It's been off the shark for two months. We're already to the point we've been judging people still there for having not seen it yet. o.o
Unbanning the alt-right wasn't jumping the shark? Firing over half the employees wasn't jumping the shark? Promoting COVID misinformation wasn't jumping the shark? Yeah, he finally started banning journalists, but he's been making the place unwelcome for anyone who isn't a Trump supporter for a long as heck time.
If you are just now asking if it's going to jump the shark, and I mean this not to be sarcastic or mean, but in genuine hope for the future: Please spend some time asking yourself why banning PG was the last straw for you, and not any of the crazy stuff prior.
Let's make this the last time we let hero worship blind us to the realities on the ground.
At least unbanning alt-right figures (as much as I disagree with) was in line with Musk's free-speech pretense. Everything else that came after that... yikes. I wonder what juicy government contracts the GOP has promised him.
When all this started I thought that Twitter wouldn't make it to Christmas. Sometimes I think that was too much, that it'd take longer to collapse. This past week makes me think I might be right.
By that logic basically any Twitter user with a link on their profile should be banned. For example Microsoft would have a link to Microsoft.com on their profile and on that webpage there will be links to other competitive social media.
In fact, Tesla's Twitter profile links to Tesla.com and at the bottom of that website is a link to Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn (in addition to Twitter).
Almost anyone with a link to a site in their profile will likely have competitive social media links on that site. PG's website didn't even link to his Mastadon profile, its a plain text representation of his Mastadon handle.
> Banned for posting a link to his personal website (which has links to his other social media profiles)
How many levels deep does their new policy go? It sounds like they violated it not Paul...
Paul and I disagree on a lot (I've struggled to remember to not post like a Redditor here) but dear lord -- last I looked at HN, it said the guy was leaving Twitter, and Paul doesn't seem like the type to troll on his way out like I am.
This is absurd.
For context: I'm an amateur comedian in addition to being a hacker. Every set I've done IRL I've asked folks not to record or quote, and had that honored. I specialize in observational comedy -- often rude, insulting observations that approach the limits of American style free expression that I won't repeat here. I've encountered folks who can't take a joke before, but dear lord, the levels of petty coming from Elon Musk are off the charts.
Or as I'd say if it was open mic night in an undisclosed location in Appalachia:
"Big 'You're not breaking up with me I'm breaking up with you' energy on the bird site tonight ladies and gentlemen."
>They can’t violate it, because it doesn’t restrict them in any way.
So to be clear, their policy says if you link to a website that links to a website that links to something other than twitter? Or they were so ambiguous that they can selectively ban whoever they want due to the nature of the internet?
>This is my last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.
The tweet itself did not contain a link to http://www.paulgraham.com/, which contains a link to his Mastodon profile. Apparently that was enough to be suspended.
It doesn't even contain a link. It contains the mastodon handle (username and instance), but you can't click on it because it's not a link; you can paste it on the search bar of your own instance to follow him (and see some of his posts, if someone on the same instance has already followed him).
You mean this is a quick way to get rid of mostly unused Twitter accounts? I'm in.. I've got a few to knock their total account #s down.. After that make a gdpr request and have fun.
haha, would love to for fun, but not a good business move as consumer network based products are hit driven/hard to cold start/etc., and already 100% dedicate to trying to get my own startup off the ground. Would be a fun project though, and I did take a first stab at a social network with a gaming clip sharing site once, but quickly realized this is a very hard space with very low probability of success when you're competing against a bunch of incumbents that have a network to work with already.
The whole server concept is a disaster, IMO. There is no search box for server. There is no information on how to create a server (at least on landing page). A lot of servers require "manual review". Many are "full". I don't know which one of these servers will even survive over time. I use Twitter as my "log" of interesting content and ideas. I rather not put content on server managed by a dude who can be run over by bus tomorrow and then I lose everything in an instant.
The servers on the Mastodon website are servers that have been running for a long time, are trusted, and have a plan for what happens in an emergency (multiple people with full access to everything required)
> Is this word especially hard to write properly somehow?
Yes, as evidenced by your frustration. It was a poor decision to use that word as the name in the first place - hopefully it hasn't hampered adoption too much.
It's so painful to use. It's such a waste they're winning the network effect battle off of Twitter's collapse. Not that I have a better alternative (open to suggestions).
Mastodon is the protocol. You can't really quit "Twitter" by joining "email", for example. It doesn't make sense.
Now maybe you can "quit Twitter" to join "Gmail", which is an email service. Similarly, people are going to have to pick Mastodon servers that work with them the best.
Tumblr seems to be the weird one (promising ActivityPub, aka Mastodon, support soon). Tumblr seems to be my personal best bet, but I'm also open to suggestions.
Yes, the protocol is terrible, which plays a major role in the UX. And yes, the semantics game is very fun to play with Mastodon, but people say they're quitting Twitter for Mastodon all the time and we all know what it means.
ActivityPub is the protocol, Mastodon is an implementation of that protocol. There are other services built on ActivityPub that can interop with Mastodon, which is part of what makes the whole system awesome.
The charitable reading is that a lot of people are saying "Mastodon" when they mean the "Fediverse" (the large collection of mostly inter-communicating servers running an instance of the software).
my main frustration right now is the inability to follow somebody on a different instance from a web link, coupled with all instances using the same theme. when somebody links to https://mas.to/@paulg, i end up on a site that looks exactly the same as mastodon.social, except i can't sign in to it, and i can't actually click the follow button there. if i want to follow @paulg, i have to go to my instance and search for @paulg@mas.to
Agreed, this is annoying. I just have to go back to my instance, and search for the link (https://mas.to/@paulg) in the search bar, then I can follow them.
both those options are bad UX and papercuts that cause me to not want to use it. if you "just" have to take a second step or prepare your environment in a particular way for the most important part of a social network, following someone, that's a dealbreaker.
>maybe it just show how little someone else's content is important to you
i mean that's pretty much it. i barely care about the whole thing, but if it's easy enough it's a bit of decent time waster. twitter was easy enough, adding the tiniest of steps is enough to make me decide i don't really care.
Mastodon's UX isn't bad, it's just not actively pressuring me into interacting more than i really want to, the way twitter generally did/does.
1. you can copy-paste same url ( https://mas.to/@paulg ), no need to re-format, event simply writing `paulg` will start the search and likely find intended user pretty fast
It feels like Mastodon is limited by the limitations the web (rightfully) added to improve security/restrict third party tracking. A lot of these UX issues could be fixed by having native client apps, where you add servers and the client takes care of mixing feeds and searches.
I feel like someone should lean into the fact that twitter is going insane and make a carbon copy of it, instead of trying to innovate on the concept/UX. Maybe even use a similar name, like bitter, xitter, etc.
Innovation is usually the way to overthrow incumbents, but in this case a carbon copy might be more effective.
I have a feeling that Twitter could be politically important enough to have one or more governments reign them in unless Musk manages to calm things down or drive it into the ground.
The smartest thing he could do is find some pretext to remove his public persona from the daily operations. He's clearly in over his head (micro managing policy etc) and business sense alone should tell him that.
Would be pretty amusing if Paul Graham decided to invest in the Mastodon ecosystem. That said, I think Elon is a pretty public cautionary tale of why emotionally driven financial decisions are a bad idea.
Boy the bar for the “to be fair” crowd sure has slipped. To be fair, pg was only temporarily banned for acknowledging the existence of competing social networks!
Yeah, it's like those WW2 movies in Japanese POW camps in the jungle. One of the allied officers yanks their chain, they send him to cooler, and the soldiers cheer the officer.
Except PG made kissy noises with the POW guards and said to the soldiers "I still think they are very civilized" as he went on to the cooler. That bit wasn't in the original script.
I'm explicitly quoting the thread title, not the thread content, which is too extensive to do justice to in a line or two. Reading much of the threads there and elsewhere, and skimming most of the rest, I believe his intent was to create a bolt-hole, but had hopes that Twitter would recover.
yeah sort of curious what they do with them. it’s the most direct violation of this rule, but maybe they pull too much engagement to get rid of entirely.
OF isn't exactly a directly competitor with twitter, since they don't currently have a way (that I know of) to post content people have to pay to view, especially pictures/videos, and I doubt they want to get into it with adult content since payment providers tend to get iffy on that sort of thing.
It's just "enforcement", there's nothing malicious about it. Elon Musk is the CEO and policymaker of Twitter now, he's responsible for the actions his company takes.
I wouldn't be surprised if the employee who did this gets fired as a result of this. In fact, I'd be shocked if @paulg isn't reinstated within 48 hours (as they did with Taylor Lorenz a few hours ago.) All of Musk's previous interactions with Graham suggests that their relationship is friendly. And if there's one thing we've seen from Elon Musk's Twitter, it's that he's not hesitant to fire Twitter employees.
That'd be extremely unfair. It was extremely dangerous to Mr. Musk's estate that Paul Graham used his clout to entice people to switch to Mastodon. This was nothing but a display of unswerving loyalty and adherence to Mr. Musk's vision.
How many malicious employees do you think would be left at this point? There have been massive layoffs, and anyone who didn't like Musk or the "extreme hardcore" could have taken the severance.
Right, but if you're still there because you can't leave, then you're not going to do something stupid to get yourself immediately fired, like going rogue and suspending Paul Graham's account.
Sure they could. They could have lined up a job or impulsively lashed out, or think enforcing the policy gives them cover. It’s the sort of thing I might do.
This is just a probability you may have a different weight on.
I keep hearing "maybe it was a rogue employee" or "maybe it was automation" about everything Twitter does lately... until Musk comes out and defends the thing. I don't know why the benefit of the doubt should be granted at this point.
Malicious? Elon Musk wants employees to have utmost loyalty to him, what's malicious to risk taking the fall by clicking the ban button on the rich, famous and powerful to safeguard the vision of the visionary CEO? This was fulfillment of orders beyond the call of duty.
Graham was a threat to the Master, what's a loyal servant to do?
This is insane. Elon Musk himself [replied to @paulg](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604258004706201602) not even 24 hours ago. I bet this will be reversed (quite possibly along with the new anti-competitive, anti-free speech policy) but if not, this feels like an unprecedented death knell.
pg's twitter was amazing archive of insightful content. How do I get the backup of his tweets? I always thought it will be there all the time. Does he has backup that he can share? I am all but stunned right now. Need time to process this.
Do not stand
By my page, and weep.
I am not there,
I do not tweet—
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints in snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle, autumn rain.
As you awake with morning’s hush,
I am the swift, up-flinging rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight,
I am the day transcending night.
Do not stand
By my page, and cry—
I am not there,
I did not die.
Twitter is great, but its the users that provide the value, not Twitter itself. If all the interesting people are moving to Mastodon, guess I'll need to move as well.
This is capitalism. He'd be completely within his rights to buy Twitter for cash...then completely shut it down, pay off A/P & such, and liquidate all assets.
Individuals in societies have this thing called reputation. Him claiming to supportive of free speech while doing this to a social platform he now owns is pure hypocrisy and damages his reputation, whatever's left of it.
Note that Twitter's TOS are only one of the three components of the Twitter User Agreement. There are also the Twitter Rules and Policies. This is what Twitter's Rules and Policies page says:
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
Not really; it’s the same. You can’t release products that compete with apple, ala an App Store, or games store, etc. It took a lawsuit to change that for Europe, but we still have yet to see what that looks like.
I think the Apple rule they're referring to is that if you have an in-app transaction, you're not allowed to reference the fact that the transaction can be made off-app (which would avoid Apple's 30% cut). It's not quite the same, but similarly draconian in that it restricts what you're allowed to say (as opposed to what you're allowed to link to).
That’s one part of it, also if you sell say ebooks or MP3s, you can’t sell them in-app, but also you can’t even provide a link in-app to buy them using the mobile browser.
I don’t want to derail this conversation with App Store policies, but the notion of policing links isn’t great, especially for a social network.
Not only that. There are a lot of things you can't say on the App Store. Pretty much anything critical of App Store policies or mentioning alternative platforms as text in your app (rather than user generated content) is likely to get you the boot.
The TOS says any accounts that primarily focus on promotion of competitors will be banned, which, hm, but anyways. I think it’s obvious PG’s account was not primarily focused on links to other socials, so on to the next condition.
The TOS also says any accounts which post a direct link to such sites will be found in violation.
It does not say anything about purely mentioning the fact you have another social media (especially without saying the username), nor linking to a personal website, nor does it say anything about referring to where to find such a thing
Calling this a "blatant attempt at ban evasion" is uncharitable. What he wrote was, at most, arguably against the spirit of the rule. This is not even to speak of whether the rule is reasonable, or even just consistent with Elon's stated values.
This is a very strange way to describe what's going on at Twitter.
Musk has loudly announced that you're not allowed to even link to your other profiles on any other social media sites, or even describe indirectly how to find them. No major social media site has ever done something quite this anticompetitive, and certainly not all this scale. I've been using the Internet since the Eternal September, and this is a ludicrous policy.
You have misunderstood what Elon and I are referring to by 'ban evasion'.
You may disagree with the policy of banning the promotion of alternative social platforms, but that is the rule. Trying to break that rule while not getting banned is blatantly ban evasion.
That's not what ban evasion means. Ban evasion is the attempt to circumvent an existing ban or suspension. Posting content that does not benefit Twitter, without violating Twitter's rules, is not ban evasion.
You're mistaken about the situation. PG did violate Twitter's rules (although I believe Elon has since had a change-of-heart about the rule he broke). Specifically, its rules on the promotion of alternative social platforms policy. You can find these rules on Twitter's page on Rules and Policies[0].
This is not the usual use of the phrase "ban evasion", but it is a literally correct use of it.
Your redefinition of the phrase "ban evasion" would implicate anyone who follows the platform's rules but is not wholly devoted to the interests of the platform's owners.
Sure (please note that this is a quotation from the policy as it was when PG was suspended, and that the policy has since been changed):
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
As you are aware, the formerly suspended account did not link out to Mastodon or directly name any Mastodon handle. The tweet that led to the suspension was also compliant with how the CEO claimed the policy should have been interpreted:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
Whether that rule has since been deleted is of course interesting, but it is not directly relevant to my point, which is that PG did violate Twitter's rules (but, to be clear, the rule was indeed deleted).
Yes, I am aware that PG did not provide a hyperlink. In fact, that's the core of my claim about PG attempting to violate Twitter's rules while evading a ban (the kind of action which Elon and I have referred to as 'ban evasion').
I believe you have misinterpreted Elon's Tweet. But I'm not interested in debating the interpretation of the poorly written Tweet. What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.
> What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.
The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO interpreted them. Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules. That is not a reasonable expectation, and the unreasonableness of this expectation caused the backlash that led to the account being unsuspended.
> The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO initially interpreted them
Where did Elon interpret the rule as being that users can advertise prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms as long as they don't provide a hyperlink?
> Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules.
Why are you talking about my expectations? What I am doing here is pointing out that PG clearly violated Twitter's rules. My claim is a descriptive claim, not a normative one.
The CEO's statement (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288) interpreted the deleted policy to mean that occasionally sharing links to other social media platforms is "fine". The suspended account's tweet did not even include a link to Mastodon, it only mentioned that a Mastodon account exists without directly naming the handle. Because the tweet did even less than what the CEO claimed was "fine", the suspension was unjustified.
You are inventing a completely different definition of "ban evasion" that has not been used in any Twitter policy page to try to justify the suspension, even after the suspension has been reversed for its unreasonableness.
If you read carefully the thread you linked you will see that Elon affirmed the following statement:
> You just can’t create or turn (my emphasis) your account into a free advertising unit for one of the listed competing platforms.
This is what PG was doing (you can argue that he actually wasn't - but he was according to Elon's standards, which is the important sense). One Tweet buried deep in a thread that could possibly be misinterpreted to support your position is not convincing.
I am not "inventing a new definition of ban evasion". I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.
> I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.
No, you are taking a phrase that already has a defined meaning in the context of Twitter and making up a new definition for it to attempt to justify the suspension. As Twitter has already defined it, "ban evasion" is the circumvention of an existing ban or suspension. It is not something that can be done by an account that is not already suspended or banned.
I have no idea why you are continuing to defend this unjustifiable suspension even after Twitter has already reversed it. The fact that your initial comment is flagged, downvoted, and hidden (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044649) shows that your argument has been firmly rejected on HN.
Whether you like my use of the words 'ban' and 'evasion' ultimately isn't super relevant to my point.
I'm not 'defending' Twitter's actions. I'm interpreting reality. I'm discussing a matter of fact. The question is: did PG break Twitter's rules? The answer: yes. You may dislike Elon Musk. You may dislike me. You may dislike Twitter's (now deleted) rule. But this basic factual claim will remain correct.
HN has an infinite track record of being very wrong. I take my comment being flagged as a much greater endorsement of it than had it been "upvoted". You can find countless HN users in this thread getting the basic facts of the situation wrong (yourself included). And it's not just that these are ignorant people searching for the truth. These are not enquiring minds. Any amount of sincere reflection would have revealed the truth. These are people actively claiming clear untruths as the truth. Why should I care about being downvoted, if these are the people downvoting me? Any time I am upvoted I should take it only as a sign to take a step back and think: "have I made some kind of blatant logical error?"
- The tweet is not similar to any of the examples provided in the deleted policy (“follow me @username on Instagram”, “username@mastodon.social”, “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”).
- The tweet did not bypass restrictions on external links via means such as URL cloaking or plaintext obfuscation, with the example provided being “instagram dot com/username”.
Even though the account did not break Twitter's rules, you believe that it should have broken Twitter's rules because the tweet said something that hurts Twitter's business prospects. This is what you are erroneously using the phrase "ban evasion" to describe, even though Twitter's policy on ban evasion (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion) defines it as something done only by accounts that were previously banned or suspended.
HN does have it right this time. HN users are fully capable of seeing that the novel definition of "ban evasion" you invented specifically for your argument does not match the definition used in https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion.
Using a hyperlink is not neccessary to break the rule. Naming a Mastodon account (or any account) is not neccesary to break the rule. Breaking the rule in the same way that it was broken in the examples given is not neccesary to break the rule. Elon stated in various places that attempts such as PG's to break the rule (which is about the promotion of prohibited social media) without getting banned would not be tolerated. In one instance he referred to such an attempt as 'ban evasion' (this was in a Twitter space, I'll find it when I'm back at my PC).
Elon's phrase "casual sharing" is not inclusive of PG apparently denouncing Twitter and promoting his Mastodon account in its place. PG's Tweet was anything but casual. If PG had linked to some post he found interesting that happened to be on Mastadon, that might qualify as casual.
I never claimed that my use of the phrase 'ban evasion' matched the use in the Twitter user agreement. HN and I are in agreement on that count (as I have stated elsewhere in this thread).
Frankly, you have bad reading comprehension, most likely due to motivated interpretation i.e. you tend to see what you want to be there rather than what is actually there.
> Elon stated in various places that attempts such as PG's to break the rule (which is about the promotion of prohibited social media) without getting banned would not be tolerated.
The expectation is that you either break the rule and get suspended, or you don't break the rule and don't get suspended. This acccount didn't break the rule (or the ban evasion policy) as it was written but still got suspended because Twitter still deemed the tweet to be against its interests, even though Twitter didn't bother to codify this in the rule. Twitter can suspend any account on its platform for any reason it wants, of course, but the resulting backlash led to the account being unsuspended.
If a person can read he should be able to see that PG's Tweet broke the rule. There's nothing too complicated about it - the rule clearly stated that X was not allowed, and PG did X.
You seem like someone who can read, so the charatable interpretation is that there is some kind of mental block that's stopping you from seeing the clear truth.
If you want to stop talking, OK. Either way I hope you have a merry Christmas.
Except in the sense that the speech being controlled is "X social media platform is better", I don't think it is.
Let me be clear that I think Twitter's new social media sharing policy is ridiculous and likely to cause a Streisand effect for Mastodon and others. Twitter is really harming itself with these policies more than anything else, but time will tell whether they see their own errors and grow up in time to save themselves.
Having said that, what other forms of free speech are being prohibited? I haven't read too deeply into the situation around the ElonJet and related account suspensions, but the justifications they've made were related to individual safety regarding real time location sharing of people in the course of their private lives, one case of which led to someone attempting to attack a person based on their shared location.
I think it's clear that there is some justification for prohibiting public location sharing for controversial figures during the course of their private lives, as it holds little value in terms of expressing oneself freely. Meanwhile, the previous suspensions tended toward expressions which were far less likely to lead to physical harm.
Even worse, does it apply any ethical principles to the decision making around the limits of freedom of speech? I.e. when you're weighing up whether, say, incitement of violence, or Nazi support are beyond the line of what is acceptable, do you also place 'promoting alternative social media technology' as somewhere near these limits of freedom of speech?
Have I been advocating following Twitter's rules? No. I've simply been explaining what those rules were (they have since been reverted) and how PG broke them.
Actually, Elon just had paul's account unsuspended. Regardless of the reasoning, it makes much of your argumentation moot (irrelevant) because it's clear you don't understand Twitter or Musk's reasoning (nor does Musk).
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
You can’t blame the enforcement of a new policy on a “rogue employee”. The buck stops with Elon and he needs to own the consequences of whatever policy changes he decides to enact.
I think we need to be at least open to the possibility that the current owner of privately held Twitter is an extraordinarily thin-skinned douchebag with the conflict management skills of a spoiled toddler, and a lengthy track record of petty ridiculous retaliation against people who suggest he is wrong about something or otherwise not the biggest genius in the world.
From the "Twitter Files", the platform reporting system has a list of accounts, and those accounts can have different levels of "approval" for moderation. For example, any moderation action taken on Libs of Tik Tok would require approval from a committee [1]. Larger, more popular accounts require more eyes as they're likely to garner more "false" reports.
All of this is to say that there are three likely scenarios:
1. For whatever reason (e.g. staffing, technical problems, lack of training), PG's account didn't get treated with the scrutiny it deserved.
2. A report on PG's account went up the chain, landed in front of a trained moderation team, and they banned him against Musk's wishes (presumably unintentionally).
3. Musk desired his ban.
If it was a random tech CEO, I think Scenario 2 would be most likely. Given the recent technical issues with Twitter, their employee turnover, and Musk's recent actions towards "former allies" that spoke out against him, I think it's actually a toss-up.
> We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
And from Elon Musk:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
This is actually how I found out about several of these services. Elon's finding out the hard way that the Streisand Effect continues to work no matter how hard you swing the banhammer.
This is all rather entertaining to watch from the sidelines. Both "sides" in this power struggle are making hilarious cock-ups and are playing hard to their bases, to the point of absurdity. The sad thing is watching people say things like this as if it's some kind of "checkmate, alt-right!" but anyone with even an eighth of their attention resting outside of a filter bubble can see that A) nobody on the other side gives a shit and B) the side accusing Musk of not adhering to his promise has already squandered so much cache over the past 7 years that this kind of reneging, which is by all measures incredibly tame and expected given both Twitter's business interests and Musks personality, is in no way damning let alone surprising. Neither side has moral authority, you're both just street fighting and are too covered in mud and manure to figure out that you're punching in the wrong directions.
Exactly. It's so odd to act like this is a good example of a "free speech violation". The speech being prohibited serves no purpose beyond harming Twitter's popularity. If you're still allowed to convey any actual opinion (with clear exceptions, such as desire for harm to be done, illegal speech, etc), than this is a nothingburger to the people willing to support Musk.
Similarly, it's so minor in comparison to previous examples of Twitter's past suspensions for real free speech violations that nobody on the right is going to come to the suspension "victim's" defense.
Notice that TikTok isn't on the list. Seems like Musk crafted the rules in a way to ensure that one of his favorite Twitter accounts is safe from this rule about posting links to other social media.
Okay. Would you perhaps suggest “instigated” as a better descriptor?
Quite literally, Bostons childrens fucking hospital has been receiving direct bomb threats, death threats against doctors, & other shit directly because of LibsofTikToks extreme stretching of cherry-picked “truths”
If you are trying to say you know better about this than the state government of Massachusetts, & even the feds - please do let me know why you think this way, whether or not you think your viewpoint is best for a civil society, & whatever other reasons you believe I’m not able to accurately apply the meanings of “incite” or “instigate”
This is a very strange hill to have an opinion on other than “this is very bad and dangerous” when a childrens hospital affiliated with one of academias (Harvard/Cambridge universities) premier teaching hospitals (Mass General as a whole - which the childrens hospital is affiliated with.) is receiving bomb threats & direct threats of lethal harm to several employed doctors, as well as their support staff.
I’ve come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that there’s no good faith discussion to be had when one side is “anything that leads to threats of domestic terrosism against a childrens hospital is a bad thing” & the other is “buh, buuh - have u considered that death threats against childrens hospitals might actually be the way of righteousness? This sociopath has thoughts they think you’ve yet to consider!”
> I’ve come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that there’s no good faith discussion to be had when one side is “anything that leads to threats of domestic terrosism against a childrens hospital is a bad thing” & the other is “buh, buuh - have u considered that death threats against childrens hospitals might actually be the way of righteousness? This sociopath has thoughts they think you’ve yet to consider!”
I fully support directing resources to tracking down and prosecuting people issuing threats. That would be a good use of police resources as opposed to some of the bullshit they spend their time on now. The people issuing threats were motivated to act by their ethics that were triggered by stories told by LibsOfTikTok, but also because they think they can get away with it, and that's the lever that we can move without compromise. Instead of trying to constrain speech, ensure people can have charged conversations on important social issues without the threat of violence.
That said, I also reject your inference that LibsOfTikTok necessarily bears direct responsibility for the people who issue violent threats. "Incitement" are exactly the cases where speech does convey responsibility, and I'm not sure they've crossed that line.
To say LibsOfTikTok is responsible would also imply that CNN and MSNBC's coverage was responsible for Hodgkinson's attempt to murder a bunch of Republicans. If you want to make that argument too then at least you're being consistent, but it's totally reasonable to disagree.
Given how you've framed this, you'll probably argue that LibsOfTikTok is not practicing "journalism", but there is no rigourous, formal definition of journalism that would distinguish what the media does from what LibsOfTikTok does. Media is factually wrong all of the time and its coverage clearly biased as well. We can agree that LibsOfTikTok is probably wrong "more" of the time and "more" biased, but moving the line of incitement, libel and defamation to encompass more speech is slippery and dangerous.
YouTube also isn’t included. I think it’s possible that while the policy is foolhardy and vague, he deliberately excluded video sites.
This means he’d have failed to achieved his purpose, since TikTok is certainly a competitor even if the medium is video rather than text, but I also don’t think he understands social media all that well.
It's not so much whether or not someone you like Paul Graham or not. I don't follow him. I don't know him. I'm sure he's a fine person.
But if you really, truly believe in free speech and having a platform for sharing interesting ideas, then you want someone like Mr. Graham on the platform.
Elon has been so hands-on and vindictive that it's hard to rule out him personally deciding to ban pg and then going back on it, but that's not the only possibility. If you looked at the replies to pg's initial "I'm leaving" post, there were hundreds or thousands of Elon's reply guys mocking him or deriding the decision. Twitter has become much more of a toxic hellhole than it was before.
What I've noticed is that accounts tend to receive bans when a large number of users report them simultaneously (whether they are actually rule breaking has relatively little impact). It strikes me as possible that a bunch of Elon's fans reported the "I have a Mastodon account" post, and some moderator pulled the plug on the account on the assumption that that's what Elon would want.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of this would exonerate Elon. He put this stupid policy in place to begin with. If anything, the sheer scale of the pro-Elon toxicity I've seen in every Twitter link I've clicked today is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is slowly building on the platform.
I think what's highly likely is that the "hundreds or thousands of Elon's guys" (or 4chan trolls) reported the account/tweet.
Most platforms use some sort of automatic algorithm coupled with an army of people in "third world" countries doing actual first-level reviews and a smaller group people at HQ supervising/monitoring/working on the algorithms.
Well, except...he fired all those people. So now it's probably just "autoban and if there's enough noise, someone comes back and unbans."
When the elon jet reddit user got banned, it was probably the same thing - trolls/bots/muskies mass-reporting after a post hit the front page.
I use TinyURL. I’m sure other link shorteners work. When a snitch reports the tweet I add random query variables to the url and generate another short link.
No, it literally said in the rules that he posted that any attempt to get around it would also be a violation. He told people where to find it. He attempted to get around it. So it's a violation.
A stupid rule, but technically someone at Twitter has to enforce it. Since the people suspending accounts aren't in charge of what rules they enforce and which they don't.
How much you want to bet this ends up with the EU threatening Musk again?
Not really “has to”, he just is doing it because he’s got nothing better to do. Much like how he didn’t have to fire the previous head of moderation and spend the last week calling him a gay pedophile and releasing his work emails.
Isn't he CEO of 2 or 3 other companies? I know a lot of people think that CEOs don't actually do anything important; Musk is not hurting their argument.
I think he's the "CEO" of several more companies. How many 100 hour work weeks has Elon logged at the Boring company this month? I'm going to guess zero.
> Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.
I'm not sure a vote is the best option but it doesn't solve the problem either. There needs to be due process. You can't bring out a new policy and 5 mins later start banning accounts that have tweets older than the policy that also violate the policy.
Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.
> Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.
Is there still any doubt about that?
The only way forward where I think Twitter may be salvaged is if Musk steps away from it right now but I don't think his ego would allow him to admit to such a failure. So down it is.
If the answer is 'yes', it's not a rigged poll and he abides by it then I don't envy whoever will be in the drivers seat with Elon as backseat driver and most powerful user of the platform.
I suspect the answer could be yes and still be what Elon wants. Elon does something spectacularly unpopular then throws this poll up. While I don't think this is 4d chess I think this might be on purpose. I suspect he wants out and to save face publicly. This way he can claim to his supporters that he is the good guy and simply abiding by the will of the people. Not that he got in over his head and had to bail before drowning.
The first thing any new CEO of Twitter should do as a litmus test of their freedom to act would be to ban Musk. If that sticks Twitter might regain some trust. Plenty of stuff Musk has done in the last couple of weeks would be bannable offences by their own TOS.
It doesn't matter if it's rigged. My bet is, Elon is tired of this mess by now and wants to resign — this is just a way of looking good on the way out.
Funnily enough, he has a poll up half an hour ago for whether he should step away as head of Twitter. Yes has a strong lead, so I guess we'll see if he abides by it!
I think there is. Not so much because of Musk himself, but because network effects businesses are hard to kill. Exhibit A being Jack's years of vague, indifferent, part-time management.
I think he could continue to fuck it up for a while, find a reason to declare victory, and turn it over to a department-store mannequin to run while he goes back to his real job(s). It would slowly reconstitute itself and keep chugging along. As comparison, I note that Tumblr and Flickr are still going concerns.
That said, he's been far more diligent in breaking it than I ever expected, so he may well manage to destroy it.
> but because network effects businesses are hard to kill
That is true, but once it does go down it can go very fast, especially if there is a viable replacement. Digg, Slashdot, MySpace, AOL, Google+ etc. Network effects work to your advantage on the way up, but can work to your disadvantage on the way down.
Tumblr and Flickr are shadows of their former selves.
Oh, for sure. It'll be interesting, though, to see if there is a "next Twitter". I suspect that Twitter is a creature of the era in which it started, and so that there is no next Twitter in the sense of a global town square. I think it will be more like email's slow slide, with different needs causing fragmentation into different tools and spaces.
One of the many reasons why "a vote" isn't a best option is that by "a vote", he means a poll he posts on his personal Twitter account and which is brigaded by lunatic Elon people. Moreover, Twitter laid off at least 80% of the experiments team last I checked (maybe 100% now?) and most of the other related research science people, so I highly doubt they even have a mechanism to do sample to population extrapolation or design a sample frame even if they wanted to. Completely embarrassing.
Another reason is that this is the platform Elon Musk himself claims is full of bots. If that's the case, wouldn't it make online polls on that platform pretty untrustworthy?
He's already held a poll on unbanning Donald Trump, and while the poll was ongoing, Elon was complaining that too many bots and trolls were voting 'No'.
So sad. It would have been better if it had stayed banned, really would have given that extra push to mastodon/etc.
Does anyone think Elon can recover this situation? I think he'll have to re-float twitter and have an independent CEO, and sell another $15B of Telsa stock to pay back the debt and get some operating capital. With time and rational management, he might be able to then sell out, only losing ~$15B.
And it shows Paul is followed by 2857 people, following none.
All this random minor chaos is a little saddening.
Eggs have to be broken to make omelette. This looks like sloppy cooking.
Oh you’re right. It just makes analysis like, dumb.
Making piles of money, inspiring a lot of people, while holding a questionable vision just isn’t something reactionary people do, usually. It’s something con-men do, but they usually try to save their image. Not go all Kurt Cobain on their kingdom…
Indeed. This one is funky. I’m open to outliers. Good call.
To be fair, the bloke is just human. Unfortunately we don't need humans running big old corps and media outfits or even simple businesses.
I'm not sure how you can have a "charismatic" individual run something like Twitter. Your charisma might be my anathema but a PR department waffling platitudes will probably work.
A dictator will always want to dabble. We are looking at some fundamentals here. Twitter run by whim and not rule. The world's media has basically gone all in on Twitter but it needs to get a grip.
I suspect the best thing for Twitter is to exclude the owner from participating. We all have far bigger fish to fry.
For sure. And I think the lashing out is driven by some things that are legitimately painful. He only briefly wanted to buy Twitter; the courts were going to force him to buy it. And the main source of his wealth, TSLA, has gone from a peak of nearly $400 per share to down around $150.
Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, where his has competent domain experts running things he knows less about, he has already fired everybody at Twitter with a backbone. Because he uses Twitter, he clearly (and wrongly) believes he understands it just fine. Twitter's also all software and mostly consumer-facing, so changes are both immediate and obvious. So I think with Twitter there's very little between his impulses and immediate impact on hundreds of millions of people.
Oh, for sure. But given his behavior, either he didn't believe it was a firm contract or he just thought firm contracts applied to other people, not him. Either way, I'm sure it's a very stressful experience. Stress that he has richly earned, I must add. I just think it helps explain why he's flailing around with such vigor.
I think it's worthy to note that the markets declined significantly between when he signaled a desire to buy Twitter and when the court forced his hand. I don't think he wanted to back out, he only sought adjusted pricing, based on the significant decline in stock price.
Yeah, but that’s not how public company acquisitions work. Basically the reason that there’s a lag between when the contract is signed and when the acquisition closes is because there’s a lot of logistical stuff that has to happen in the meantime. SEC filings have to be made, shareholders have to approve the transaction, usually at least some regulators have to sign off, etc.
It can be very disruptive to a company’s operations and stakeholders (employees, vendors, customers, etc.) for it to agree to sell itself. So it wants to have its deal, including price, locked down to the maximum extent possible. So if markets turn down in that interim period, 99.9999% of the time, it’s the buyer’s problem. And in any event, Twitter would have had to go back to the shareholders for another vote even if they had wanted to take a lower price.*
But there was no particular reason for them to, because they had a tight contract and there weren’t any compelling arguments that the buyer wasn’t required to close per its terms.
* An obvious question is, what if markets had gone up instead of down in that period? There was still a binding deal to acquire Twitter, but in this instance, it is at least theoretically possible that another buyer could have made an unsolicited offer for the company and the board would have had a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept that off. In that case, they can terminate the merger agreement, but then the buyer gets a termination fee and usually reimbursement of transaction expenses. But the reason for the asymmetry is that, barring a deeply distressed situation, a company doesn’t put itself up for sale without a high degree of certainty that a sale on the original or better terms will go through at the end of the day.
Other repliers are disagreeing with you but I think you are absolutely correct. He was trying to pressure Twitter into changing their price to avoid being dragged through discovery. It looked to me like it almost worked, but my suspicion is he realized that he would also be subjected to this and decided it wasn’t worth it.
If he can't handle the uncertainty of shifting markets getting in the way of the binding agreements he forced on other people, if the stress of managing that many billions of dollars is making him sad, I'd be happy to take a few off his hands to help lighten the load ;)
I think we're all right there with you, but I'm not holding my breath. Best he could off Jet Tracker Kid was $5k, which would arguably be pennies (less than that?) to Elon with his level of wealth. :D
I can understand why folks feel no sympathy for him on the matter, but he is a business man, and any smart business man would be foolish to not attempt to get the best deal in the end. I was merely pointing out that if he truly did not want to own Twitter then he would have just paid the breakup fee.
Why would short-term market price fluctuations matter if he were serious? Real corporate acquisitions are based on looking at the target, figuring out how much money could be made by the new owner, and bidding accordingly. If he were buying it for business reasons, a general market decline wouldn't change anything, because it would be years before he might try to IPO again. And if it wasn't for business reasons, market fluctuations matter even less.
I think the real problem is Musk is a very polarizing personality and everyone can only speculate his intentions using their colored lens.
I stand by my opinion that he intended to close the deal one way or another, but wanted more favorable pricing. Your IPO profit is eaten away if you paid more than you could have when taking the company private.
I don't think Twitter truly was worth what the markets claimed it was worth, much the same as Tesla stock is still detached from the underlying asset. Mania in the markets will set the price at whatever people are willing to pay.
I firmly believe Musk saw a threat to the ability for healthy public discourse to be carried out and was willing to jump on the grenade that was an overvalued Twitter, until a point at which it became vastly overvalued.
That said: I do agree he has made a series of missteps at the helm of Twitter. He came in seeking to change far too much, far too quickly, and Twitter has a rough road ahead of it to get to even self sustaining, especially on the eve of an economic calamity.
I suspect he wanted to cause problems and pain for Twitter, and that this was the bait used to hook him into ownership at an inflated price. He has flouted so many other laws, regulations, etc, he probably thought he had a good chance at getting away with this type of behaviour in a Delaware court.
I think it was just a regular pump and dump like with doge or btc. He was going to buy a stake, get his followers excited, pump the share price and then dump it.
What he didn’t realise is that in the real world, contracts can be enforced.
They rebuffed him, poison pilled to make it really hard and required a much firmer offer, which he made and they accepted (he even threatened a shareholder lawsuit if they didn't citing boardmember fiduciary duty).
Courts didn't force this on him out of nowhere, he bought it then he wanted out when the tech market tanked, and courts just said no, you bought it.
He had a lot of time to back out with a penalty payment too and didn't do so.
To oversimplify it somewhat, he could back out and walk away owing the $1 billion only if his debt financing sources had refused to fund. It was unlikely that was going to happen because (1) his lenders had committed to finance the deal (barring the occurrence of very, very unusual circumstances) and (2) they had their own separate legal and reputational exposure if they didn’t show up at closing.
The courts forced him to make good on his ironclad offer to buy. He forced his lawyers to craft the most absurdly ironclad offer you could imagine. No lawyer would have ever written such an offer without being explicitly told.
I don't know, I think speech on twitter was way more predictable before. Now you need a weather report to figure out what Elons current mood is and an oracle to figure out what you're therefore not allowed to post.
Makes even more sense if you treat it as a foreign hostile takeover.
A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.
I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.
It doesn't quite add up all the way to me, but almost; it looks like an act of sabotage.
The thought experiment is: if you wanted to destroy Twitter, what would you differently?
I mean you could do even worse, but... not if you didn't want to make it obvious. The "entitled born-rich manboy can't deal" is obviously a solid cover, because almost all of us already believe it!
Possibly, an algorithm banned him just for writing the word "mastodon", then someone noticed and reversed the ban just because he's famous, to avoid public backlash.
Will everyone who argued that paulg broke the rules with his last tweet now admit they were wrong or will they now argue the unbanning isn't justified?
The European Union Digital Markets Act, coming into effect in May 2023, explicitly forbids such behavior. (If twitter is classified as a "gatekeeper".)
Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
Odd use of 'gatekeeper' isn't it? Even if I would call this 'gatekeeping behaviour' (I don't think it is, the way that's usually used around here at least? Not to say that it isn't 'misbehaviour') surely the thing that's objected to really is gatekeeping by x platforms, where x is 'monopoly' or 'dominant' or something?
I think the term gatekeeper makes more sense if applied to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft & Co, with their search engines, maps, app stores, operating systems, browsers ... all these are gateways to "the digital market". Twitter might be to small and comparatively niche to be classified as a gatekeeper. There does not seem to be an exact definition that I could find. But social networks as a category and companies like Meta/Facebook are listed as gatekeepers.
> There does not seem to be an exact definition that I could find.
From the regulation, Article 3:
1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:
(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
2. An undertaking shall be presumed to satisfy the respective requirements in paragraph 1:
(a) as regards paragraph 1, point (a), where it achieves an annual Union turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States;
(b) as regards paragraph 1, point (b), where it provides a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union, identified and calculated in accordance with the methodology and indicators set out in the Annex;
(c) as regards paragraph 1, point (c), where the thresholds in point (b) of this paragraph were met in each of the last three financial years.
Thanks for digging that out. That's a good expansion of what I meant by 'dominant platform' really, it's just to me, in what I see, that's not the way 'gatekeeper' is used (in the popular modern way, nor does it make sense at all in a metaphorical to historical/literal way). People seem to disagree :shrug:.
A correct use of "gatekeeper" as it always has been.
You might be more used to the more informal social media use of the word meaning busybodies that involve themselves unasked to police people's behaviors to their own arbitrary standards; this is not it.
By far the most prevalent use I see is Wiktionary's #3 'one who gatekeeps' > verb #5:
> (by extension, slang, Internet) To limit another party's participation in a collective identity or activity, usually due to undue pettiness, resentment, or overprotectiveness.
But in the (today) rarer, less metaphorical sense... It's not that either? What is Twitter guarding access to? It's not, we're talking about Twitter itself.
My view is that "gatekeeper" used to - and still does - mean someone or something with actual power over belonging to something, and by extension "gatekeeping" commonly means someone who doesn't have actual power but tries to exert social influence as if they decided who does and doesn't participate in or belong to a thing. I think the two meanings continue to coexist depending on context.
> My view is that "gatekeeper" used to - and still does - mean someone or something with actual power over belonging to something, and by extension "gatekeeping" commonly means someone who doesn't have actual power but tries to exert social influence as if they decided who does and doesn't participate in or belong to a thing.
From a straight up grammatical perspective, I'm not sure what you're saying makes sense, or really what you're trying to say. What you're saying "gatekeeper" means tracks just fine. But I'm getting thrown for a loop with "gatekeeping" because that's either a verb (e.g. "The dog is gatekeeping.") or an adjective (e.g. "The gatekeeping dog..."), but you're giving it a meaning that only works for a noun ("someone who doesn't have actual power but...").
Basically, I don't understand what you're trying to say, but what you're saying seems like something I'd like to understand.
As far as grammar goes, I think I was implying that "gatekeeper" does suggest the older meaning more, and "gatekeeping" the newer meaning. But I'm not sure if that's a rigid rule or why the pattern exists.
Twitter is a bit of a gatekeeper is it not? So many companies ran their customer service through there, it became one of the dominant customer service platforms (alongside Facebook). On top of this, many news platforms also relied heavily on Twitter to break and share news, same with journalists who used Twitter as their only form of communication effectively.
Twitter was positioning itself as a major gatekeeper of information, and so I do think the EU should be looking into this carefully in hopes of preventing it from happening again.
To be clear, I don't object to there being the regulation at all, I was just commenting on the word choice, which to me, and apparently vehemently not others, seemed unusual.
The way Elon seems to like to take his chances, Twitter pulling out from the EU/EEA market might be a possibility. Personally I think that would be beneficial, as even more would switch to Mastodon in 2023. Even if I don't use social blogging websites myself, I think that would be a net win.
I’ve been thinking recently that Elon might actually have the hidden goal of attempting to get the US to pass legislation forbidding social media companies from doing this sort of thing.
If that were his goal, he could gave done it for far less than $44B. how many dark money donations, Super PACs and think-tanks (left and right) could he have funded with 'only' $2B? Probably enough to get him an amendment in a must-pass bill with bipartisan support. For even less money, he could petition the state legislature in Texas or Florida to pass another Social Media law.
I’ve never had the slightest illusion about Elon Musk or his principles. About the most I can say for him is he has said a few things I agree with over the years.
"She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour 9:00 a.m.
And I'm gonna be high
As a kite by then
...
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no, no, no
I'm a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did"
I wonder what amount of twitter revenue and users are in the EU?
Also I strongly suspect that mastadon would have a lot of trouble complying with European laws (except I think some have company size minimums that mastadon instances would likely not reach).
If someone follows me, that means they’ve affirmatively expressed interest in what I have to say. How is it “spam” for me to tell them how they can continue hearing from me?
He's saying such a rule from the EU could allow spam from the companies themselves, not that these posts from advocate users would be an instance of spam.
> He’s saying such a rule from the EU could allow spam from the companies themselves
The word “consumer” in the rule that gatekeeper platforms must not “prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms” has a meaning, and that meaning is, in this case, “Elon Musk is wrong”.
I'm kind of shocked that Bezos hasn't commissioned an ActivityPub/federated network (mastodon instance) that obfuscates the decentralization (for easier onboarding) and gives you some kind of "deal" for having Amazon Prime.
Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).
I think there are tons of brands that could launch a Twitter clone right now while the dumpster fire is hot. My guess is that nobody wants to run a social media site these days… not even Elon Musk.
Social media sites are a sort of grayweb at this point in history.
Content moderation is a hard, stressful, thankless job. Having built several moderation tools for large sites (large for back in the day), I for one am enjoying the debacle that is Elon and a cadre of Yes Men thinking they would waltz in with no experience and shake it all up with no consequences.
I have no experience with content moderation but thought that the bureaucracy Twitter had in place was really a response to genuine market imperatives. I mean, remember the site was a leading recruitment site for foreign Isis fighters, to give an extreme example. The Elonites and the resurfaced 4chan types have this picture of faceless ‘woke’ elites who came from nowhere but the general elite miasma —- and sensibly cast aside by free speech Musk. But in fact it was a gruesome business and technical problem; in the end it will only end up being reproduced.
I think the reason so few are getting into the thing is that Twitter never showed the concept to be a particularly profitable business in the first place, and it couldn't seem to grow beyond a certain small size (in comparison to other networks).
So why would Amazon or any other company want to invest in their own version of that?
I definitely agree that Twitter, as a proof of its concept, failed pretty spectacularly. But I also feel like that was due to a confusion of focus at the company, realized as a desire to be an ad-supported platform that championed a libertarian ideal of 'free speech'. That dissonance hurt them a lot, to my mind.
Amazon, on the other hand, has no such dissonance and has a very profitable advertising arm that could happily benefit from yet more digital real estate. Of all the players out there, Amazon already does massive hosting AND competent ad scheduling across diverse device ecosystems. It just seems like they've got all of the technical side pretty much already up and running; they just need to strap it together in a specific package and ship it.
I know - easier said than done; and who knows what other priorities they're worried about that might not cooperate with owning a "digital town square". For all I know, there's some monopoly law that they'd have to screw with, too.
But all of this is to say: they seem well-positioned, so I'm just idling musing on why they haven't capitalized on it. Your reasoning is as good as any other I've heard. /shrug
That's like saying "Postfix isn't scalable like Gmail", comparing two completely different things. and in fact the fediverse is far more scalable than any single service like Twitter can be.
The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).
One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.
So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.
Not necessarily a single big instance. Just one big implementation; that may use multiple instances under the hood. The centralization of Amazon allows it to polish up some kind of "portal" without worrying about the traffic concerns, and then use that to let users connect to internal instances, seamlessly, and external instances in common federated ways.
I know it seems like a long way around for not really providing any "value", but the idea is that most people just want "next twitter". They simply aren't going to deal with server instances in the way that, say, the gaming public does. People running businesses, being "influencers", or developing journalistic followings do not get any value from caring about technical implementation. So Amazon's strength, here, is that they could pick up a ton of influential people just by being "easy" and then the followers come for their interests.
Reminder that with Mastodon, more than with other services, you have to know and trust the server operator to respect your privacy and also to not act arbitrarily if you have a different political stance on an issue than they.
It's significantly easier to find who is responsible, and to sue them or arrest them. You can certainly afford to sue them more than a $20B company.
In contrast, the operator doesn't even have your phone number, nor demand a major corp email address, both things twitter required. You could log in via tor if you wanted.
Twitter could have sold your data, accidentally leaked it via an API or some cloud bucket, or it could have gone out with the help of a foreign intelligence operative employed there... And you have no hope of proving how or why. Their internal controls were incredibly lax. And the FBI would tell you to go away.
Well, I think I have to update my understanding of "Free Speech". It's such a simple concept on paper that got extremely complex to deal with once deployed to production.
I think twitter couldn’t be more mismanaged than under this narcissistic idiot, but free speech is far from simple — you just get mindless shitposting and hate speech without some form of moderation.
Ah, that’s why I was banned. I had my Mastadon account in my profile. Made that account in 2007. What a shame to have something so important completely torn down.
A million users is insignificant compared to the number of advertisers who have abandoned them, and it's probably causing cash flow problems which is one reason why he was so desperate to chase people away and/or fire them, and why Twitter has been liquidating equipment (that and the huge debt he's generated on Twitter's books.)
Remember how Twitter has stopped paying rent on a bunch of its offices? And Musk just cashed $3.5B in Tesla stock? They probably couldn't pay the rent without people going unpaid.
Not paying your rent is one thing, but not paying employees results in immediate, we-gonna-fuck-you-in-the-ass attention from governments around the world. My state treats non-payment of wages as a criminal offense by the officers of the company.
It's possible, it's just that Musk's behavior is so abhorrent there's essentially no remaining reasonable defense of any of his naked hypocrisy and childishness.
On the grand scale of things, Musk's twitter behaviour isn't even a nanohitler, well bellow Bill Gates, the Koch brothers or Murdock and not even close to basically any world leader (Tony Blair, George W Bush, Barrack Obama, Emmanuel Macron). Don't overuse words like "abhorent" unless you want to seem like you're hysterically overreacting.
> to comment substantively on this topic at this point
Why not? "It's a private platform!". If that very substantive statement was embraced a couple of years ago by many that have now got banned I don't see why they can't follow their own (past) advice.
I joked with a friend years ago when Elon started this act that if the billionaire class is going to have their way with the rest of society then they better at least be entertaining.
I can’t say I’ve been much of an Elon fan for a while now but he does give me plenty to gawk at, a modern day bread and circus.
This is not exactly free speech issue, because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.
This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.
> because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.
Because the journalists Musk banned were definitely not banned for their opinions on Musk?
I'm going to preempt the 'harassment' argument--the photo Musk posted, when he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked, was found to have been taken an hour after Musk's jet took off and nowhere near any airport.
One of the journalist didn't even talked about Elonjet, but posted an article about Tesla with data from an insider btw. This claim just fell apart for me when I learned that, do you still believe it's true?
Taylor Lorenz was suspended for “prior doxxing” (i.e. before the policy change, and why now?) immediately after asking Musk for comment on a story about his allegation that @elonjet was responsible for a stalking incident.
It's at the very least Musk's explanation. Lorenz's tweet with her offsite links predates the new policy; if they're related, the policy was a retroactive explanation similar to how they made up the "no real-time location" policy after banning @elonjet.
I think it was this: she tagged Elon (and emailed him), so he went looking at her account. Found some older posts and reported them (maybe his assistant did that).
And the account was banned until the links are removed by the account owner (this is how twitter deals with such posts).
Taylor Lorenz did enough harm already, for example, revealing identity of libsoftiktok was inappropriate, she is a bad person.
I don't think that anything prior to rule introduction should stay forever. If she was forced to delete it, that's fine.
I guess she got banned for reminding musk about the time he doxxed her for reporting on Tesla.
They are other examples.
And the question isn't if it's true or not. The question was: what would make you change your mind about EM. To me, it was the pedo accusations about a rescuer who refused his 'help'. I then found videos about how fake and dumb the Hyperloop was, and I was done with him.
I change my mind constantly when I get more information. But my opinion of Musk is not polar either absolute evil and absolute good. When he does something good, I give him a point, when he makes a mistake, I subtract a point.
So far Elon was net positive for Twitter.
Hyperloop, I don't think this is a big deal. Musk has thousands ideas, not all of them work.
I don't care about pedo story. It was inappropriate for sure, but everyone can make mistakes. Who is without sin... I prefer people who make mistakes openly to people who know how signal virtue.
In the end, for me, it is important what you do, and not as much, what you say.
I think this article explained well that she in fact wasn't tweeting about Elonjet but about the time he doxxed an ex-employeur.
I remember it was before the idiotic pedophilia accusations, he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address after tweeting about her like 5 times in a row, i thought 'wow, not cool'.
Here what I found [0]: "This is worse than just stalking: Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez, he’s retweeting stuff they find, and he’s encouraging them every step of the way. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for setting mobs upon his enemies; Musk should be banned too, but won’t be."
Maybe he did something else, and that is bad, but let's not move goalposts.
> he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address
"Doxxing" for revealing email address a bit exaggeration. This is also bad, but doxxing usually means revealing something which may give people significant distress. Like home address.
Also if there's a screenshot of such tweet. Since it seems to be disappeared from the internet, probably nobody really cared.
> Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez
This is journalistic exaggeration. There's no proof of that in the article. Mentioning someone in Twitter does not mean he intentionally sets "his army of fanboys".
It's very likely an antitrust issue. This is a significant policy shift meant to stifle a competitor through market dominance rather than competition. I'd be surprised if the consumer protection bureau doesn't start an investigation
You are correct in that this is not a free speech issue. Private organizations can control what is said on their platform.
You are 100% incorrect in that free speech is not, has never been, and will never be limited to political preferences/opinions.
Commercial, frivolous, inconsequential, satirical, and all other forms of free and independent thought are "speech".
"Drink more Ovaltine" is speech the same way "slavery is bad" is speech. These two disparate utterances are equally important and protected as "speech".
"I like big butts and I cannot lie" is speech as important as a treatise on political theory.
The comment you replied to lampoons Musk's "free speech absolutist" schtick. A nuance you have failed to appreciate.
What hasn't been noted here, yet, as far as I can tell, is that the EU prohibits this type of behavior (banning mentions of competitors) and it will be interesting to see how they respond. But that's an antitrust matter, not free speech.
Well, in the context of Musk's entire public premise for buying Twitter being to provide an at-scale safe haven for online free speech, it absolutely is a free speech issue.
I must say, VPS_Report is an evil person. I don't know if he deserves his right to speech after he posted his threats, but I won't miss him on Twitter.
Andy Ngo is fine. You may disagree with him, but he only does journalist work.
I thought @chadloder was a really insightful account with tons of resources for Osint and infosec.
I don't get why it's banned, is it because he found some jan6 protestors who weren't caught by the police yet with his tools?
And, I mean, crimethinc, really? You cannot do mellower on the anarchist side. I don't think they even defend the second amendment. It's clearly political.
chadloder seems like a decent person. I'd like to know what Elon or Twitter has on him.
Musk promised that everyone will get explanation why they were banned. I'm waiting for it.
> It's clearly political.
It may be personal, but I doubt it is political. It just happens that people who attack Elon are on the left, and people who were banned by previous administration and unbanned now are on the right, so it looks political.
Of course, Twitter moderation should not be based on personal preferences of Elon.
> all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example
I do not think this is true. At least not in this scale.
You can post on FB about Twitter or Mastodon. You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo[0] or OpenStreetMap and so on.
[0] Even first suggestion for me when I enter the 'd' char.
Because people do not threaten FB to leave to Mastodon. But you can't link (maybe you can now, but some time ago you couldn't) to Telegram inside Whatsapp, because Facebook considered Telegram a competitor.
> You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo
Again, because Google does not consider DDG a competitor.
But a while ago (long before the war when everybody were at peace), Russia was the only country where Google Chrome did not offer the choice of search engine. Because Russia was the only country where Google was not the leading search engine. There's famous commit in Chromium repository which explicitly excludes Russia.
> This is not exactly free speech issue, because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.
Freedom of speech encompasses far more than just "political preferences/opinions".
> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example).
1. I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms.
2. Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists".
3. Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise. It's a "competitor" to Twitter in the same sense that me raising chickens in my backyard makes me a "competitor" to Tyson or Foster Farms.
> I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms
WhatsApp banned links to Telegram.
Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
> Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists"
Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
> Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise
Competition may be not only for money, but also competition for users. It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
> Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
Right, links, not "mere mentions".
> Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
Very likely the former - or more accurately, he wasn't ever a "free speech absolutist" in the first place, but dishonestly claimed to be one. The latter is obviously a possibility, though it would go against the whole ostensible point of him buying Twitter in the first place.
> It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
It is also quite possible that a critical number of chicken eaters will stop buying frozen chicken strips in favor of raising chickens themselves or getting chicken meat from neighbors who do so. That doesn't make backyard chicken farmers Tyson/Foster competitors in any meaningful sense.
> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.
During the #deletefacebook movement, Facebook didn't ban links to or discussion of competitors.
Analogy of tyrant in other thread is very apt. Reminds me of Caesar who won impossible wars, gained huge respect and then took over the senate while still claiming that Rome was a republic. Interestingly he became dictator only because all other nobles thought he must be doing something right if he won all he impossible wars.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadUnbanning the alt-right wasn't jumping the shark? Firing over half the employees wasn't jumping the shark? Promoting COVID misinformation wasn't jumping the shark? Yeah, he finally started banning journalists, but he's been making the place unwelcome for anyone who isn't a Trump supporter for a long as heck time.
If you are just now asking if it's going to jump the shark, and I mean this not to be sarcastic or mean, but in genuine hope for the future: Please spend some time asking yourself why banning PG was the last straw for you, and not any of the crazy stuff prior.
Let's make this the last time we let hero worship blind us to the realities on the ground.
When all this started I thought that Twitter wouldn't make it to Christmas. Sometimes I think that was too much, that it'd take longer to collapse. This past week makes me think I might be right.
Ridiculous.
In fact, Tesla's Twitter profile links to Tesla.com and at the bottom of that website is a link to Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn (in addition to Twitter).
Almost anyone with a link to a site in their profile will likely have competitive social media links on that site. PG's website didn't even link to his Mastadon profile, its a plain text representation of his Mastadon handle.
How many levels deep does their new policy go? It sounds like they violated it not Paul...
Paul and I disagree on a lot (I've struggled to remember to not post like a Redditor here) but dear lord -- last I looked at HN, it said the guy was leaving Twitter, and Paul doesn't seem like the type to troll on his way out like I am.
This is absurd.
For context: I'm an amateur comedian in addition to being a hacker. Every set I've done IRL I've asked folks not to record or quote, and had that honored. I specialize in observational comedy -- often rude, insulting observations that approach the limits of American style free expression that I won't repeat here. I've encountered folks who can't take a joke before, but dear lord, the levels of petty coming from Elon Musk are off the charts.
Or as I'd say if it was open mic night in an undisclosed location in Appalachia:
"Big 'You're not breaking up with me I'm breaking up with you' energy on the bird site tonight ladies and gentlemen."
They can’t violate it, because it doesn’t restrict them in any way.
So to be clear, their policy says if you link to a website that links to a website that links to something other than twitter? Or they were so ambiguous that they can selectively ban whoever they want due to the nature of the internet?
>This is my last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.
The tweet itself did not contain a link to http://www.paulgraham.com/, which contains a link to his Mastodon profile. Apparently that was enough to be suspended.
It doesn't even contain a link. It contains the mastodon handle (username and instance), but you can't click on it because it's not a link; you can paste it on the search bar of your own instance to follow him (and see some of his posts, if someone on the same instance has already followed him).
/s ...maybe? I honestly can't tell anymore
but have you tried simply using bookmarks in your browser — full control, full responsibility
also if you on the level of creating and maintaining your own server — its all open source
At least mastodon has a complete export your data feature available for you, without hassle.
> Mastadon
Is this word especially hard to write properly somehow? At least, please let your spell-checker do its job.
Yes, as evidenced by your frustration. It was a poor decision to use that word as the name in the first place - hopefully it hasn't hampered adoption too much.
Now maybe you can "quit Twitter" to join "Gmail", which is an email service. Similarly, people are going to have to pick Mastodon servers that work with them the best.
Tumblr seems to be the weird one (promising ActivityPub, aka Mastodon, support soon). Tumblr seems to be my personal best bet, but I'm also open to suggestions.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126541959168...
there are some additional twitter-like mobile clients, i.e.
- https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/tapbots-ivory-mastodon-...
which supposedly fix the difference
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webpage-sideb...
if that's the biggest obstacle
maybe it just show how little someone else's content is important to you
i mean that's pretty much it. i barely care about the whole thing, but if it's easy enough it's a bit of decent time waster. twitter was easy enough, adding the tiniest of steps is enough to make me decide i don't really care.
Mastodon's UX isn't bad, it's just not actively pressuring me into interacting more than i really want to, the way twitter generally did/does.
2. https://indieweb.org/webactions
Innovation is usually the way to overthrow incumbents, but in this case a carbon copy might be more effective.
Twitter is hard enough technically, but the global compliance/regulatory challenges must be daunting.
The smartest thing he could do is find some pretext to remove his public persona from the daily operations. He's clearly in over his head (micro managing policy etc) and business sense alone should tell him that.
Before: Twitter was everywhere - any clone would fail.
Now: Twitter is still everywhere. Seems like drug for journalists.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165 : Promotion of alternative social platforms policy (help.twitter.com)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985 : Paul Graham is leaving Twitter (twitter.com/paulg)
No one said anything about it being a good version of Twitter.
Except PG made kissy noises with the POW guards and said to the soldiers "I still think they are very civilized" as he went on to the cooler. That bit wasn't in the original script.
They were planning on launching an OF competitor this year.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme
PG did not even post a link, just mentioned the name.
That's the literal opposite of low hanging fruit!
“Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme”
I wished the current one was half as clever.
Mohammed bin Salman invited 30 of his closest friends to discuss public projects before arresting them and torturing them in the Ritz Carlton
Don’t ever fall into the trap of anthropomorphism of autocrats
The only reasonable comment in this thread. He was reinstated a few minutes ago.
If they aren't held hostage by a H-1B visa.
If an employee couldn't afford to leave before — for whatever reason! — then they can't magically afford to leave today either.
This is just a probability you may have a different weight on.
Graham was a threat to the Master, what's a loyal servant to do?
You don’t.
> I always thought it will be there all the time.
Welcome to the fun times of walled gardens owned by capricious wankers!
> Does he has back that he can share?
Maybe!
When the account appears again you run one of the many archiving tools that downloads tweets to a json file.
Preferably a tool that doesn’t require an API key.
Looks like now you're not allowed to so much as mention that you use other websites on the internet besides Twitter.
Elon has made it clear that these blatant attempts at ban evasion are not allowed.
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
PG broke the rule when he promoted a prohibited 3rd-party social media platform.
Twitter is Musk's fiefdom now and the rules are what he decides they are. Letter of the law is worthless here; it's will-of-the-baron rules.
If that’s not okay to Twitter, that’s extremely interesting. Brings Apple’s App Store rules to mind.
I don’t want to derail this conversation with App Store policies, but the notion of policing links isn’t great, especially for a social network.
The TOS also says any accounts which post a direct link to such sites will be found in violation.
It does not say anything about purely mentioning the fact you have another social media (especially without saying the username), nor linking to a personal website, nor does it say anything about referring to where to find such a thing
This is a very strange way to describe what's going on at Twitter.
Musk has loudly announced that you're not allowed to even link to your other profiles on any other social media sites, or even describe indirectly how to find them. No major social media site has ever done something quite this anticompetitive, and certainly not all this scale. I've been using the Internet since the Eternal September, and this is a ludicrous policy.
You may disagree with the policy of banning the promotion of alternative social platforms, but that is the rule. Trying to break that rule while not getting banned is blatantly ban evasion.
Here is Twitter's policy on ban evasion: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion
In case Twitter changes this policy, here's an archived copy of the current version (October 2020): https://web.archive.org/web/20221218225353/https://help.twit...
This is not the usual use of the phrase "ban evasion", but it is a literally correct use of it.
[0]https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
You may have to find an archived copy, since the page you linked currently does not exist:
> Sorry, this page doesn't exist.
> Try using the search bar, or return to the Help Center.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
Your redefinition of the phrase "ban evasion" would implicate anyone who follows the platform's rules but is not wholly devoted to the interests of the platform's owners.
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34050283
As you are aware, the formerly suspended account did not link out to Mastodon or directly name any Mastodon handle. The tweet that led to the suspension was also compliant with how the CEO claimed the policy should have been interpreted:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288
Yes, I am aware that PG did not provide a hyperlink. In fact, that's the core of my claim about PG attempting to violate Twitter's rules while evading a ban (the kind of action which Elon and I have referred to as 'ban evasion').
I believe you have misinterpreted Elon's Tweet. But I'm not interested in debating the interpretation of the poorly written Tweet. What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.
The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO interpreted them. Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules. That is not a reasonable expectation, and the unreasonableness of this expectation caused the backlash that led to the account being unsuspended.
> The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO initially interpreted them
Where did Elon interpret the rule as being that users can advertise prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms as long as they don't provide a hyperlink?
> Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules.
Why are you talking about my expectations? What I am doing here is pointing out that PG clearly violated Twitter's rules. My claim is a descriptive claim, not a normative one.
You are inventing a completely different definition of "ban evasion" that has not been used in any Twitter policy page to try to justify the suspension, even after the suspension has been reversed for its unreasonableness.
> You just can’t create or turn (my emphasis) your account into a free advertising unit for one of the listed competing platforms.
This is what PG was doing (you can argue that he actually wasn't - but he was according to Elon's standards, which is the important sense). One Tweet buried deep in a thread that could possibly be misinterpreted to support your position is not convincing.
I am not "inventing a new definition of ban evasion". I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.
Yes, you are. You've already admitted that your novel definition of "ban evasion" is not the usual use of the phrase (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34047933) and that the phrase typically refers to something completely different (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045113). Twitter's own definition of "ban evasion" differs from what you are claiming the phrase to mean (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion).
> I am using simple English words in a straight-forward way.
No, you are taking a phrase that already has a defined meaning in the context of Twitter and making up a new definition for it to attempt to justify the suspension. As Twitter has already defined it, "ban evasion" is the circumvention of an existing ban or suspension. It is not something that can be done by an account that is not already suspended or banned.
I have no idea why you are continuing to defend this unjustifiable suspension even after Twitter has already reversed it. The fact that your initial comment is flagged, downvoted, and hidden (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044649) shows that your argument has been firmly rejected on HN.
1. PG broke Twitter's rules
2. Twitter suspended PG's account
3. Twitter changed its rules
4. Twitter reinstated PG's account
Whether you like my use of the words 'ban' and 'evasion' ultimately isn't super relevant to my point.
I'm not 'defending' Twitter's actions. I'm interpreting reality. I'm discussing a matter of fact. The question is: did PG break Twitter's rules? The answer: yes. You may dislike Elon Musk. You may dislike me. You may dislike Twitter's (now deleted) rule. But this basic factual claim will remain correct.
HN has an infinite track record of being very wrong. I take my comment being flagged as a much greater endorsement of it than had it been "upvoted". You can find countless HN users in this thread getting the basic facts of the situation wrong (yourself included). And it's not just that these are ignorant people searching for the truth. These are not enquiring minds. Any amount of sincere reflection would have revealed the truth. These are people actively claiming clear untruths as the truth. Why should I care about being downvoted, if these are the people downvoting me? Any time I am upvoted I should take it only as a sign to take a step back and think: "have I made some kind of blatant logical error?"
- The tweet did not link to Mastodon.
- The tweet did not name a Mastodon handle.
- The tweet is not similar to any of the examples provided in the deleted policy (“follow me @username on Instagram”, “username@mastodon.social”, “check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”).
- The tweet did not bypass restrictions on external links via means such as URL cloaking or plaintext obfuscation, with the example provided being “instagram dot com/username”.
- The CEO of Twitter stated that "casually sharing external links" to competing platforms is "fine" when the deleted policy was in place: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288
Even though the account did not break Twitter's rules, you believe that it should have broken Twitter's rules because the tweet said something that hurts Twitter's business prospects. This is what you are erroneously using the phrase "ban evasion" to describe, even though Twitter's policy on ban evasion (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion) defines it as something done only by accounts that were previously banned or suspended.
HN does have it right this time. HN users are fully capable of seeing that the novel definition of "ban evasion" you invented specifically for your argument does not match the definition used in https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/ban-evasion.
Elon's phrase "casual sharing" is not inclusive of PG apparently denouncing Twitter and promoting his Mastodon account in its place. PG's Tweet was anything but casual. If PG had linked to some post he found interesting that happened to be on Mastadon, that might qualify as casual.
I never claimed that my use of the phrase 'ban evasion' matched the use in the Twitter user agreement. HN and I are in agreement on that count (as I have stated elsewhere in this thread).
Frankly, you have bad reading comprehension, most likely due to motivated interpretation i.e. you tend to see what you want to be there rather than what is actually there.
The expectation is that you either break the rule and get suspended, or you don't break the rule and don't get suspended. This acccount didn't break the rule (or the ban evasion policy) as it was written but still got suspended because Twitter still deemed the tweet to be against its interests, even though Twitter didn't bother to codify this in the rule. Twitter can suspend any account on its platform for any reason it wants, of course, but the resulting backlash led to the account being unsuspended.
You resorting to personal attacks shows that you have lost the argument. If you still want to discuss this, there are other comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044151, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34040165, and a bunch of other threads and subthreads. I am disengaging. Merry Christmas.
You seem like someone who can read, so the charatable interpretation is that there is some kind of mental block that's stopping you from seeing the clear truth.
If you want to stop talking, OK. Either way I hope you have a merry Christmas.
FWIW, that's not the definition of ban evasion.
Specifically, ban evasion is attempting to evade an active ban already in effect, e.g., registering an alt.
A fit of pique doesn't redefine a term.
That, as much as anything else, would lead to everyone having drinking problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4plPGRG8o
But I get it now, you're doing comedy.
Just because it's now apparently official policy doesn't make it any less juvenile and mercurial
I suspect it's simply a case of Twitter changing its policy in real time.
Let me be clear that I think Twitter's new social media sharing policy is ridiculous and likely to cause a Streisand effect for Mastodon and others. Twitter is really harming itself with these policies more than anything else, but time will tell whether they see their own errors and grow up in time to save themselves.
Having said that, what other forms of free speech are being prohibited? I haven't read too deeply into the situation around the ElonJet and related account suspensions, but the justifications they've made were related to individual safety regarding real time location sharing of people in the course of their private lives, one case of which led to someone attempting to attack a person based on their shared location.
I think it's clear that there is some justification for prohibiting public location sharing for controversial figures during the course of their private lives, as it holds little value in terms of expressing oneself freely. Meanwhile, the previous suspensions tended toward expressions which were far less likely to lead to physical harm.
People just use them fully randomly.
1. Are you just an advocate for following a website's terms?
2. Or do you think there is credibility in these terms?
1. PG broke one of Twitter's rules:
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
2. Twitter suspended PG's account
3. Twitter got rid of the rule.
4. PG had his account reinstated.
All of this is to say that there are three likely scenarios:
1. For whatever reason (e.g. staffing, technical problems, lack of training), PG's account didn't get treated with the scrutiny it deserved.
2. A report on PG's account went up the chain, landed in front of a trained moderation team, and they banned him against Musk's wishes (presumably unintentionally).
3. Musk desired his ban.
If it was a random tech CEO, I think Scenario 2 would be most likely. Given the recent technical issues with Twitter, their employee turnover, and Musk's recent actions towards "former allies" that spoke out against him, I think it's actually a toss-up.
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601018810495995904
> We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
And from Elon Musk:
> Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme.
Similarly, it's so minor in comparison to previous examples of Twitter's past suspensions for real free speech violations that nobody on the right is going to come to the suspension "victim's" defense.
Quite literally, Bostons childrens fucking hospital has been receiving direct bomb threats, death threats against doctors, & other shit directly because of LibsofTikToks extreme stretching of cherry-picked “truths”
If you are trying to say you know better about this than the state government of Massachusetts, & even the feds - please do let me know why you think this way, whether or not you think your viewpoint is best for a civil society, & whatever other reasons you believe I’m not able to accurately apply the meanings of “incite” or “instigate”
This is a very strange hill to have an opinion on other than “this is very bad and dangerous” when a childrens hospital affiliated with one of academias (Harvard/Cambridge universities) premier teaching hospitals (Mass General as a whole - which the childrens hospital is affiliated with.) is receiving bomb threats & direct threats of lethal harm to several employed doctors, as well as their support staff.
I’ve come to the pretty reasonable conclusion that there’s no good faith discussion to be had when one side is “anything that leads to threats of domestic terrosism against a childrens hospital is a bad thing” & the other is “buh, buuh - have u considered that death threats against childrens hospitals might actually be the way of righteousness? This sociopath has thoughts they think you’ve yet to consider!”
I fully support directing resources to tracking down and prosecuting people issuing threats. That would be a good use of police resources as opposed to some of the bullshit they spend their time on now. The people issuing threats were motivated to act by their ethics that were triggered by stories told by LibsOfTikTok, but also because they think they can get away with it, and that's the lever that we can move without compromise. Instead of trying to constrain speech, ensure people can have charged conversations on important social issues without the threat of violence.
That said, I also reject your inference that LibsOfTikTok necessarily bears direct responsibility for the people who issue violent threats. "Incitement" are exactly the cases where speech does convey responsibility, and I'm not sure they've crossed that line.
To say LibsOfTikTok is responsible would also imply that CNN and MSNBC's coverage was responsible for Hodgkinson's attempt to murder a bunch of Republicans. If you want to make that argument too then at least you're being consistent, but it's totally reasonable to disagree.
Given how you've framed this, you'll probably argue that LibsOfTikTok is not practicing "journalism", but there is no rigourous, formal definition of journalism that would distinguish what the media does from what LibsOfTikTok does. Media is factually wrong all of the time and its coverage clearly biased as well. We can agree that LibsOfTikTok is probably wrong "more" of the time and "more" biased, but moving the line of incitement, libel and defamation to encompass more speech is slippery and dangerous.
This means he’d have failed to achieved his purpose, since TikTok is certainly a competitor even if the medium is video rather than text, but I also don’t think he understands social media all that well.
So much for free speech.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737
But if you really, truly believe in free speech and having a platform for sharing interesting ideas, then you want someone like Mr. Graham on the platform.
What I've noticed is that accounts tend to receive bans when a large number of users report them simultaneously (whether they are actually rule breaking has relatively little impact). It strikes me as possible that a bunch of Elon's fans reported the "I have a Mastodon account" post, and some moderator pulled the plug on the account on the assumption that that's what Elon would want.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of this would exonerate Elon. He put this stupid policy in place to begin with. If anything, the sheer scale of the pro-Elon toxicity I've seen in every Twitter link I've clicked today is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is slowly building on the platform.
Most platforms use some sort of automatic algorithm coupled with an army of people in "third world" countries doing actual first-level reviews and a smaller group people at HQ supervising/monitoring/working on the algorithms.
Well, except...he fired all those people. So now it's probably just "autoban and if there's enough noise, someone comes back and unbans."
When the elon jet reddit user got banned, it was probably the same thing - trolls/bots/muskies mass-reporting after a post hit the front page.
A stupid rule, but technically someone at Twitter has to enforce it. Since the people suspending accounts aren't in charge of what rules they enforce and which they don't.
How much you want to bet this ends up with the EU threatening Musk again?
Any hope for an improved Twitter is getting tossed out the window.
So far.
> Paul’s account will be restored shortly
And https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832
> Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.
Isn't he CEO of 2 or 3 other companies? I know a lot of people think that CEOs don't actually do anything important; Musk is not hurting their argument.
Yes but they aren’t ‘extremely hardcore’ over there.
Not.
I'm not sure a vote is the best option but it doesn't solve the problem either. There needs to be due process. You can't bring out a new policy and 5 mins later start banning accounts that have tweets older than the policy that also violate the policy.
Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.
Is there still any doubt about that?
The only way forward where I think Twitter may be salvaged is if Musk steps away from it right now but I don't think his ego would allow him to admit to such a failure. So down it is.
I think there is. Not so much because of Musk himself, but because network effects businesses are hard to kill. Exhibit A being Jack's years of vague, indifferent, part-time management.
I think he could continue to fuck it up for a while, find a reason to declare victory, and turn it over to a department-store mannequin to run while he goes back to his real job(s). It would slowly reconstitute itself and keep chugging along. As comparison, I note that Tumblr and Flickr are still going concerns.
That said, he's been far more diligent in breaking it than I ever expected, so he may well manage to destroy it.
That is true, but once it does go down it can go very fast, especially if there is a viable replacement. Digg, Slashdot, MySpace, AOL, Google+ etc. Network effects work to your advantage on the way up, but can work to your disadvantage on the way down.
Tumblr and Flickr are shadows of their former selves.
Does anyone think Elon can recover this situation? I think he'll have to re-float twitter and have an independent CEO, and sell another $15B of Telsa stock to pay back the debt and get some operating capital. With time and rational management, he might be able to then sell out, only losing ~$15B.
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045423
There's no secret plan, he's just trying to "fix" whatever personally bothers him.
Making piles of money, inspiring a lot of people, while holding a questionable vision just isn’t something reactionary people do, usually. It’s something con-men do, but they usually try to save their image. Not go all Kurt Cobain on their kingdom…
Indeed. This one is funky. I’m open to outliers. Good call.
I'm not sure how you can have a "charismatic" individual run something like Twitter. Your charisma might be my anathema but a PR department waffling platitudes will probably work.
A dictator will always want to dabble. We are looking at some fundamentals here. Twitter run by whim and not rule. The world's media has basically gone all in on Twitter but it needs to get a grip.
I suspect the best thing for Twitter is to exclude the owner from participating. We all have far bigger fish to fry.
How many orders of magnitude is his NW from yours ? He’ll be ok no need to feel sorry for Elon
Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, where his has competent domain experts running things he knows less about, he has already fired everybody at Twitter with a backbone. Because he uses Twitter, he clearly (and wrongly) believes he understands it just fine. Twitter's also all software and mostly consumer-facing, so changes are both immediate and obvious. So I think with Twitter there's very little between his impulses and immediate impact on hundreds of millions of people.
It can be very disruptive to a company’s operations and stakeholders (employees, vendors, customers, etc.) for it to agree to sell itself. So it wants to have its deal, including price, locked down to the maximum extent possible. So if markets turn down in that interim period, 99.9999% of the time, it’s the buyer’s problem. And in any event, Twitter would have had to go back to the shareholders for another vote even if they had wanted to take a lower price.*
But there was no particular reason for them to, because they had a tight contract and there weren’t any compelling arguments that the buyer wasn’t required to close per its terms.
* An obvious question is, what if markets had gone up instead of down in that period? There was still a binding deal to acquire Twitter, but in this instance, it is at least theoretically possible that another buyer could have made an unsolicited offer for the company and the board would have had a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept that off. In that case, they can terminate the merger agreement, but then the buyer gets a termination fee and usually reimbursement of transaction expenses. But the reason for the asymmetry is that, barring a deeply distressed situation, a company doesn’t put itself up for sale without a high degree of certainty that a sale on the original or better terms will go through at the end of the day.
I stand by my opinion that he intended to close the deal one way or another, but wanted more favorable pricing. Your IPO profit is eaten away if you paid more than you could have when taking the company private.
I don't think Twitter truly was worth what the markets claimed it was worth, much the same as Tesla stock is still detached from the underlying asset. Mania in the markets will set the price at whatever people are willing to pay.
I firmly believe Musk saw a threat to the ability for healthy public discourse to be carried out and was willing to jump on the grenade that was an overvalued Twitter, until a point at which it became vastly overvalued.
That said: I do agree he has made a series of missteps at the helm of Twitter. He came in seeking to change far too much, far too quickly, and Twitter has a rough road ahead of it to get to even self sustaining, especially on the eve of an economic calamity.
It will show up in contract law books under what not to ever let your client do.
I suspect he wanted to cause problems and pain for Twitter, and that this was the bait used to hook him into ownership at an inflated price. He has flouted so many other laws, regulations, etc, he probably thought he had a good chance at getting away with this type of behaviour in a Delaware court.
What he didn’t realise is that in the real world, contracts can be enforced.
Courts didn't force this on him out of nowhere, he bought it then he wanted out when the tech market tanked, and courts just said no, you bought it.
He had a lot of time to back out with a penalty payment too and didn't do so.
He forced himself.
This is the problem of having core global communications infrastructure be centralized
Did he fall out with Larry Ellison as well? I've lost track at this point.
A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.
I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.
Again, just my private opinion.
It doesn't quite add up all the way to me, but almost; it looks like an act of sabotage.
The thought experiment is: if you wanted to destroy Twitter, what would you differently?
I mean you could do even worse, but... not if you didn't want to make it obvious. The "entitled born-rich manboy can't deal" is obviously a solid cover, because almost all of us already believe it!
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
- treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
- prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
From the regulation, Article 3:
1. An undertaking shall be designated as a gatekeeper if:
(a) it has a significant impact on the internal market;
(b) it provides a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users; and
(c) it enjoys an entrenched and durable position, in its operations, or it is foreseeable that it will enjoy such a position in the near future.
2. An undertaking shall be presumed to satisfy the respective requirements in paragraph 1:
(a) as regards paragraph 1, point (a), where it achieves an annual Union turnover equal to or above EUR 7,5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalisation or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States;
(b) as regards paragraph 1, point (b), where it provides a core platform service that in the last financial year has at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the Union and at least 10 000 yearly active business users established in the Union, identified and calculated in accordance with the methodology and indicators set out in the Annex;
(c) as regards paragraph 1, point (c), where the thresholds in point (b) of this paragraph were met in each of the last three financial years.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
("core platform service" is explicitly defined to include social networking services)
You might be more used to the more informal social media use of the word meaning busybodies that involve themselves unasked to police people's behaviors to their own arbitrary standards; this is not it.
> (by extension, slang, Internet) To limit another party's participation in a collective identity or activity, usually due to undue pettiness, resentment, or overprotectiveness.
But in the (today) rarer, less metaphorical sense... It's not that either? What is Twitter guarding access to? It's not, we're talking about Twitter itself.
From a straight up grammatical perspective, I'm not sure what you're saying makes sense, or really what you're trying to say. What you're saying "gatekeeper" means tracks just fine. But I'm getting thrown for a loop with "gatekeeping" because that's either a verb (e.g. "The dog is gatekeeping.") or an adjective (e.g. "The gatekeeping dog..."), but you're giving it a meaning that only works for a noun ("someone who doesn't have actual power but..."). Basically, I don't understand what you're trying to say, but what you're saying seems like something I'd like to understand.
Twitter was positioning itself as a major gatekeeper of information, and so I do think the EU should be looking into this carefully in hopes of preventing it from happening again.
Guess the question is what direction the sewage is flowing.
Also I strongly suspect that mastadon would have a lot of trouble complying with European laws (except I think some have company size minimums that mastadon instances would likely not reach).
This seems quite commonsensical. Isn't there already some other (less explicit) existing law that has the same effect?
The word “consumer” in the rule that gatekeeper platforms must not “prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms” has a meaning, and that meaning is, in this case, “Elon Musk is wrong”.
Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).
Social media sites are a sort of grayweb at this point in history.
So why would Amazon or any other company want to invest in their own version of that?
Amazon, on the other hand, has no such dissonance and has a very profitable advertising arm that could happily benefit from yet more digital real estate. Of all the players out there, Amazon already does massive hosting AND competent ad scheduling across diverse device ecosystems. It just seems like they've got all of the technical side pretty much already up and running; they just need to strap it together in a specific package and ship it.
I know - easier said than done; and who knows what other priorities they're worried about that might not cooperate with owning a "digital town square". For all I know, there's some monopoly law that they'd have to screw with, too.
But all of this is to say: they seem well-positioned, so I'm just idling musing on why they haven't capitalized on it. Your reasoning is as good as any other I've heard. /shrug
Amazon has spent decades building the complete opposite culture of what it takes to successfully run a social network.
The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).
One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.
So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.
I know it seems like a long way around for not really providing any "value", but the idea is that most people just want "next twitter". They simply aren't going to deal with server instances in the way that, say, the gaming public does. People running businesses, being "influencers", or developing journalistic followings do not get any value from caring about technical implementation. So Amazon's strength, here, is that they could pick up a ton of influential people just by being "easy" and then the followers come for their interests.
In contrast, the operator doesn't even have your phone number, nor demand a major corp email address, both things twitter required. You could log in via tor if you wanted.
Twitter could have sold your data, accidentally leaked it via an API or some cloud bucket, or it could have gone out with the help of a foreign intelligence operative employed there... And you have no hope of proving how or why. Their internal controls were incredibly lax. And the FBI would tell you to go away.
Just because you decentralize won’t make all kinds of scaling easy.
I think soon getting kicked off of Twitter will become a tech badge of honor. Like having a gmail address back when it was invitation-only.
Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over : https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/03/1062752/twitter-...
[1 hour ago - 4 comments] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34046074
This does Not bode well;
links to Mastodon, including your Mastodon account in your profile or even the mere mention of Mastodon.
Is this action for the actual bleed? - Or paranoia at the current projected losses? - Competition?
Remember how Twitter has stopped paying rent on a bunch of its offices? And Musk just cashed $3.5B in Tesla stock? They probably couldn't pay the rent without people going unpaid.
Not paying your rent is one thing, but not paying employees results in immediate, we-gonna-fuck-you-in-the-ass attention from governments around the world. My state treats non-payment of wages as a criminal offense by the officers of the company.
True, however high profile account contents matter to both advertisers and other twitter uses.
>Stephen Fry, who last week tweeted an image of Scrabble letters spelling out ‘goodbye’, and abandoned his 12.5 million followers!
Stephen Fry quits Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover : https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/tv/stephen-fry-quits-twitter-...
>(Update December 19, 2022, 8:40 AM IST):
Twitter has deleted the tweets announcing the policy that prohibited people from posting handles and links to other social networks.
The company has also silently removed the policy page that detailed these rules.
So: lol
It fits, and I’ll use it if I want, thanks. You’re the one bringing in comparisons to hitler, bizarrely enough.
Why not? "It's a private platform!". If that very substantive statement was embraced a couple of years ago by many that have now got banned I don't see why they can't follow their own (past) advice.
I can’t say I’ve been much of an Elon fan for a while now but he does give me plenty to gawk at, a modern day bread and circus.
This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.
Because the journalists Musk banned were definitely not banned for their opinions on Musk?
I'm going to preempt the 'harassment' argument--the photo Musk posted, when he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked, was found to have been taken an hour after Musk's jet took off and nowhere near any airport.
They banned because they shared his jet location.
> he was claiming that the journalists caused him to be stalked
Did he claim that specifically? I'm not sure. But if he did, these claims are probably incorrect.
But that does not cancel the fact that journalists were posting jet location after he asked (via twitter policies) not to.
This is false in some cases.
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-bans-washing...
And she is unsuspended already.
Here's her explanation why https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1604559889585410048
Here's Musk explanation: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604482428281753601
(Sorry, could not post earlier, massively downvoted, so HN prohibits me from posting replies.)
It's at the very least Musk's explanation. Lorenz's tweet with her offsite links predates the new policy; if they're related, the policy was a retroactive explanation similar to how they made up the "no real-time location" policy after banning @elonjet.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11550753/Taylor-Lor... has a screenshot of her Tweeting him asking for comment on a story that came out today, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details.... That, IMO, is the most likely explanation for the action.
> And she is unsuspended already.
Yes, he's gotten a lot of backlash today.
And the account was banned until the links are removed by the account owner (this is how twitter deals with such posts).
Taylor Lorenz did enough harm already, for example, revealing identity of libsoftiktok was inappropriate, she is a bad person.
I don't think that anything prior to rule introduction should stay forever. If she was forced to delete it, that's fine.
But Elon as usual could have managed it better.
I guess she got banned for reminding musk about the time he doxxed her for reporting on Tesla.
They are other examples.
And the question isn't if it's true or not. The question was: what would make you change your mind about EM. To me, it was the pedo accusations about a rescuer who refused his 'help'. I then found videos about how fake and dumb the Hyperloop was, and I was done with him.
Can you give a link to the source please?
> what would make you change your mind about EM
I change my mind constantly when I get more information. But my opinion of Musk is not polar either absolute evil and absolute good. When he does something good, I give him a point, when he makes a mistake, I subtract a point.
So far Elon was net positive for Twitter.
Hyperloop, I don't think this is a big deal. Musk has thousands ideas, not all of them work.
I don't care about pedo story. It was inappropriate for sure, but everyone can make mistakes. Who is without sin... I prefer people who make mistakes openly to people who know how signal virtue.
In the end, for me, it is important what you do, and not as much, what you say.
> she accuses Musk of having 'always' doxxed people in an attempt to silence critics of his treatment of employees
I remember it was before the idiotic pedophilia accusations, he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address after tweeting about her like 5 times in a row, i thought 'wow, not cool'.
Here what I found [0]: "This is worse than just stalking: Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez, he’s retweeting stuff they find, and he’s encouraging them every step of the way. Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for setting mobs upon his enemies; Musk should be banned too, but won’t be."
[0] https://slate.com/business/2018/07/elon-musks-attacks-on-rep...
Maybe he did something else, and that is bad, but let's not move goalposts.
> he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address
"Doxxing" for revealing email address a bit exaggeration. This is also bad, but doxxing usually means revealing something which may give people significant distress. Like home address.
Also if there's a screenshot of such tweet. Since it seems to be disappeared from the internet, probably nobody really cared.
> Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez
This is journalistic exaggeration. There's no proof of that in the article. Mentioning someone in Twitter does not mean he intentionally sets "his army of fanboys".
You are 100% incorrect in that free speech is not, has never been, and will never be limited to political preferences/opinions.
Commercial, frivolous, inconsequential, satirical, and all other forms of free and independent thought are "speech".
"Drink more Ovaltine" is speech the same way "slavery is bad" is speech. These two disparate utterances are equally important and protected as "speech".
"I like big butts and I cannot lie" is speech as important as a treatise on political theory.
The comment you replied to lampoons Musk's "free speech absolutist" schtick. A nuance you have failed to appreciate.
What hasn't been noted here, yet, as far as I can tell, is that the EU prohibits this type of behavior (banning mentions of competitors) and it will be interesting to see how they respond. But that's an antitrust matter, not free speech.
Maybe not as much before Musk, but it does now:
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
Did not read every accusation from it, but it mention for example, Andy Ngo and VPS_Report.
Here is the tweet about both of them:
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1594550575383072770
I must say, VPS_Report is an evil person. I don't know if he deserves his right to speech after he posted his threats, but I won't miss him on Twitter.
Andy Ngo is fine. You may disagree with him, but he only does journalist work.
I don't get why it's banned, is it because he found some jan6 protestors who weren't caught by the police yet with his tools?
And, I mean, crimethinc, really? You cannot do mellower on the anarchist side. I don't think they even defend the second amendment. It's clearly political.
Musk promised that everyone will get explanation why they were banned. I'm waiting for it.
> It's clearly political.
It may be personal, but I doubt it is political. It just happens that people who attack Elon are on the left, and people who were banned by previous administration and unbanned now are on the right, so it looks political.
Of course, Twitter moderation should not be based on personal preferences of Elon.
I do not think this is true. At least not in this scale. You can post on FB about Twitter or Mastodon. You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo[0] or OpenStreetMap and so on.
[0] Even first suggestion for me when I enter the 'd' char.
Because people do not threaten FB to leave to Mastodon. But you can't link (maybe you can now, but some time ago you couldn't) to Telegram inside Whatsapp, because Facebook considered Telegram a competitor.
> You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo
Again, because Google does not consider DDG a competitor.
But a while ago (long before the war when everybody were at peace), Russia was the only country where Google Chrome did not offer the choice of search engine. Because Russia was the only country where Google was not the leading search engine. There's famous commit in Chromium repository which explicitly excludes Russia.
Freedom of speech encompasses far more than just "political preferences/opinions".
> This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example).
1. I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms.
2. Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists".
3. Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise. It's a "competitor" to Twitter in the same sense that me raising chickens in my backyard makes me a "competitor" to Tyson or Foster Farms.
WhatsApp banned links to Telegram.
Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
> Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists"
Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
> Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise
Competition may be not only for money, but also competition for users. It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
> Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
Right, links, not "mere mentions".
> Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
Very likely the former - or more accurately, he wasn't ever a "free speech absolutist" in the first place, but dishonestly claimed to be one. The latter is obviously a possibility, though it would go against the whole ostensible point of him buying Twitter in the first place.
> It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
It is also quite possible that a critical number of chicken eaters will stop buying frozen chicken strips in favor of raising chickens themselves or getting chicken meat from neighbors who do so. That doesn't make backyard chicken farmers Tyson/Foster competitors in any meaningful sense.
During the #deletefacebook movement, Facebook didn't ban links to or discussion of competitors.
But Facebook bans links to Telegram in WhatsApp.
Also Facebook ranks posts with links to Twitter (or YouTube) lower than other posts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044189.