moral however, that's a different matter. But I never considered either Twitter or the US government to be moral.
> Dicks. Dicks were censored.
Dicks for the big guy.
The reporting in 2020 had emails that showed Hunter arranging meetings with Joe that Joe denied, texts telling associates not to refer to Joe Biden by name, as well as an email where Hunter would be holding money for "the big guy."
It looks like this could be quid pro quo official corruption, but there's not enough there yet to be sure. It needs to be investigated.
We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Bill Clinton because it looked like his real estate investment was too good to be true and he had a dodgy tax deduction. We appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Trump based on non-specific allegations of collusion. The evidence here is at least as strong as it was in those cases.
Change it to a knitting forum that bans crochet posting, the principle is the same. Is it government censorship if the government helps the knitting forum to develop the anti-crochet rule, and then acts as watchdogs?
- The Biden family tried to get what is effectively revenge porn taken down from Twitter before he was elected.
- Twitter had labels for high-profile accounts like libsoftiktok that meant "don't ban this person without some higher-up approval"
In both cases they were deliberately presented in a misleading way. When the first one was revealed it was suggested this was evidence that the White House was censoring Twitter - but Donald Trump was the president at the time. In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards. I think people switched off after this, if there was anything truly scandalous they would have lead with it and wouldn't have bothered trying to stoke outrage with the two I mentioned.
What I do find interesting is something that isn't really getting much coverage - that Bari Weiss seemingly has access to some internal admin tool. In some screenshots she's posted this tool has a "Direct Messages" section, suggesting she has been able to read private DMs - a bit alarming.
>In the second case (quite amusingly, tbh) Weiss suggested Twitter was suppressing libsoftiktok, when in fact it was deliberately treating the account with kid gloves - i.e. she got it completely backwards.
I think you're the one that's getting it completely backwards - since Twitter's "kid gloves" treatment lacks any semblance of due process, it was seen as a brand risk to engage in repeated high-profile bannings. It's like having a law that you know is unjust and advising against enforcing it against anyone powerful so you don't get called out - you can call that "kid gloves" treatment but that's papering over the underlying problem.... if your moderation policies are defensible you shouldn't need to carve out exemptions like this.
I don't understand why this gets so oft repeated. The Post article (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...) contains nothing resembling porn. There are some pictures of Hunter with a crack pipe, but that's not even a revelation. We already knew he had a drug problem.
What is a revelation is what could be official corruption, where Hunter gets paid exorbitant salaries to hold jobs he's not at all qualified for, and then funnels a portion of that money on to Joe. There's a possibility of quid pro quo that needs to be taken seriously and investigated further.
The evidence here is at least as strong as Whitewater and Russian collusion, and we appointed special prosecutors to investigate those. We should do the same here.
Who else could be "the big guy" that Hunter is to hold 10% for?
We don't have a comprehensive list of tweets the campaign and the DNC forwarded. I looked at archive.org for the tweets linked here: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064
2 of these include Hunter nudity, one is a video that doesn't play, one was never archived.
One, from GuySquiggs, is a Hunter photo with the nudity mspainted out, but questioning the age of the woman in the photo.
Also, is that a legal use of campaign funds to have staffers try to scrub the candidate's son's nudes from Twitter?
I'm also not making any claim about the contents of taken down tweets aside from the ones I was able to see on archive.org. Those are just 3 tweets of 5 that were requested to be taken down by "the Biden team."
AFAIK we haven't been given any links to tweets that the DNC requested to be taken down.
The Twitter Files also says that the Trump White House made some takedown requests. Excepting actually illegal content like CSAM, any such request would be government censorship.
They lost credibility for repeating his commitments about free speech so yhey should treat his claims [despite “documents”] as just tweets.
If anyone thinks these communications are a smoking gun, I'd invite them to get into the upper reaches of leadership and see for themselves that there are rarely cut and dry cases where everyone agrees on what to do or when to do it. In reality, operating a multinational business that needs to avoid regulatory scrutiny is, believe it or not, challenging.
So look at all this through the lens of what Elon seeks to gain from releasing all of this. He never acts out of pure altruistic intentions; he only takes action when he believes it will greatly benefit him.
That being said, NPR, BBC, WaPo, Fox News, and WSJ have covered latest revelations in the past 24 hours from this post.
Advertisers have come back and the staff is muuuuch smaller than before.
Big names not sure about spend
The idea is usually to slash close enough to the bone that the company survives, but 100% of profits go to debt servicing. But this doesn't make for a company that's resilient to economic turmoil (or one that can invest money into growth). So the contingency plan is to ensure that they are first in line in court.
The only logical reason I can think of to not pay something you know you’re legally obligated to pay is if you’re intending to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying. Otherwise you’re going to end up paying and pay a load of legal fees on top.
I guess one alternative is effectively taking a risky loan: you are running low on cash but you have a large cash flow coming in the future. Stop paying rent, eventually after a protracted court battle pay your debts with that future cash flow and the legal fees are “interest”.
Neither feels like the actions of a financially healthy company.
Other examples:
- Illegal firings of non-US Twitter staff
- Pushing back the Twitter acquisition
- Roadster/Truck deposits
- Radar will-they/won't-they
The ability to stop paying bills without seeing the inside of a cell or having to sleep in the cold is a powerful negotiation tool. Some won't even have the means to sue him. Despite being painted as failures, none of these will have a materially adverse affect on his life. Consequences are different for a person like him.
And other lawsuits will be coming in soon now that they got rid of their content moderation staff.
Which advertisers, for what price?
We will never know the true revenue of Twitter because it is no longer a traded company nor are they in any obligation to publish data of this kind publicly.
Maybe it's a megalomaniac dictator thing, and I will never understand.
Think about FTX, cryptocurrencies, Juicero... it's becoming pretty overwhelmingly clear that having money is not in any way correlated to being able to spend it intelligently. It's time to start seriously thinking about wealth caps.
Why? What advantage would that bring to him?
Honest question. With him overpaying for Twitter already (maybe not completely voluntary), bankruptcy looks like the fastest way to make the deal even worse.
It doesn't take a financial wizard to realize that Twitter was insolvent from the day it was purchased. Saddling a company with an interest payment that's nearly double revenue is a clear indication to me that the time period from purchase-to-bankruptcy was going to be measured in months. So we can be pretty confident that everyone involved with this purchase was expecting Twitter to die quickly.
You and I are on the same page. But the "why" is not "why would they make such a poor financial choice," since it's clear the answer to that is "to kill Twitter." The why is really, "why bother killing Twitter?" I get Musk's reasoning, but I don't understand what his co-investors get out of the deal. Authoritarian regimes benefit from having dissidents operate on a centralized platform, because it's easier to monitor. Killing twitter pushes these groups out to platforms that are going to be decentralized and impossible to block. It's weakening their grip, not reinforcing it.
My best guess is that they assumed that Musk would stay on post bankruptcy and act as their pro-authoritarian sock puppet. But they didn't anticipate his complete ineptitude would drive users off the platform in such numbers.
Why would you say that?
He signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter at an agreed upon price.
Nobody forced him to sign that, ergo: he completely voluntarily signed a binding agreement on which he later wanted to renege.
This is not to defend Musk in any way, it's just a statement of facts.
It could get ugly indeed. Tesla's brand image is slipping, and everything points to that just getting worse. Between Elon as the face of the company, and their seeming inability to deliver a competitive product now that everyone else has started making EVs... well, I wouldn't buy any TSLA for sure. You buy a Tesla now for the supercharger network, everything else is a compromise. That's a shaky place to be.
Musk put up $22.4B of his own money to buy Twitter, plus another $4B he already had invested.
Maybe Twitter was worthless when Musk bought it, and that $26.4B was - theoretically - already burnt in the deal. If you pay $26.4B to buy garbage, you lost $26.4B from the start...
Assuming Twitter is not worthless, Musk loses whatever percentage of that $26.4B actually has value. Worst case, that's probably at least 20% - which is still $5.28B.
He'll also still be on the hook for $13B in personal debt financing to banks. Unless Musk himself can claim to be bankrupt, he owes them $13B - and they're going to get it one way or the other.
Further, another $7B of equity investments came from questionable investors like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Who knows what they're going to do if Musk purposefully runs the company into the ground and burns billions of their money...
There's a lot of reasons why Musk can't just say oops, claim bankruptcy and leave everyone else holding the bag.
It's almost as if all the other investors aren't morons...
The bond market has shifted. Twitter still owes $13 Billion of course, but those bonds are toxic. No one wants junk-bonds from Twitter right now.
Why not?
On a more serious note, AFAIK (IANAL) Elon and other celebs are public persons who don't necessarily have the same kind of expectation of privacy since they've chosen to be in the public eye. Meaning unless it's something protected by law like medical records or something done/talked about on their private property out of the public's view they can reasonably expect the public will know/talk about whatever they do.
You could sometimes track Global Hawk drones above the Black Sea publicly.
Why not, when it's convenient? It's probably not impossible to get a Stinger missile or similar from one of the current war theaters or black markets.
I wanna be clear, this is just a mental exercise, I do not wish nor want harm to anyone. This is just because Elon's ego is getting the best of him.
Then the wild west internet was developed into a city and well, you just can't walk around shooting your gun wherever you want anymore. And changing the law to let people do that isn't going to bring back the wild west, and is more likely to just cause a bunch of chaos.
Because the pre-9/11 Internet I remember had The Anarchist Cookbook et al. widely available, didn't have IP-related domain seizures or OS/browser-based safelists, and had Usenet and IRC instead of Facebook.
It seems accurate to say we've regressed in terms of free speech absolutism.
This is ridiculously ahistorical. The only time you found consequence-free speech on the Internet was when the reach was small or people that might not care didn't pay attention.
Platforms got shut down or censored all the time. Usenet access from an ISP's NNTP servers would often be missing a lot of groups or sometimes while hierarchies. Web hosts would take down pages or suspend accounts regularly. Even before widespread Internet access BBSes would get taken down. Steve Jackson Games' BBS got raided by the Secret Service because it had promo copy for a cyberpunk game they were writing. Rust n' Edie's BBS got taken down for software piracy and then sued because someone uploaded scans from Playboy.
The whole reason PGP exists is because Phil Zimmerman was concerned talking about anti-nuclear protests would attract the attention of the government. Pretty much every aspect of old cypherpunk developments were done because there was no assumption speech on the Internet was free from consequences.
IDK, but let's say that's exactly what it is...
Look at how completely fine everyone was when it was the other group, and now are furious they feel like it could be them. Pretty astounding I think.
"Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him [...] things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia [...] A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory."
Typical Musk MO to randomly accuse someone of pedophilia.
At it's core, the modern internet-using demographic is incompatible with the pre-2000 wild west free speech internet.
To not mince words -- current internet users are not technically educated or paranoid enough, and their expectations have aligned with the guarantees provided by the current walled gardens.
That was the internet of "If you run an exe downloaded off a webpage, you install a virus with zero warnings."
--
That said, I do get where Elon was aiming, and I think news media is shit for either deliberately misconstruing or not understanding his position.
To wit: that in a truly open marketplace of ideas, extremism will be shudden with the sunlight of transparency.
So instead of nanny-stating things for people, show them how stupid neo-nazi's sound, and let them decide for themselves.
What I think he underestimated was how unprepared the world (users + civil groups + government) was for a return to that model.
For example, if Twitter enabled tools to help journalists correlate associated accounts... how many news organizations still exist who have staff to do that work?
But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.
Are you going to track the locations of his vehicles and where they park next?
An alternative argument - if we're going to do it to him, maybe we should do the same to everyone (which is crazy because no one cares that much about random plane movements from rich guys unless they are politically connected, or green hypocrites, or involved in some crime, but Law Enforcement protects this data etc)
You might as well say 'everyone'. Anyone rich enough to use, let alone own, a private jet is almost by default politically connected.
You could hide within this, say, you know, take a first class flight somewhere on a commercial plane. The price you pay for having your own plane is that your plane's movements are public.
I personally support all of this data being public, it's generally a great way to gain information on clandestine government activities.
Twitter (and Musk) has access to pinpoint each of their users with the same precision, I feel it's a poetic balance.
It is stalking.
Also, it violates Twitter's rules about physical location sharing
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
KTHX
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
I think there are legitimate questions about how and where aggregating crowdsourced data on people's movements crosses a line.
I am sure that allowing crowdsourced license plate reader data that makes a full history of every car movement public would be well across the line.
I am not so sure that this crosses that line but I think that discussion would be much more interesting than the low quality Musk bashing that seems to dominates these comments. (Edit: There are also some high quality comments that are quite critical of Musk that add information and context and deserve to be more prominent, but they are in the minority as the low quality comments are pretty prevalent and not being downvoted sufficiently.)
Given that the LADD list exists, we either need to repeal that law, make circumventing that law a crime, or make the the process for inclusion in the LADD list more rigorous and public.
The current situation where we are allowing companies to bypass privacy laws by using crowdsourced data seems like a bad precedent.
I briefly looked at LADD, very interesting mechanism for restricting data by filtering it from feeds. From the rest of your response, it seems like it’s perfectly legal to crowdsource this data.
I don’t really have an opinion about Musk etc, but know plenty of people do and will continue to argue.
To your point of a distributed network of license plate readers, this to me seems akin to what passive wifi/bluetooth scanning is doing, as well as the SDKs that beam your location to other entities. (there was a post on HN a year or so ago but i’m blanking on the name.)
I wonder if there is any legislation in the US for these operations.
Yeah, people are saying "it's public info about a public figure", but I'm pretty sure that we could imagine all sorts of creepy-yet-legal digital gang-stalking that one can do, similar to how doxxing is legal but nearly-universally frowned upon. Not to say that the account should have been banned, but I don't see this as just harmless fun like others seem to.
In theory the various intelligence services and the FAA have this information, but it's not acted on.
Funny because the legacy content moderation did take harm into account and the new rules line is whether a rich dude takes offense.
It's interesting that you would put this at your limit because this is free and public data.
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean I need to know your private medical conditions
Just because I support free speech, doesn't mean we need all potential targets of political assassination to have their schedules always publicly available with arrival and departure times with 10 digit grid coordinates
Just because I support free speech doesn't mean everyone should be able to track everyone else's cell phones, which are a proxy for a person's physical location
Why on earth are y’all licking one of the richest people on Earths boots. The man is clearly using his power and money to stifle speech that that is critical of him. That’s not something that needs defending.
The side effects of ADS-B have been really great in this regard. I love it.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/adsb/pilot
It can be crowdsourced, and can be weaponized against individuals. The same way license plate photography can be used to track individual's cars.
Now that this data has been used against Elon's family, a series of retractions are in order.
Problem here is that there are clearly free speech bounds, but Elon Musk has campaigned publically about being a "free speech absolutist" which would entail not curbing any form of speech.
You can always find compelling arguments for banning speech or forms of speech and we'll continue to draw and redraw lines as a society. But you can't go around claiming to have some absolute principle and then renege on it any time it hurts your feelings and continue to be respected. Can you think of anyone else who has their flights tracked? Are Bill Gates' flights tracked? Why do you think that is?
Also being a public figure means that you lose some amount of privacy. If he doesn't want all this drama he could just stop talking and being a highly prominent public figure. Now we're just going to get a flight tracking website instead, probably with new features.
I think there are at least two problems with your alternative argument, if not more. The first problem is Elon Musk is politically connected and operates in the public sphere as a highly political person. The second problem is that there isn't anything that prevents people from tracking other rich people like they do Elon, except that nobody cares about what they do because they don't do things like buy Twitter. If you want a change I think you have to make private flight information unavailable, but until then I don't see any real problem with it. Stop flying a private jet if you don't like people posting where you are flying to and from. There isn't anything that prevents someone from reporting everywhere I go except that nobody cares. Hell, I self-report it on Yelp.
> The Administrator shall, upon request of a private aircraft owner or operator, block the registration number of the aircraft from any public dissemination or display, except in data made available to a Government agency, for the noncommercial flights of the owner or operator.
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data. Imagine that people put crowdsourced license place readers on their private property and then through a made an aggregate of this data on the public movements over every car available (and charged commercial users.)
That would be quite problematic for personal privacy.
ADSBExchange isn't quite the same as that since airplane movement is less granular and thus less privacy is lost. Also, the people who use private jets tend to be rich and powerful, so there's an aspect of "punching up" here that is not present in the crowdsourced car movement analogy. Still, I don't think the privacy considerations here are as cut and dry as the people who are claiming "it's public data, what's the problem?" are making it out to be.
That's what businesses do. They sell this data about you.
I am less certain about if I feel the same way about plane movements. I do believe that is a discussion we should have rather than just assuming thr loss of privacy is worth the transparency.
The only reason folks would be obsessed with this is for nefarious reasons or just out of a blatant disrespect for the privacy of another person. Only negative reasons.
1) If you have no cookies, Twitter constantly recommends that you follow Elon Musk
2) “Elon Musk” appears to be permanently set as a trending topic for logged-out users
2. I just checked in incognito and he's currently not trending for me(from Germany).
A few years ago, we were all mad at Uber for their "God View" which tracked celebrity locations -> https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38314832
Often enough[0] (it's questionable if the Mueller probe would have even happened without Clinton & Democratic Party clamoring for it) and the last time just a month ago:
"Hillary Clinton: Right-Wingers Plot To 'LITERALLY STEAL' The Election In 2024"[1]
[0] https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQAFpe8mEU
Thus the only public source is ADSBExchange because it uses croudsourced data.
So the data isn't "public by design" but due to a lack of privacy laws that prohibit selling this sort location data.
What I don't like is the argument that purely because some piece of information is "public", we should allow companies to aggregate and sell this data.
And as a reminder, these planes literally broadcast their location themselves to the public.
I do think there are some strong arguments for allowing the aggregation of flight transponder data. I'd like to people making those arguments (such as the value of transparency in fighting corruption) rather than backing dangerous lines of argument because they don't like Musk or rich people in general.
Edit 2: One of the things that makes what ADSBExchange doing seem OK to me is the fact that in addition to selling the aggregated data commercially, ADSBExchange makes the data publicly available for non-commercial use. To me, that really helps tip the scales as it supports the transparency argument
Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Edit: To me, this possibility is why we need laws that protect people from having this sort of private information sold or distributed.
“Private information: You may not publish or post other people's private information (such as home phone number and address) without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so. Learn more.”
Now.. his fight information is technically “public” but in that same sense, phone numbers and street addresses are also “public”. Thus, a suspension to the flight tracking account seems in alignment with Twitter policy.
Elon claimed he would not “ban” the account. And he has not done so. They were suspended.
Okay edit lol: I _actually_ didn't know that "Suspended" is the equivalent to "Permanently Suspended" aka"Banned" on twitter. Shocking, I know. I walk back my second statement.
So the argument is that the word he used is different?
That's just nitpicking. the ElonJet account didn't "violate Musk's privacy", it just "republished tracker information".
Semantics around banning or suspending pretty much work out to the same.
If you are trolling congrats, I took your bait. It’s a slow Wednesday here in Colombia.
When did he do this? He released cherry picked anecdata that supports his priors, proving literally nothint.
Indeed. I saw it described as "he's raised the Batshit signal"
Remember: Don't feed the trolls
It's petty, I find it tasteless, but I still must admire how easily he plays everyone.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27098612 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19983270 (May 2019)
You've unfortunately been doing it quite a lot lately. If that keeps up, we're going to end up having to ban you. Fortunately, you've also posted good comments, so this shouldn't be hard to fix. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
I'll probably work.
He's just changed who gets banned to be more in line with his personal beliefs. Accounts banned under the previous regime are unbanned and accounts that either were or likely would be permitted previously are now banned, with recent examples being the account that initially hosted the viral clip of Elon being booed on Chappelle's show and now ElonJet.
The latter example is particularly important, since both the public and Elon himself seemed to view this account as a litmus test of his commitment to "free speech."
for example here's a banned account: https://twitter.com/h3h3productions/ here's the account that posted the video: https://twitter.com/CleoPat48937885
well seems like he reactivated his account(pretty sure you got like 30 days or something to reactivate it after deleting or something like that), here's an archive of how it looked: https://archive.ph/W0d0v
The elonjet account however is a pretty bad one gotta agree, wonder if there will be any kind of explanation or attempt at one.
Billionaires walk hand in hand with fascists. Nothing free speechey about it.
There's simply no Libertarian ideal that can be achieved in one place. The Internet as a whole is an absolute haven of free speech. Twitter caters to a certain audience, Facebook to another. They're very broad, but not infinite. There are plenty of other places that cater to the audiences that they don't. And people can always find ways to share their ideas with no interference. The thing they aren't entitle too is reach.
I think it's better for everyone to be entitled to their privacy.
Someone who very visibly, very loudly, and very consequentially, inserts himself or herself into global and national matters is a very public person, by choice. No one is peering into his house and taking pictures. Someone published legally available public data about an aircraft, exercising their right to freedom of speech.
And certainly not powerless. Being an oligarch (or celebrity) -- you know, you get to call heads of state and have a chat -- is not about "wealth" or "fame"; it is a hazy zone between power and wealth.
Try to think of someone you admire. Fighting for a good cause. A pro-choice activist or an female celebrity flying to an African country to work with NGOs for women's health issues or something.
The critical necessity of open and unobstructed expression to a functioning liberal/democratic order far exceeds such considerations.
> Try to think of someone you admire. Fighting for a good cause. A pro-choice activist or an female celebrity flying to an African country to work with NGOs for women's health issues or something.
Speaking of lovely Angelina, as a CFR member she will be well advised (by experts) to take necessary precautions, should they be necessary. In fact, I would be surprised if she does not have a professional security detail.
Btw, I'll take that bait ("pro-Choice") and offer you this: At a fundamental level, my view is that as a citizen of a free society my primary concern shall never be my choice or viewpoint, rather that which insures that I may freely express my views and be able to freely exercise the political right to promote or support my viewpoint. Anything that undermines fundamental mechanisms that support our free society, regardless of the ideological or right/wrong garb it takes, must be rejected. That would be a more accurate picture of what "[I] think".
If you are wealthy enough and that tracking rubs you the wrong way, you are free to take public transportation like the rest of us. If Congress can do it, so can Musk.
with all the hysteric hatred he gets, he still has a right to safety for him and his family
- "A screenshot of what he claimed was an internal Slack channel showed Ella Irwin, the person appointed to replace Yoel Roth as Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking a “Team” to “please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-account-following-elon... ("Twitter Account Tracking Elon Musk’s Private Jet Gets Shadow Banned")
https://twitter.com/JxckSweeney/status/1601793881355739143
It's unclear if Ella Irwin still works at Twitter, but giving everything going on I strongly suspect there's no one to moderate against Elon personally banning an account he does not like.
You guys never give up on your conspiracy theories. Its uninspired, tiresome and unintelligent for the most part.
But the most important point in the context here is:
> Still, there were warning signs. As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, "I am the alpha in this relationship."
So, y'know - it's not speculation that he said that, we have proof. As you could have found from a quick search of a distinctive word.
Do you really believe that Russia grown to be the biggest country on Earth by playing nice with natives? Or if it suddenly became evil after revolution? Russia destroyed other cultures every time it got an upper hand and was built on blood of mostly other people.
No, I think they got to be the biggest country on Earth by having land that would support decent population and econonic activity next to Siberia; Canada got to be #2 by pretty much the same method, with a different stretch of marginally useful Arctic and near-Arctic land.
Elon is looking like he got suckered into buying Twitter and now has to play the difficult and mundane role of private equity turnaround so that he can recoup his -- and his investors' -- funds. It's a huge distraction from his more important businesses.
Folks are already asking him to step down as Tesla CEO [2]. Best to kick a dog while he's down.
I think Tesla has been overvalued for some time. It's not the only EV company in the world, and soon every company (and domestic production capacity worth its salt) will be pumping out EV options for consumers. This Twitter deal was the activation energy required to jostle the Tesla stock out of its lofty position.
I hope I'm wrong, and that things at Twitter begin to stabilize. I think that SpaceX is one of the most important companies in the world right now, and it needs a leader who can continue to push the boundaries of what was thought possible.
[1] I'm thinking of putting my money where my mouth is and buying puts, which is something I rarely do.
[2] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/unconfirmed-reports-claim...
Even further? It is at $159 today from well over $300 just a few months ago.
The best time for puts was a while ago, it will be a lot harder to make the same kind of money going forward, better be careful.
Well, c'mon, this has always been the case since the very beginning under both Dorsey and Agrawal. The difference then was that the other half of the world was condemning it.
Flying by the seat of your pants is probably fun for Elon but it makes the product worse. If the product gets worse, the people leave.
That is not true in all jurisdictions and definitely not in Germany. Since twitter offers it’s services to the general public, bans must be non-discriminatory and are open to challenge in court. Twitter can ban anyone who violates their ToS, but not just anyone Elon dislikes.
https://www.e-recht24.de/artikel/marketing-seo/11415-was-koe...
I do not believe such a thing exists in Germany. The claim certainly needs a proper source.
https://www.lhr-law.de/magazin/social-media-recht/olg-dresde...
It’s not surprising this exists. It’s equivalent to the Hausrecht in the physical world - if you make your place available to the public (a bar, restaurant, supermarket) you no longer can kick out just anyone without cause. You can ban people from entering (or make them leave) for reasons, but those must be non-discriminatory and not arbitrary. “I don’t like you nose/hair/color of your skin” won’t work. “You need to wear shoes or leave.” is likely valid.
Sure. But since ElonJet is run from the US, in a dispute between a US company and a US user, only US law is really relevant, any foreign court is likely to dismiss the claim as outside of their jurisdiction. As far as US-based users go, he basically does have the right to ban anyone, so long as he doesn't start banning people on the basis of a protected characteristic such as race or sex.
Even if we suppose, counterfactually, that ElonJet was run from Germany – while the German legal system might in that situation be open to hearing the case, I doubt ElonJet would win, when you consider the extensive emphasis which German (and EU law) puts on privacy rights, and the fact that it is willing to go a lot further in limiting free speech in the name of privacy than the US legal system is.
Why do people feel the need to respond to valid criticism with "well technically they're ALLOWED to do [thing]?" That's neither here nor there.
> 7:30 PM · Nov 6, 2022
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
We don't expect that. He absolutely does have the right to do that.
Pointing out his banning of the account simply demonstrates his free-speech absolutist hypocrisy.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
it demonstrates that he very well understands that posting things can lead to safety concerns.
he is gleeful when some people or groups have safety concerns from posts.
often he actively mocks them and portrays them as unreasonable if they express safety concerns and ask for some kind of help.
If Elon is concerned maybe he could just rent a jet as needed instead of keeping one all to himself.
If they were publishing "Elon has flown X miles, used Y fuel and created Z emissions in the past T time" that would be far different than what they do.
You are reaching for excuses that can't possibly apply. Perhaps you should ask why you'd go so far to excuse this doxxing, but not others.
I personally dislike Musk and view him as a conman. I take issue with several things he's done at Twitter and even more with what he's done at companies like Boring Company, Paypal, or Tesla (eg, promising the first car to the actual founder then launching it into space just to spite them).
People here just managed to find a thing where he happens to be right (whether it comes from personal pettiness or actual principle).
Second, if it were passed, intent can be very hard to prove -- even in seemingly clear-cut cases.
Third, only the DOJ could choose to actually prosecute.
> Second, if it were passed, intent can be very hard to prove -- even in seemingly clear-cut cases.
It's not at all clear cut in my opinion. This is information that is already in a public database, and it's the location of an airplane - not a person. That's not a technicality, unless the airplane is somehow a primary residence.
It's pretty different than publishing someone's private phone number or the name of the school that their children attend. The latter type of information is actually private.
ElonJet just put the information on Twitter. And Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and now Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
So it's pretty rich to stretch that far to whine about imaginary censorship and then just blatantly censor speech you don't like.
I agree with your other points, but this is missing the mark. There is some degree of editorial control over what “this site” publishes, but none on the comments (you’d had to go quite far to get banned). “This site” is not a homogenous single-minded entity. And you don’t have to dig far to see both stories and comments very critical of Musk. I happen to share that point of view, but that’s besides the point.
However, this makes him look bad, given he repeatedly claimed that the Twitter takeover was to make Twitter more pro free speech. Examples:
Two months ago he tweeted (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792):
“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes“
Five weeks ago he tweeted (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456):
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk“
And yes, people can change their opinion, but this seems more like Twitter will be in favor of free speech, as long as Elon likes it.
The previous bans were controversial because they marginalized a voice. It was never about the specific people in question. It was basically invalidating the voice of many people since these were highly influential people or politicians.
There's a huge difference. I'm not taking a position on those particular people in any way, just saying that most people don't care about ElonJet in the slightest and why catching him on technicality here doesn't matter (in my humble opinion).
But even so, I find the hypocrisy pretty interesting here. This person bought a company for $44b to improve transparency, specifically said he wasn't going to ban this account to show his commitment to transparency, and then his new company banned the account about a month later. Not only that, but the company didn't ban the related accounts showing the location of others who didn't happen to buy the company out of their commitment to transparency.
Come on, that's interesting no matter what your view on the individual.
Through his actions, Musk has shown himself to be in the latter camp. Those in the former camp should be just as mad about post-Musk Twitter as they were about pre-Musk Twitter. Problem is I don't see many people (here on HN at least) saying "Wow, I thought Musk would fix Twitter but this is not what I expected when he said he supported free speech!" To me, that shows maybe a lot of people were in the latter camp all along, and are pleased things are working out just as they expected.
It's also not that he only banned the elonjet account. He banned the accounts of people posting the video that showed him being booed in SF, he banned several left leaning journalist accounts after a campaign from alt right groups [1]. It really just shows the hipocrasy, and many people are taking note.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Maybe I misunderstand you, but whose voice are you calling marginalized? Is it not the voice of politicians like e.g. Trump? Is Trump not a white rich and powerful person (I was not specifically talking about Musk).
I think the problem was actually that Twitter under previous leadership was way too lenient with powerful people. Take Trump for example, he was arguably breaking Twitter TOS on a regular basis, but never faced consequences (I'd argue because he was driving engagement so it was not in Twitters interest to ban him). When they finally banned him, it thus seemed arbitrary.
Similarly, how come Musk never got a suspension for his pedo comments, also pretty clearly a TOS violation.
I think therein lies the main problem with most social media platforms, they clearly have different standards for people who are influential enough and the rest of the population and this is by no way a left/right thing.
People don't always agree 100% with their politicians. But by banning them you take away their voice entirely.
I said very clearly I was not talking about the actual people behind the accounts themselves. I am not feeling sorry for Trump or for Elon here in any way.
How does that even work?
And if 50% share similar political opinion, how is that even possible that this opinion would be somehow inaccessible?
The opinion of people like Trump or Elon is very easy to access, and supported by plenty of people. The majority of them is never banned, because the bans are not targeting an opinion, but rather conspiracy theories and abuses. You can have exactly the same philosophy as Trump, talk and promote this philosophy, and yet never say something that will make you banned.
"Trump voters" is not a marginalised set, it contains super pacs and Peter Thiel. It may contain subsets that are marginalised but those sets are marginalised by being marginalised, not by being trump voters.
People who have little opportunity for advancement being white and Christian does not mean that whites or Christianity is under threat.
Also, trump got away with his shit for years before being banned. That looks like privilege, not oppression.
I take it you see the irony of being woke about the anti-woke
As a resident HN Christian, I don't concur.
We've seen a number of Christian individuals & businesses recently taken to court/UCMJ action for refusing to do things that are contrary to their religious (Christian) beliefs, or for openly stating their beliefs [1] , [2] , [3] , [4]
The same protections afforded to observant jews and practicing muslims should also be afforded to Christians.
It is in the Constitution after all.
[1] https://thepoliticalinsider.com/colorado-baker-sued-again-th...
[2] https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/16/justice-thomass-opinion...
[3] https://www.christianpost.com/news/obamacare-and-the-catholi...
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/air-force-cracking-down-on-c...
It is ok to operate a business with respect for religious preferences.
It would have been more relevant to show examples where the "attacker" did not had any stakes or if it would have been proven that the "attacker" has reacted this way because the person is christian, but would not have reacted if the person was muslim, or atheist, or ... but defended the same actions. For each of your examples, I really doubt there would not have been exactly the same conflict if the person was atheists but had the same strong views.
At the end, it may even feel like Christians are slowly discovering that they are people like others and that there is no reason the society should always settle to their advantage. In a way, it feels like the "threat" in question is "stopping being privileged".
I never said anything about marginalized.
But in fact, it does not really change my argument: the examples that you are providing does not show anything bad against Christians. What you provide is just examples of neighbors quarrel where one party happens to be Christian. If you think it means Christians are under threat or unfairly treated, it makes me feel that you are thinking that the normal situation is when society always side with Christians all the time, which would be a pretty strong privilege for Christians, and very unfair for non-Christians.
The reason several people were removed is because they have made really poor choices. For example, Trump could have defended his thesis while still calling for people to not take violent action. It is incorrect to pretend that the bans are stopping politicians of doing politics: you can defend your party or explain your political ideology without breaking twitter's rules. It is incorrect to pretend that the bans are targeting a political side: if you are promoting a political ideology that is not based on hatred and lies, then you never _need_ to post anything inciting to violence or spread misinformation.
If now you are saying that Republicans are more often banned, maybe one reason is that Republicans are more prone to accept hatred or lies as part of their political ideology strategy. But being banned is a strategy consequence, it's the price you pay if you go down this road that is, again, totally a choice (as long as your political ideology is not based on hatred and lies).
I don't think that aligns with the doc drops from Twitter
I'm not american, so, some of the arguments also seem crazy. For example, the fact that the majority of the employees vote democrats does not imply that the majority of the employees are immoral persons who will cheat without scruple. It is very worrying that in US, apparently, people are so polarized and uneducated to democratic concept that if they see someone that happens to be "on the wrong side", they will think they can only be the worst of the monster without even questioning that for one second.
For every bans I've seen, the person banned was ALWAYS doing a mistake, was giving a good excuse to justify the ban when it could have been easily avoided. For example, Trump could have phrased his messages such that he calls for more calm without changing his political message. He did not, he choose to send what he has sent (he had his reasons, but it is not about "freedom of political opinions", because, unless his political ideology is based on hatred and lies, his political opinions are not restricted by avoiding hatred and lies).
This is my main issue with this: if republicans are unfairly targeted, why are they so stupid to always give huge elements that can be used, later, to justify the ban. Just use your brain and don't tweet something that is, objectively, at least borderline. If republicans are victims of the democrats, why are they not even trying to not give them ways of going away with it?
But that's not the first paradox in the US. Another one: Trump claims the election was stolen. He was the president when the election was organized (and was already predicting frauds months before the election days). He claims the steal occurred in states where he almost won, which are states where he has a lot of supporters and allies. And yet, he failed to catch any little proofs. If the election was stolen, then he is super incompetent, and should never be reelected: he has proven he is easily out-smarted by democrats.
The right to free speech entails the right to censorship. I can freely throw someone out of my house for expressing something I dislike. A publisher can refuse to publish someone's work for any reason. If someone expresses an idea others find distasteful, it is their right to boycott that person and anyone associated with them.
My problem is not with the censorship. It is with the money. Our oligarchs are comparable in power to royalty of old, and they act with no oversight and no accountability. Musk was able to waltz in and start dictating terms to millions of people. One man should not have that kind of power.
I will not claim to know where the lines should be drawn. It is clearly OK for someone to run a newsletter about local Yorkshire Terrier breeders with an iron fist, but it is clearly not OK to run a global monopoly of a social media company in the same way. I don't know what happens in the middle ground.
Now twitter doesn’t really have policies, just Elon’s whims. And those can change at any time and without any external consensus. No one knows what the rules are.
For example, Valve is a private company that can ban anyone they like from Steam, but we wouldn’t hear this defense if a publisher get banned capriciously and lost their income.
Unless everyone can use the same terminology to mean the same thing, these conversations are pointless.
("visibility filtering")
https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/tweet-visibi...
The conspiracy theory that Twitter shadow banned accounts to a level in which even people looking for their Tweets couldn't find them, remains false. Everything that everyone Tweets is visible to everyone who looks at their Timeline. This is explicitly how Musk promised to run the service, "Freedom of speech, not reach" and is basically how Twitter has operated for years with the exception that old Twitter banned people who repeatedly violated the TOS.
Matt Binder: https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1601142989061246976/pho...
Tweeter Execs denying: https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-shadow-banning-republicans-...
> To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn't make judgments based on political views
The "conspiracy theory" is that Twitter was deliberately targeting conservatives for their politics, not that the site had moderation functions.
There is a substantial difference between tweets not being promoted by the algorithm and tweets being invisible. A "shadow-banned" user's tweets would be invisible to even their followers.
"It appears @ElonJet is longer banned or hidden in anyway."
https://twitter.com/JxckSweeney/status/1602354433807061070
However I think it's OK to say that any topic about Elon Musk on HackerNews always descends into cringe / misinformation / le spaceship man bad / populism / repetitive memes; all fed by people who apparently source their news from /r/politics and r/whitepeopletwitter on Reddit and Business Insider bottom-tier clickbait media.
Posts pushing baseless and debunked conspiracy theories[1] are getting downvoted into oblivion. Posts with highly questionable takes[2, 3] are also seeing the same. Even perspectives that tend to agree with the general HN consensus but are overly antagonistic[4] are receiving this treatment.
The system is working as intended.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33986398
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985551
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985732
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985784
Think I'm wrong? Let's see if he'll go after Jack Dorsey in the future for recently correcting him on going after CSAM.
But then again, Elon is hell-bent on alienating everyone. I was planning on selling our Land Rover and getting a Tesla but I changed my mind because a lot of people will associate me with the guy or think I agree with him. Still.. amazing cars.
Are they really that nice? I've been in a few but never owned one. I hear a lot about fit and finish issues unbefitting a car of that price range.
What does a Model S get you that an S-class doesn't, or a Model 3 against, I don't know, an Audi A4? Is it just all about that electric drivetrain? I don't yet have a strong preference on electric vs. ICE, but I would gladly pay more to have a car without the "slap an iPad in the middle for every UX" design of the Tesla.
I’ve never seen anything over 50 miles, but I wish some manufacturer could take a PHEV to 100 mile range and I’d snap that up in a heartbeat.
Then for longer trips we have the convenience of not needing to charge.
This depends a lot on your region. Fremont factory is well known for build/paint quality issues. Shanghai & Berlin cars are much better.
Can’t wait for all EVs and chargers to be interoperable.
Jack didn't like that accusation:
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1601302412056473600
> Jack: No, it is not.
> Elon: When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety.
> She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request.
> I made it top priority immediately.
Why doesn't he set the record straight on this?
I don’t know what happened in past year. But to say we didn’t take action for years isn’t true. You can make all my emails public to verify. Company took away my access to email or I would.
I think Twitter may actually end up making more money in the future. Musk seems to be able to market his companies very effectively. I’m assuming there is significantly more interest in the going ons at Twitter since he took over.
It's also incorrect to say the jet's location tells you where Elon is. I have a friend who's ridden that jet. My friend isn't Elon, but worked for him
And just on this very website I have been told by very vocal Elon fanboys that "you either support free speech or you don't, no halfway points about it" when I tried to explain why banning/muting hateful rhetoric may be necessary in a social media.
Free speech absolutism has always been a fake frame since it is actually “legal speech absolutism” even according to Musk.
I didn’t say anything about absolutism - my take on free speech is that “doxxing” speech like the GPS coordinates of an individual, particularly when it is not newsworthy or connected to current events, doesn’t do anything to contribute to the marketplace of ideas beyond increasing personal risk to that person, and therefore is under motivated from the perspective of the principle of free speech.
I'm having trouble seeing even reach the level of Bruce Schneier's Movie Plot threats much less the level where it would warrant restricting someone's ability to share public information. We were, after all, tediously reassured that Musk's deep and heartfelt belief in the sanctity of free speech extended even to the point of not restricting people who made specific threats to attack the U.S. system of government, so it seems quite disingenuous for him to then turn around and block people to prevent comments which might hurt his feelings.
It’s also very telling that his acolytes think this ineffectual attempt at protection justifies restricting speech but someone who actually incited a violent attack against the U.S. system of government should have their platform amplified again. If we’re concerned about violent mobs, wouldn’t you start with the people who’ve actually led one?
Every day I wake up and wonder what the free speech absolutist's new definition of free speech would be.
Sorry but the world doesn't revolve around that guy. No special rules for billionaires.
And it was Elon who stated free speech over everything.
Like anyone else so unreasonably rich or famous, they should have no expectation of privacy or any of the other privileges us commoners enjoy. There need to be consequences to such sociopathic hoarding of resources.