"Sweeney has been using sites such as ADS-B Exchange to track the movements of private jets blogging to celebrities, tech billionaires, and Russian oligarchs for years now. By law, the movement of these plans is publicly available information. “This account has every right to post jet whereabouts, ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even AF1 (@AirForceTrack) Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well,” the account’s pinned tweet read before it was banned."
This confuses the issue though. ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement and if an aircraft was going to takeoff that had an unknown ICAO number he'd have someone at the airport to figure out it was Elon's jet that had changed it's ICAO number.
Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.
Are you sure that plane actually has a PIA ICAO number? Or that on the ground spotters were required to find the new ICAO?
I know nothing about this, but was a rabbit hole to explore.
The tail number for his plane is well known. If you put that N-number into an ICAO conversion script (https://www.avionictools.com/icao.php), you get the same Hex number that you see from adsbexchange.com. From what I can tell, the script is using an algorithm and not doing a DB lookup. So, just based on the tail number, you could figure out the canonical ICAO code for the plane.
The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
In order to address this privacy shortcoming, the PIA program exists. This would change the ICAO for the plane to be disconnected from the tail number. But from the tracking website, it seems like the ICAO number for his plane hasn’t been changed/anonymized(?!?). So either, they haven’t actually gotten the new ICAO number installed (after 10-ish months), or the plane isn’t eligible to be part of the program. PIA requires the plane to only fly domestically and have the right kind of transmitter. If the plane flys internationally, it can’t have an anonymized ICAO number.
> Are you sure that plane actually has a PIA ICAO number?
I'm not sure that it does at this very moment, but public statements by Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it. It's possible Elon stopped using it because of that de-anonymizing.
> The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
Yes LADD is a different system and you're not required to follow it as a data provider. FlightRadar24 for example follows it and does not list any LADD aircraft as they use FAA's data feed which requires as it's terms of use that you follow the LADD program.
> Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it
I read that too, but haven’t been able to find any source that wasn’t Sweeny on that. Without another source, I’m more inclined to believe that the plane is part of LADD, but not PIA (or isn’t anymore). And that the plane from the Sweeney tweet from February 2022 may have been another plane entirely. Maybe Musk’s plane was enrolled at one point, but it honestly doesn’t make much sense to me to have a plane enrolled in PIA.
I mean, if I had a private plane, I’d like to keep the option of flying it internationally, which you couldn’t do with an anonymized ICAO (again, according to my limited reading).
Also, given the limited number of PIA planes, it would be trivial to look for ICAO numbers that disappeared at one airport and then for a new private ICAO number to appear at the same airport. The system only makes sense from a privacy perspective if you don’t have continuous monitoring of the ADS-B transponders. As things currently exist, with a small number of PIA planes, it would be obvious to find new codes.
That would certainly be an interesting twist on the story if it wasn't actually covered by PIA and only LADD. I haven't heard this variant before, but it would make a lot of things make sense, but it would give me more questions than answers.
Even if you have PIA though, I don't thing you're restricted from flying internationally. I don't see any comment on the PIA page that says you can't fly internationally with it. Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
> Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
The FAA site made it seem like changing the codes was a non-trivial “process” that wouldn’t want to do regularly. You’d have to reprogram the transponder back to your canonical code, because other countries don’t have access to the private PIA conversion lookup tables. The private ICAO numbers might also conflict with other countries “number space”.
Maybe this is an easy thing, but most changes in aviation don’t seem “quick”.
It might be possible that you’re not allowed to do this on your own as a pilot of a certified plane (and require to pay someone who is certified to do so) but I can change mine very easily from a setup screen in about 30 seconds.
It could be a procedural thing where after switching, the FAA won’t recognise your canonical one? That’s seems a little strange, though.
I don't think that's relevant past the point where Musk is on the record as saying that because he's such a champion of free speech he's not going to ban the account.
No, I think it’s relevant because the banned account was not just “sharing public information”, but actively tracking Musk using a combination of online data and real word surveillance.
The fact that Musk previously said he wouldn’t ban the account, then changed his mind (apparently after a personal incident) just shows Musk changed his mind, is all.
It certainly demonstrates he didn’t think through his previous decision, suggesting it was a spontaneous comment and not a rigorous policy. Which is worrying, because publishers such as Twitter need to have a consistent and coherent moderation policy.
But it’s still relevant if we’re to decide which position we agree with, and whether Musk was “right” previously or now.
That Musk 'changed his mind' on the one thing that he said would set Twitter apart from 'the rest' is where I have a problem: this is a matter of principle so dear that it should override his personal affairs because that is what he is on the record about. If Musk's principles only hold water as long as he isn't personally affected then I'm fine with that but then he should get off his high horse and stop pretending.
Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
> Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
So Twitter is now unusable because elonjet has been banned? Social media companies change their policies all the time. You don't have to agree with the decision but holding it up as something so consequential is just silly.
Assuming what he said about his son being accosted is true, how could he not change his mind? Should he really not stop something that threatened his kids life because of a promise he made to internet strangers?
If Elon uses this personal experience as an opportunity to reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then I will commend him for finally maturing past the "free speech absolutist" position.
If he simply bans those who would cause him (or people he likes) harm but continue to allow and encourage "free speech" for those who would cause harm to others then that seems a bit hypocritical.
This is an extreme exaggeration. If you've used Twitter since the Musk takeover and come away with the impression that you can't criticize him there, you've had a completely alien experience to mine- it seems to be the main use of the site these days.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
As he originally announced his non-banning as being due to his fundamental principles, it's more than just changing his mind. He should at least clarify how his attitude towards freedom of speech on Twitter has developed. Personally I think he's being disingenuous as he doesn't seem to care about other people's safety following even his own tweets, so although I can understand him putting his own family first, he should now appreciate that his previous stance on absolute free speech is untenable.
He perhaps wouldn't have. Then again, so? Incidents happening to us and our family, hit us harder, and can move us to take specific action more often, news at 11.
So free speech only counts when it doesn't affect you personally, got it.
I don't think anyone would really care about this had he not made purchasing Twitter all about trying to save us from the evil Twitter censorship demons.
>So free speech only counts when it doesn't affect you personally, got it
Yes, people are less accepting of things that personally are meant to spite/hurt them, even if they match their general principles. News at 11.
Besides, free speech is about sharing opinions and such, however controversial. Petty "I'll share your itinerary to the world" is not real speech, opinion, let alone an argument. It is doxxing/stalking - that the information is publicly available in aviation registers is irrelevant (lots of stalking information is: the doxxing/stalking/threatening part is extracting it from its normal location, highlighting, it and making it more public).
There's a number of valid arguments for why the plane tracker may not be doxxing, and a couple tenuous, but valid arguments for why to ban the plane tracker account.
But no matter how you slice it, this account (and it's owner's personal account) were targeted purely because they irked Musk, and he has given zero indication that he plans to enforce this rule for basically any other account.
I suspect we're quickly approaching the point where impotent cries of hypocrisy will no longer be considered even worth issuing. Maybe we're already there. The charge is inert, it does not sting, it changes no minds, and is slightly entertaining to haters, who chuckle for less than a second, and then get on with their lives.
So? Everyone keeps saying this over and over, but leaving out the most important part. In the same tweet he admitted it’s a direct threat to his personal safety! Can you comment on that part? Because it seems like people want, with Elon and other celebrities, to be put in harms way, in the name of keeping these doxxing accounts online. Which by the way are made by some college kid who probably doesn’t realize the ramifications of what he’s doing.
Meh. Musk has no problem handing information to journalists like Matt Taibbi that included personal email addresses, all the better for Taibbi to accidentally publish.
Musk had no problem insinuating that Yoel Roth was a pedophile (as is Musk's style), reportedly forcing Roth into hiding.
Does Musk recognize the ramifications of what he was doing in either case? No. At any rate, it's pretty clear that the "threats to personal safety" is a mask, he clearly is fine with doxxing and threatening other people's public safety... as long as he is the aggressor, not the victim.
Right now it seems like he's willing to defend he and his friend's personal safety (his friend's safety as an after thought mind you), but he doesn't much care about the safety of people he's upset with.
I fail to see the connection between this video, which was posted well after the account was blocked, given that the account had not tweeted out Musk's location after Dec 12th.
The 'won't somebody think of the children' argument doesn't play nice with 'free speech as long as it is legal'.
If Musk is so concerned about his children's privacy and safety then maybe he should stop tweeting out their whereabouts in real time himself?
The “speech” you speak of is automated broadcasting the movements of wealthy people in real-time. The primary group of people who have use for that information is kidnappers.
There’s zero connection between this “speech” and political freedoms.
Similarly, there’s a huge difference between you sharing you or your family’s location on social media occasionally on your own terms vs strangers tracking and sharing it regularly.
No, it's broadcasting the movements of a set of aircraft, using publicly available data. There is no information about who is on board those aircraft.
Nobody has any right to privacy regarding the flight movements of their aircraft, and indeed any idea in that light is antithetical to the entire principal of air traffic control and safe air travel. The idea that people would not be able to track his aircraft if this account is gone is ludicrous, as there are both other flight tracking websites, the ability in some areas to get full flight plans, and even if you're a stalker the ability to just listen into ATC radio near the routes his aircraft use.
You even have spotters who spend all their days at airports logging all aircraft and posting the results online, as they've done for decades, so there's no way for aircraft movements to remain secret for long.
By buying private jets and choosing to use them exclusively, Musk himself gave up his right to any privacy when flying on them. He has other options, such as flying commercially or chartering aircraft, as others in his position have done, but has chosen not to use them. He's now trying to change the rules for everyone else to carve out an exception for himself and other super wealthy individuals.
It's rank hypocrisy and bullying and I'm amazed so many people on HN are supporting him in this, and choosing to believe him rather than reading up on how open this data already is.
And publicly available satellite imagery can track the movements of your car. Depending on the country you live in, the fact that you own the car is also publicly available information.
That doesn’t mean somebody putting those pieces of information together and regularly tweeting your movements isn’t creating a security risk for you. The choice that you make to buy a car or drive it in public also doesn’t mean that you have to welcome automated stalking.
So these "kidnappers" you are talking about are smart enough to create a security risk for a multi-billionaire who can afford any level of security, but at the same time they are too stupid to combine a few pieces of publicly information themselves and would only be dangerous if some teenager on Twitter does it for them?
Show me how publicly available satellite imagery could offer anywhere close to the same level of tracking that is federally mandated and available for aircraft, and I might take that argument more seriously.
This account wasn't even 'putting those pieces of information together', he was tweeting it directly from ADSB Exchange, one of a number of collators of ADS-B Out data.
Aircraft movements are not private and haven't been for decades. If you want privacy in your air travel, don't fly everywhere on 1-3 well known private jets.
Publicly available satellite imagery can’t track my car in any meaningful way. At best you’d be able to figure out the color and (rough) size of it if you knew my address.
> I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids.
That was never going to happen. It's just a way to get people to work their asses off to further his real goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. Ironically, buying Twitter may well end up undoing that.
This always was the case and there are zero recorded instances of such so no need to trot out this argument. Musk himself has Tweeted out the location of his child in real time.
Free speech applies to all speech, not just political speech. If you want "free speech as long as it's legal", this should be allowed. If you don't that's also fine, but then you can't cite "free speech" as a reason to reinstate Trump (Which Musk did). Although regardless neither of these is a "free speech" issue (In the constitutional sense) since it's about a corporation banning certain things on its platform, which it's perfectly entitled to do. It's just very clearly shown the hypocrisy with which Musk now runs Twitter.
It's interesting because Elon agrees with free speech restrictions only when he or his own children are affected, but not others. Case in point, this one + alex jones' controversy ('My firstborn child died in my arms'). Meanwhile, he fired the entire child abuse monitoring section.
So you think he has good reasons for going back on what he claimed was his free speech position. Fair enough. It doesn't mean he hasn't gone back on what he said though, and it definitely fits with previous observations that he doesn't actually care at all about free speech and just does whatever he feels like that day.
Nobody is a true free speech absolutist; and Musk least of all[0]. There are always limits to speech.
Things like libel, threats, blackmail, etc are also speech, and yet banned or restricted in some way. Social media are doing a lot of work exploring the edge cases of these, and it's possible laws need to be updated to account for the results.
[0] Years ago Musk cancelled a Tesla order from a critic. On Twitter, it didn't take him long to ban a lot of satirical accounts.
I agree with you, but I believe it is the case that Elon has previously described himself as a free speech absolutist, so this whole episode is exhibit 487 in the case for Elon having no idea what he's talking about.
Not even sure I fully trust Musk on this, after he lied about holding his child that died; when it turned out the mother did and it was SIDS related, he's got form on using his children to manipulate the outside world.
Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.
> Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.
In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.
Since I onow people whos children actually did die in their very arms, using such a dramatic experience and be untruthful about it is simply dispicable. Especially since having your child die in front of you doesn't need any further dramatization at all.
That’s not relevant to whether he’s a hypocrite. All that’s relevant is “would he have done the same thing if it was someone else’s location being tweeted out?”
Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”
He'd say "one two gerbil gerbil fourteen spiders singin' to me" if it would affect the stock price of anything he's planning on buying or selling, or harming something that cuts into his earnings.
Previous strategy to appeal to tech was to pick last week's top post on /r/iamverysmart and state it as his philosophy.
Current strategy now that tech has soured on him the past few years, is transitioning to parroting fascist dogwhistles.
In two years he buys Whole Foods and will be ranting about holistic lifestyle chakra healing.
If you're the richest person in the world, you're going to have to expect that weirdos are going to follow you around. Many employ private security details. That's just how things are.
>A masked stalker, dressed all in black, was following his young child in car thinking it was him.
I mean, maybe?
I don't see a masked stalker doing much of anything in that video. In fact, the masked stalked in the car seems afraid of the person doing the filming (a security guard?). Certainly not showing much aggression. The claim is that this person then got out of the car and jumped on the hood of Elon's car preventing it from moving, but that wasn't caught on video?
What does this have to do with tracking his plane using public data? This is not about tracking his, or Grimes' or any other ex's car; not even about stalking them.
Did you actually read the files? They don't have any naked Hunter Biden pics (thank God).
It's mostly about Twitter fabrication of Hunter Biden was hacked (discovered during laptop dissembly) and the connections between federal government and Twitter's staff.
I meant Elon commissioned posts that Matt Taibi posted. Links to Hunter’s pics were among them. If you are curious it was Tweet 8. Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
> Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.
Yeah, obviously those pictures and associated tweets are deleted. That is why we are here. However, those are archived in WaybackMachine(archive.org). Copy/paste those links there.
I heard some people walked in to a big building in DC after Trump tweeted which later got him banned. Imagine if it was your building! Or does free speech only apply to things Elon likes?
Of course an event like this would cause me to rethink my position. But I don't think I would wait until it actually happened to my child.
People have been raising these kinds of concerns to free speech absolutists like Musk for a while, but until it impacts him they are theoretical concerns that aren't as important as his principles.
If he uses this personal experience as an opportunity to empathize with others and reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then that is commendable.
Or, if he maintained his commitment to free speech in the face of personal danger to his family I would respect such a principled stance.
However, if he only bans those who might cause him (or people he likes) harm while allowing and even encouraging those who use free speech to incite harm against others then that seems hypocritical.
citizens deserve equal protection under the law. there's nothing special about his kid (or him). if anything, information about public figures, when in public, deserves less shielding.
And also at this point it's allegedly inciting violence, so his position might even be consistent given changing circumstances. Whether it actually is incitement is still debatable but a person of principle can still change their position without it being a flip flop. If Musk is taking legal action at least there is corresponding litigation for the account suspension for some sort of due process and objectivity.
The ICAO number in the GP's comment is listed in the FAA registry for the N-number: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul... (Mode S Code (Base 16 / Hex): A835AF). Are you saying that PIA program can make registry.faa.gov report data that's either obfuscated or out of sync? Why is it not reporting such data now? (Edit: Or maybe GP's comment is using a non-privacy ICAO number and the actual number squawked is private?)
The PIA program, from my understanding, removes the ICAO number from that page. It's possibly in a state that he's not registered with PIA at the moment.
> "ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program"
Only through a manual process that sounds like it can take a month or so to complete.
Perhaps, in future, this could be solved with technology that automates generation/randomisation of Aircraft IDs, much like MAC addresses on phones and laptops are randomised to prevent tracking?
Next-generation ADS-B transponders could communicate with the FAA (or appropriate local authority) via satellite or mobile network to generate/request a new, random ID before every flight.
Every measure like that introduces safety risk into the critical air traffic control system by increasing the odds of data inconsistencies and other things going wrong. I don't believe it's worth it just to preserve the privacy of billionaires and corporations.
Of course not, but what is the risk here to actual traffic? the plane still transmit its location so others can see it, they simply can't know the exact instance. Seriously asking out of curiosity.
The aircraft's type is not part of ADS-B Out data, it has to be looked up in a database using the hex code. This has implications for aircraft separation, as heavier aircraft produce more turbulence that can be harmful to smaller aircraft. A bad or missing weight category caused by something like PIA having a code collision or a failed update could lead to a fatal accident if the separation for a small aircraft is used for a large one.
A small risk, and something that could be mitigated, but still there nonetheless.
The proposals to encrypt ADS-B data, being driven by corporations and wealthy individuals, are more risky in that they add key management to the mix and make it much more likely that something will go wrong and cause widespread ATC failures or aircraft going dark on ATC displays and in collision avoidance systems at critical moments. Especially as there'll be a mix of encrypted/non-encrypted transponders for decades to come.
Presumably, just aircraft IDs would be encrypted, and not data that is safety-critical for collision avoidance? Things like callsigns (which can be changed each flight and don't necessarily have to be the aircraft's registration) and weight category could also be added, unencrypted, so that ATC screens wouldn't go dark if there was some sort of key management failure.
There is also an argument for some sort of cryptographic signing of ADS-B messages in order to prevent spoofing.
Aircraft IDs are used for type lookups and uniqueness. Callsigns are already in the signal and must be the registration for anything other than commercial or military flights, as they're registered and there's a process for allocation. Weight category and other data being added would require a whole new revision of the standard and will not reach most systems for decades.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
> ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement
Maybe he should just buy another jet or two, make sure the other jet(s) are in regular use (maybe shuttling SpaceX/Tesla/Twitter/etc employees around), and make sure he regularly swaps which one he is personally using. Extremely expensive solution, but not beyond his budget.
Or maybe he should just buy himself a private jet chartering firm. An even more expensive solution, but he can probably afford that too.
> Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code.
You can no longer claim it's public. It was de-anonymized in some way.
It's no longer a case of reposting public information but someone going considerable lengths to post this information.
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
Why are you reposting this multiple times? It's not the end run you think it is: long after that point Musk declared grandly that he would not ban the account because of his stance on free speech.
Elon Musk was already on the record as seeing the safety of children as a limit to free speech.
Jack Sweeney's efforts to deanonymize the plane could be seen as inciting the following of Musk's two year-old child and the ambush of their vehicle.
If the deanonymisation that Jack Sweeney is said to be doing can be argued to be a protected form of free speech, it must also be open to inquiries over whether it is incitement towards violence now that it has resulted in a plausible threat to a life.
Frequently people use combinations of difficult-to-find publicly available information and educated guesswork to locate people and then repackage this information as a "dox" for their followers. Not all of their followers have good intentions and even if they don't literally tell people to intimidate/scare/attack their target, they must eventually be seen as somewhat liable for the actions of their followers once they're aware of them. (Isn't this similar to the argument made about Trump's tweets before he was banned?)
Hopefully, as a private company, Twitter can establish sensible public policy about what speech is allowed or banned and where these lines are.
Also, this application of the rules is completely in line with original policy about inciting harm, and as a private company, Twitter is well within their right to deplatform users that don't follow their rules.
What seems capricious to many right now might actually be even-handed enforcement of pre-existing rules towards people that had gotten used to special treatment. And if it's not even-handed I don't see how anything has changed from before, where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed.
There are written rules about inciting harassment and posting private information/locations without express approval. Ignorance of the rules shouldn't excuse people from following the rules.
It's not whataboutism to point out that these policies existed previously, and that if there are any differences at all it's that the rules weren't always applied for this violation previously. The fact is, certain Twitter accounts used to get a free pass -- I feel like the modern adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" applies.
(Do I believe what I'm saying? Basically, it's one way of looking at things and I think that while this interpretation of the rules and their application is unproven and counter-narrative it is a viable argument that I expect Twitter to make as the new moderation team grows.)
So to be clear, this info is already public but a lack of web scraping ability prevents the low end stalkers from stalking without the twitter account.
Thank you. I’m sick of seeing so many people defend this nonsense by portraying it as a safety issue. This issue is public. It’s required to be public. Someone pointing out public info is not a safety issue
This is such a ridiculous take. It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.
Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.
It's doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally. It's not really doxxing if you take info that's broadcast to the public by law and use that. I put out my resume that has my name, address, and phone number on my public website and I wouldn't consider it doxxing if someone uses that info.
If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.
> It’s doxxing if the info was not meant to be public, but was leaked via some source unintentionally.
I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.
To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.
Correct I believe that’s literally where the term came from - it’s aggregating the full set of accessible information about a person into a document for sharing it and helping people locate them in meatspace.
There seems to be at least somewhat of a reasonable difference between saying "X person is at [x,y,z]" and "A vehicle owned by Y Corp is at [x,y,z]." These seem to me to be in completely different categories.
Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.
I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.
Those mental gymnastics happen primarily because anyone looking at the situation for longer than a minute can see people in power use mental gymnastics to keep themselves ahead just as much.
The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.
sounds like you need to go talk to the FAA since they are the ones originally publishing this info rather then a twitter account that is just consuming the info.
Companies that use the data published by the FAA are required to not display information about planes that are part of the LADD program (which Elon's Jet is).
This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.
It’s funny how even despite the fact I didn’t address this situation here to try to speak generally people inevitably found there way back to Musk - but the entire point of doxxing is you take public information and repackage it and focus it in a way to help target an individual. Just because the FAA publishes flight information doesn’t imply they are doxxing someone, if someone built a custom app to track everything a specific famous person was doing including this FAA data, that would be closer to what doxxing actually is.
Is he putting that info out there for every psycho to see?
Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.
If they are powerful, there certainly and obviously is.
Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.
Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.
The people who are pretending to care about free speech now by supporting doxxing efforts are way more hypocritical than anyone who supports free speech making an exception for doxxing efforts.
Most doxxing is just taking public info found by a 2 second Google search given the right starting point.
There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.
Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.
> It’s widely considered doxxing if you republish public information that makes it easy to find a person’s actual location.
I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?
Technically, maybe, but it also sounds a lot like a form of doxing. Where people live is not some highly classified secret, but collecting that data about people on a large scale, or posting it online, is not okay. In the same way, posting the whereabouts of someone's personal private plane[0] is not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation, and could be considered stalking.
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
> not so different from posting their whereabouts when they're using a different form of transportation
As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).
Presence at a specific public event with an audience specifically to see them, is not the same thing as constantly tracking and publishing someone's whereabouts.
But nobody is "constantly tracking and publishing his whereabouts".
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
> The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?
Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.
Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.
None of us here are going to have private jet money, so stop dreaming as if these privacy rules on jets is ever going to apply to you, as if we're laying down how privacy should work from first principles. Billionaires live by another set of rules from the rest of us. It's about time any of those rules actually went against them.
People are arguing to normalize the destruction of privacy by saying that data being "public" means that anyone should be allowed to aggregate and publish that data.
I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.
However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.
Yes and the location of a private plane does not publish someone's whereabouts. It's a freaking plane! That's about as accurate with respect to his whereabouts as Elon Musks home address (likely significantly less accurate).
The GDPR only applies to businesses, not individuals. So, clearly in this case it does not apply at all since the person behind @ElonJet is acting in an individual capacity.
The GDPR applies to everyone, except "by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity", member states and some authorities.
> Musk has also apparently requested, via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that his plane not be tracked on third-party sites like FlightAware ... “This aircraft is on the the FAA blocklist meaning it is not allowed to be displayed to the general public,” a FlightAware spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “This is something that all 3rd party trackers do usually follow as a list is sent out every month."
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
ADSBExchange does not participate in the program that the blocklist is part of. They even cover this on their homepage
> First and foremost ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!
LADD is only one system, that adsbexchange doesn't use, but PIA still applies to them. Once the ICAO number changes the link the person posted above will no longer point to Elon's jet. You'd have to again have someone in person at the airport to deanonymize the jet.
ADSB Exchange can't get around ICAO anonymizing just by looking at the transponder data.
Well, ADS-B Exchange still has his plane listed as you can see from the second link. So while that sounds like it could have been the case at one point, it does not seem to be the case right now.
IANAL so correct me if I’m wrong but it looks like Musk has a decent chance of getting SLAPPed back [1] to kingdom come.
Twitter may be a private entity but the lawsuit is clearly meant to stifle the distribution of public information. Now that he owns one of the largest social media platforms used to distribute stuff like CALFire emergency announcements, that jet information is not only already public but arguably that information is now in the public interest
It would depend on where the lawsuit is filed. Anti-SLAPP statutes are state laws, and vary wildly by state from very strong laws, weak laws with almost no teeth, to no laws at all.
Unfortunately this means enterprising billionaires might be able to forum shop the SLAPP lawsuit to states where it’s less likely to bite them later.
Sweeney is a college student in Florida and the alleged incident happened in California. I’m guessing Musk is based out of Texas? CA > TX > FL according to anti-slapp.org grades but all three have anti-SLAPP laws. Sweeney might actually have the hardest time in his state because the laws are weirdly specific.
IANAL and genuinely curious, how much further can Musk shop around? To the state Sweeney’s corp is in (if he has one)? Does some random court in Kansas or whatever have the jurisdiction to slap a meaningful injunction against someone who’s never stepped in the state? I doubt Musk would be able to actually recover any funds that way but again IANAL and I’m curious. Can he make this federal?
Musk is literally trying to sue a twenty year old college student. Might as well try bleeding a rock. Is Musk so out of touch that he really thinks that he can get anything but a pyrrhic victory?
What Musk would get is more of what he's already getting: causing pain to the target and fear to others. Whether or not he eventually loses the lawsuit doesn't matter for that.
Again, I’m asking about the jurisdiction which decides whether Sweeney will have anti-slapp to defend him. If so, Musk’s case can get dismissed with prejudice at the first hearing and the courts in some states will even fine him for wasting everyone’s time.
Yes, thanks, I'm aware, and I'm saying that an anti-SLAPP statue is insufficient here. Might the process be shorter? Yes. Might Musk have to pay attorney's fees? Yes. Is that enough to render Musk's threats harmless? No. Is it enough to dissuade Musk? Also no.
Getting sued by Musk will hopefully be a less giant pain in the ass than without an anti-SLAPP statue. But it still could be quite painful. And just the threat of the lawsuit is pain on its own and may have a chilling effect on both the target and others.
Yeah, ouch. I had thought the legal process could be terminated sooner but the defendant in the first case study Hill v. Heslep et al still had over $100k in legal fees (which they were awarded after winning the anti-SLAPP motion), though that seems to have had a complicated second prong due to California’s new revenge porn laws.
I hope Sweeney opens up a legal defense fund and Streisands Musk to victory.
If Musk sues I would happily throw money into that pot to defend Sweeney. Though, if he sues in a state with a decent anti-SLAPP law, I would also expect plenty of lawyers willing to pick up the case pro-bono, and only try to get paid out of awarded legal fees.
It would be a worthy cause, a very high profile case, and (depending on the jurisdiction) a not-insignificant chance of recovering fees. I'd be willing to bet Sweeney won't have to front the cash for his defense. But, again, if he does, it's a pot I'd throw some money into.
Even with the knowledge that the doxxing is leading to stalkers endangering not just the wealthy target but also his young child, you would fund the doxxer?
That’s pretty monstrous.
If there is a kidnapping or murder down the line, your money will have helped enable it.
I don’t agree with your characterization of the situation.
I disagree with all of your factual assumptions, so I then disagree with your moral conclusion.
You can call me monstrous if you want. I frankly don’t care about your opinion of me at all. I’m happy to discuss my moral framework with you if you want, but we’re so far apart on the factual basis that I don’t think it’d be worth the time.
I don’t want to comment on you as a person, but I definitely would call the act deeply immoral.
Tracking the movements of wealthy targets in real time has zero value in terms of political freedoms. It’s primarily of use to kidnappers and other criminals. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a security risk.
> Tracking the movements of wealthy targets in real time has zero value in terms of political freedoms
I mentioned factual disagreement, and those still exist. Without conceding any of those, this is our moral and philosophical disagreement. I don’t think the power of the state should bar all speech that you personally decide has 0 political value.
I think the first amendment rightly tolerates speech, even speech that many people strongly disagree with. I think the government should be extremely hesitant about telling people they can’t speak because their words have “zero political value”.
And I would vigorously oppose a party who is attempting to use the government to punish someone for speaking.
Look, if Elon Musk brings an action that alleges very clear defamation, or if he shows that Sweeney was actively inciting harassment I’d consider otherwise. But if the legal action is only for the actions publicly alleged (posting flight information), that’s simply protected speech by the first amendment. A lawsuit to suppress clearly protected speech is legal thuggery, and I would vigorously oppose that lawsuit.
In much the same way I’ve donated to the ACLU who has stood up for the rights of people I despise to speak.
I definitely don’t agree with your political belief that automated location stalking broadcast on social media should be protected speech, or the belief that the US 1st amendment actually does protect it.
I get where you’re coming from, though. Replace “Elon’s location data” with “Elon is horrible” or “we should tax billionaires at 99%” and I’d also support the right to broadcast it far and wide.
> I definitely don’t agree with your political belief that automated location stalking broadcast on social media should be protected speech
As is absolutely you right! And, were this more private data (like the location of his car being published), I’d be much closer to agreeing with you position.
I think the SCOTUS position on “reasonable expectation of privacy” is not great for taking into account the way our panopticon is able to process so much data that used to be public, but hard to gather at scale.
I’d be pretty willing to be convinced that we should have a serious discussion on the merits and drawbacks of significantly expanding privacy rights, to make some of that illegal.
That being said, the movements of airplanes are inherently public information right now, and already public “at scale”, so I just don’t see a world where I’d agree that aircraft movements should be a part of that framework.
> the belief that the US 1st amendment actually does protect it.
This is a less subjective claim, and is just not accurate. The first amendment absolutely allows someone to publish that information. It’s published publicly by the government! The first amendment absolutely unambiguously protects that information currently.
If making public info more public is legally dicey, then you'd better tell me why you're okay wit Clearview, LexisNexus, et al... And not this guy.
Musk needs to go after the stalker. He deserves a good SLAPP'ing. Fuck billionaires trying to buy their way to immunity to the consequences of their own daft behavior.
Donating to a doxxer with the knowledge that their work has already played a role in leading a stalker to the target’s young child is monstrous. Full stop.
Responding in good faith does not just mean that you stand by what you write. It also means that you respond taking the person you're replying to at face value, without omitting important context or exaggerating the situation. Claiming that the other party is "monstrous" and saying that they'll have blood on their hands is in no way appropriate here, especially considering that:
* The discussion is in a thread about SLAPP, with the point of contention being that Elon is suing to intimidate rather than for damages
* Elon has, in the past, implicitly and explicitly demonstrated approval of such activities
* It is unclear whether the information led to the attack
That, plus that fact that the money is not going to run the account directly, but pay for legal fees in the court case.
There's a lot of discussion here on all these topics. Ignoring them completely and jumping immediately to a conclusion that lets you call someone a horrible person is not reasonable or responding in good faith. You can make your point and disagree without lowering the quality of discussion.
You are not responding in good faith yourself. There is a clear and obvious distinction between calling a stance monstrous and calling a person monstrous. The GP did the former and I don’t think it was ambiguous — but even if it was, it is in bad faith to assume the worst interpretation.
Yet again you are not responding in good faith. You defend your own admitted bad faith as a “misstep” but the other person’s alleged bad faith as “with intent”. Surely this is textbook bad faith.
I don't think so. The comment I responded to showed up in a thread of more than a 1000 others talking about the very things I mentioned. If you don't assign any intent here it's just someone cruising over the entire context of this conversation, picking a side (without any supporting evidence for why they chose their interpretation, mind you), and then using it justify making a fairly extreme comment. And then they extend it even further into "you know this could also lead to a murder so now your actions support killing children".
If any of {"the information is public/protected under the First Amendment", "Elon is suing to harass this person", "Elon is just straight up lying about the incident", "the attack has nothing to do with the account", "this is something Elon actually said he supports in the past"} are true the point being made changes dramatically. I don't think any of them have been settled at all. I'm sure 'AlchemistCamp has opinions on them as do I but in situations like these it's generally appropriate to make comments taking this uncertainty into account. Like, it could even be a curious comment, "it seems like this person's account is actively harming Elon's family, why would you possibly want to send money to fund it?", but as it stands right now it just jumps immediately into making the conversation worse.
On the flip side, I feel the problems in my comment, which I freely accept (…though not as bad faith), do not actually significantly alter its meaning. Nor do I think it ignores surrounding context like the comment I replied to did. My point was "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person's actions" and I wrote "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person" and I feel that this is something a reasonable person could end up doing, even if it's obviously not correct. Perhaps I'm missing what led you to focus on that part in particular, rather than the rest of the comment, where I feel the meat of it lies?
Both your initial comment and the first paragraph of this one are so uncharitable to me that it’s difficult to respond but here goes:
1) Contrary to your initial claims, I made an ethical criticism of a a behavior not a person (and even explicitly clarified this in a sibling comment)
2) The discussion about SLAPP was an off-topic tangent to the primary conversation of the account suspension and the security risks the anti-doxxing rule addressed
Bringing the discussion from the tangent thread to the primary topic is an improvement, not a worsening of the discussion.
3) Your implication that I “cruised over the entire” context of the thread of more than 1000 others comments to make snap posting is false on two counts. There were fewer than 1000 comments at the time and I actually had read over a hundred and already commented elsewhere first.
4) My position isn’t even close to extreme. Funding someone who is regularly de-anonymizing and broadcasting people’s real-time location coordinates against their wishes, despite being fully aware that doing so presents a security risk is morally reprehensible to many, many people—an important bit of context you yourself seem to have worked hard “to ignore”, in your own terminology.
You’ve made repeated made long-winded, meandering complaints about my critical 3-sentence comment, but at the least you’ll have to grant my comment didn’t make untrue assumptions about the other poster’s process of reading the thread, their frame of mind, their good faith in approaching the discussion, their reasoning process or their opinions.
I criticized only the specific course of action the commenter said they were planning.
We have the benefit of hindsight on this particular incident, which I think strengthens my point: it seems very likely that Elon was being purposefully misleading about the circumstances surrounding this incident, that they did not actually endanger his child, and that the ElonJet account had nothing to do with Elon's encounter with this person. I think it is reasonable to say your comment was on topic. However, I strongly disagree with your characterization that you "brought the conversation back on topic". Considering that there was already evidence on the day this was posted that Elon was acting with intentions other than genuine concern for the safety of his child, I think a "is Elon trying to get rid of an account he doesn't like?" comment thread is very reasonable and eminently on-topic. When Google cancels their social media product because "they are refocusing priorities" a thread about "hey I heard they had major security issues with the product, so they probably canned it rather than dealing with the fallout of a data breach" is totally fine, even if the official blog post mentions nothing of the sort.
Actually, if you came into the comment thread where a dozen people were already discussing this possibility, and just left a reply to one of the comments of something along the lines of "oh I guess Google thinks social is too hard, they want to focus on Android now"…that's kind of weird, right? This thread was operating under the assumption that Elon was basically lying, and trying to intimidate the ElonJet guy. The person who was going to fund him was clearly doing it because he thought he was giving money to the little guy standing up to the SLAPP abuser. When I said you waltzed in it's that you just came with "I believe every single word from Elon's side of the story and this happens to mean that you are funding a terrible thing". That was not the assumption that this thread was operating under. You can disagree with that assumption but you didn't go "guys why do you even think this is a SLAPP lawsuit?", you went "why are you funding a doxxer who might murder children". How is this an improvement to the discussion?
Do you have any evidence at all that there exists any sort of connection between the flight tracking and the incident with the car?
To my knowledge most cars don’t have tail numbers, and don’t register their flight plan with the FAA, so I don’t really understand the connection you’re drawing.
I think it's important for people to understand that the money is not the only problem. Even if the defendant never pays a dime, they spend years with a cloud hanging over their lives. There is risk and stress and time lost they they can never get back. I have see people go through it and it is fucking exhausting.
Since you can't be bothered to post the relevant part yourself, I'll do it for you:
"Courts struck down anti-SLAPP laws in Washington and Minnesota, and Washington enacted an updated law
Courts in Washington and Minnesota struck down their states’ anti-SLAPP laws, finding them unconstitutional under their respective state constitutions. As discussed above, however, Washington enacted an updated anti-SLAPP law in 2021 that addressed the concerns of the state supreme court.
In 2016, a Minnesota appellate court similarly found that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional, finding that the law “deprive[s] the non-moving party of the right to a jury trial by requiring a court to make pretrial factual findings to determine whether the moving party is immune from liability.” Mobile Diagnostic Imaging v. Hooten, 889 N.W.2d 27, 35 (Minn. Ct. App. 2016). The following year, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed, finding that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional as applied to claims alleging torts because it requires a district court to make pretrial factual finding in violation of the plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury under the Minnesota constitution. Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minn., 895 N.W.2d 623, 637–38 (Minn. 2017). These decisions raise concerns that courts in other states that recognize a plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury may follow suit."
From that, I don't know that it's reasonable to conclude that "they likely can't protect Sweeney at all", but IANAL.
It is obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in American law that a statute that has already been struck down twice is unlikely to survive a third challenge. Whoever doesn't understand that has a bunch of Wikipedia pages to read before discussing anti-SLAPP laws.
I'm not the one making assertions about legal actions. You can't call someone lazy for not making your arguments for you. I assume you are doing this because you wrote what you did based on information that you cannot back up and are now deflecting.
From the sounds of it its a bit more than just posting public flight data. He had people at airports tracking the plane as it was changing its flight code to prevent tracking. That goes beyond using public information and enters into stalking teritory, even if only in a fairy minor way.
Not defending the ban, but the context is a bit more complex than posting something off of a public site onto twitter.
Not really, the party never solicited payment. Musk opened up the negotiations and was then pissed off when the other side didn't accept his first offer.
Twitter DM, apparently: "Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3."
...and many people would be ready to donate. I wonder if it's possible to crowdfund lawsuits against billionaires, a reverse Thiel (vs Gawker), in a way.
> Every person who, with intent to place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family, by means of an electronic communication device, and without consent of the other person, and for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment, by a third party, electronically distributes, publishes, e-mails, hyperlinks, or makes available for downloading, personal identifying information, including, but not limited to, a digital image of another person, or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person, which would be likely to incite or produce that unlawful action, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail, by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
If we're to believe that information that is technically public can be "doxxing" if not widespread, then if I post about a party at my house, and then you share that post with lots of people who want to hurt me, that's doxxing and a violation of that law.
> LoTT re-uploads video content
This is not at all what LoTT does. That's what the LoTT TikTok did, but it was banned on TikTok. Current things that LoTT twitter account is posting about are:
- Yoel Roth
- A drag queen event at the white house
- A number of videos and images of drag queens that were not posted by the performer
- Taylor Lorenz
- etc.
And was repeatedly suspended from twitter for (incorrectly) claiming a hospital were doing hysterectomies on kids, resulting in bomb threats at said hospital, and then doing it again.
"re-uploading content users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing" is a misrepresentation of the account.
You are the one misrepresenting here. Someone involved in censoring a sitting US President is newsworthy by any definition as is someone who accepted a very public invitation to the White House.
Taylor Lorenz doxxed LoTT (not even debatable here with the article even being edited to remove some of the doxxed links). Speaking about this and the public journalist who did it to you certainly seems appropriate.
As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
> Over the 3-year study period, a total of 204 gender affirmation surgical cases were identified: 177 chest/top and 27 genital/bottom surgeries (Table 1). Most cases were masculinizing chest reconstructions 177/204 (86.8%) with 65/177 (36.7%) of those patients being less than 18 years of age.
> The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.
> You are the one misrepresenting here. Someone involved in censoring a sitting US President is newsworthy
Whether or not they are newsworthy or appropriate, information about Roth and Lorenz clearly isn't "video content the users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing". If you want to change your argument, feel free, but don't accuse me of misrepresentation and then lie.
Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
> As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
No I was not. A hysterectomy is not a chest surgery, and the hospital doesn't provide them to children (https://archive.vn/7R44e). The hospital may provide some services to children, but hysterectomies aren't one of them. Again, do not misrepresent my comments.
> Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
I'm a bit confused by this.
I have just checked Libs of Tiktok's Twitter feed and only found two tweets referencing Yoel Roth, one bemoaning the fact that LoTT is receiving threats and that if it were Roth it'd be national news[1], and another[2] from November the 4th flagging a tweet to him and wondering why it is still up.
Where is LoTT doxxing Roth?
As to the stuff circulating about Roth, it was all public to begin with, right? I certainly don't wish any threats to come his way but that's threats and harassment, not doxxing. Maybe I missed something.
And more, all recent. You're correct, I guess that I should have said "harass" not doxx, but yeah there's tons of stuff LoTT is doing to stoke harassment at Roth (like imply he's a groomer: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1601778632552484865)
I'll be frank and say that I don't find any of that to be harassment nor inciteful of anything but opprobrium, and I do find some of his tweets shown to make it easy to question his position. I think the tweet about whether students can consent is being unfairly taken out of context (the article it's from[1] is fair and not anything like the way it's being portrayed) but some of the other tweets and his PhD thesis… the criticism are valid (to be made, not necessarily correct).
Still, no one should be in fear because of their legal speech - that makes it unfree - whether that's Roth or LoTT or Musk or anyone else, but I don't see that those tweets would be liable for that.
I don't know if the tweet qualifies as harassment, but it's certainly making entirely baseless allegations that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types.
By using heterosexual, non-paedophilic women as one end of the spectrum, and paedophiles at the other, we can see that indeed, such statements by the former would raise no eyebrows. Such statements by the latter would raise eyebrows. That's because of context/prior behaviour.
Roth has a lot of tweets that would provide context that invites raised eyebrows, especially given his PhD dissertation, and his behaviour as head of Trust and Safety, where he suppressed the #groomer hashtag, and given an overall context where people of Roth's political persuasion are hyping up drag queens dancing for children and he's actively suppressing criticism of it. That's so easy to explain.
I also might add that women have a biological urge to give birth and take into account the male's skills as a father. To say that (some or all) gay guys have this may be true but it seems a stretch, and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM? At the very least, his tweets are utterly stupid and reckless. If a headteacher tweets "wow, women are hot but women holding babies, extra hot!" wouldn't you pause? How about if he tweets out from his main account "I have a secret dirty twitter account", you wouldn't raise an eyebrow? Please.
As to "that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types", firstly, that could be said of anything, though we do have another spectrum, running from (to a reasonable person) non-threatening through marking out undesirables to directly threatening. The marking can lead to actual threatening situations, like before a genocide, but they also overlap with valid criticism, and since we're not in a genocide situation I struggle to see how the tweets in question reach that bar. Find something that says "we should kill paedos" from LoTT and you'll have a much stronger case, otherwise you've taken up a position where you're arguing against someone who's against paedophilia, simply because they're a political opponent. That's how this endless cycle continues.
You are basically just saying, in a long winded way, that it’s ok for straight women to be attracted to straight men holding babies, but it’s not ok for gay men to be attracted to gay men holding babies. It’s a strikingly clear case of homophobia. One could more easily believe that it was unintentional on your part if you hadn’t written your third paragraph trying to justify it with back-of-an-envelope evo psych.
> and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM?
At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
> You are basically just saying, in a long winded way, that it’s ok for straight women to be attracted to straight men holding babies, but it’s not ok for gay men to be attracted to gay men holding babies.
What a strange way to misinterpret something long winded. Should I have written more for you, or do you think that your preconceived notions would render that effort as moot as it is now?
> At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
b) He was writing about letting underage children onto Grindr for some nebulous reasons around that time:
> accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
I can think of better ways for teenagers to connect than a hookup app. Can't you?
c) American date format is idiotic, I'm not interested enough to decode them all, perhaps you could do it for me as you're so precise with what others have written.
What he wrote about was how to deal with teenagers using Grindr and other networks already.
"While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults."[1]
No, what he wrote - and you’ve so helpfully provided the quote - about was allowing teenagers to use those apps formally, with some illogical argument about general purpose platforms.
There’s a reason gays use Grindr, because they have a sexual preference and want to meet others with that sexual preference for sex. If they wanted to just chat they could go on Twitter and, you know, chat with anyone - gay or not - because it’s general purpose. Is it difficult to find gay people on Twitter?
If some bloke starts writing that we should let young girls on Tinder because they already use it and, god forbid they could just use Twitter for a chat, it’s too general purpose, they need a hookup app for interaction, feel free to label him a paedo too because that’s what it sounds like.
I would love to hear your 'better ways' for queer teens to connect with each other. In general it is much more difficult for queer teenagers to meet each other (especially in more rural or conservative areas) than it is for straight teenagers. From the age of 16 I certainly made use of the internet to meet other gay people (in the early 2000s). While there are certainly risks associated (as indeed there are for adults!), one has to be realistic about the availability of other options – some of which may be considerably less safe. To me, it seems quite a sensible suggestion to have properly vetted apps that teenagers could access without lying about their age. This would probably make people safer on average than the status quo, where teenagers still use dating apps designed for adults.
>a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements', so you will have to check this for yourself.
Neither Lorenz nor LibsOfTikTok would admit they intended to cause fear. But posting someone's contact details is not normal nor does it serve a serious public interest.
Sweeney isn't on the same level at all. He's tracking jets. Airports are full of security. The last time Internet posts led to an attack on an airplane was never, unless we're counting al-Qaeda's private message infrastructure.
You don’t have to attack a jet in the airport. You can attack a car on the only road from the airport for example if you know exactly when and where to attack. (Also, not all the airports have good security, smaller airports don’t.)
> You can attack a car on the only road from the airport for example if you know exactly when and where to attack.
Was this the case with the stalker? From what I can tell the airplane landed the day before, and I haven't seen any evidence that the incident occurred near the airport.
Despite Musks claims, there's zero evidence that Sweeney has ever done anything with intent to place someone in fear for their safety. And, given that it operated for years without issue, there is in fact compelling evidence to the contrary.
I mean, I never said what Sweeney was doing is considered doxxing, or whether his behavior could lead to reasonable fear for safety. I'd rather let the lawyers untangle this annoying mess
really didn't expect my initial comment to lead to a shitstorm...
Just because information is publicly available doesn’t mean it’s not doxxing. It’s the act itself. Otherwise every accusation of doxxing could be denied with a single level of indirection.
No, the bar for “doxxing” is whether you’re disseminating private or sensitive identifying information about a person, and particularly if you’re doing so with malicious intent.
Given my real name — which is available on Twitter — my home address is not difficult to obtain from online, public, governmental real estate records.
Despite the fact that the information is public, it would still be doxxing — not to mention inappropriate, violating, and frightening — if someone decided to dig up that address and post it to a broad audience on Twitter that would have otherwise been unaware of it. This is even more true if that audience is hostile, and my information is being posted in an attempt to harass and/or intimidate.
It helps if you use a word if you use the common definition of that word.
If you want to expand the definition of the word doxxing then that's fine but you'll have to have that conversation all by yourself.
I'll just use this one:
"Doxing" is a neologism. It originates from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation "docs" (for "documents") and refers to "compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone".Essentially, doxing is revealing and publicizing the records of an individual, which were previously private or difficult to obtain. "
I’ll just use this one, from the first paragraph of the very same page you cited:
> Doxing or doxxing (originally spelled in 1337 as d0xing) is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregration of this information from public source or record databases and social media websites (like Facebook), as well as the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means such as hacking and social engineering.
So this is doxxing, and you dishonestly cherry-picked an incomplete definition. In case any confusion remains, here’s the Oxford Languages’ definition:
> search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
There is nothing 'personally identifiable' about an airplane, it's a plane, not a person.
Posting your home address which you've kept out of the public eye is doxing, posting the whereabouts of any aircraft that broadcasts that information to all receivers is not. That's why you can find this information all over the internet, the only place where you currently can't find Musk's jet is on Twitter. And that's before we get into his free-speech arguments which apparently were a bit inconsistent.
Or would you like to accuse the FAA of doxing as well?
How far out of the public eye does your address have to be? I have filed a few patents and I run a company, and both of those put my address in prominently searchable public records. If you dig a little deeper, the deed to my house is a public record accessible through a 15-year-old website, and going even further, you can do a credit report on me and find all of my past addresses.
I know people wish this weren't the case, but your address isn't exactly private information. Anyone can find it easily for anyone else.
That's true. But if you were to for instance publish that address with a call to action or if you were to compile a list of addresses of politicians with a call to action you'd quickly end up on the wrong side of the law. That is doxing. Merely looking up someone's address used to be a matter of looking in the phone book. And people that did not want to be in the phone book had unlisted numbers.
So the bar for doxing is definitely a low one, but in this particular case it isn't met. I can see why Musk is irritated that that account exists, even more so because it didn't go away at the first request by someone as powerful as him, and that makes it personal. See the whole saga with that diver for a typical response. But that doesn't mean that the person manning that account is doing something illegal and that is the bar which Elon Musk himself set not all that long ago, and which is what makes this news.
If he had been a bit smarter about this he would have just said: "I'm irritated by you, this is my site and you're gone". That would be that. But now there are all these logical pretzels why this is illegal and all that other stuff that people - and Musk - do on twitter is not because 'free speech'. The two are incompatible, and he knows it.
Yeah I don't understand this at all. If I told you right now that I'm arriving at LAX in 1 hour you still have no chance of finding me, and it's transient, I'll be somewhere else private very soon.
I don't see how it's any different from a public figure saying they'll be attending any public event.
Sure, it always helps if everyone can agree what the subject matter is, but at its core the issue isn't whether behavior X fits someone's definition of doxxing, it's whether behavior X is illegal. Something can be illegal but not doxxing, or doxxing but not illegal.
And in the case of Musk, secondary issues arise, such as the fact that in the US lawsuits can be commenced for almost any reason, and how Musk's tremendous wealth, power, and social influence allows him to hold others hostage to his whims and malleable ethical positions.
It isn't illegal as far as I can see and it isn't doxxing as far as I understand the term. It isn't classy either, and I wouldn't do it but whoever operates those accounts should be free to do so under the rules that Elon Musk set himself a few weeks ago.
The main criterium for Twitter rules changes appears to be whether or not Elon is personally inconvenienced. Which is fine by me but then he should drop the 'free speech' act and stop pretending that he understands the degree to which the former team managed to eke out the closest workable compromise on uniting free speech whilst still having a legal and functional website. That coin does not seem to have dropped yet.
Principles such as absolute free speech only mean something if you uphold them even if you are personally inconvenienced.
I agree, except to add that I unfortunately don't think Musk's principles are very different from most people's, in that it seems that most people only care about their own free speech and are completely fine with the speech of their ideological opponents being repressed.
Very true, but most people don’t brand themselves as “free speech absolutists” and make a big public spectacle about how their position is morally superior to all others.
Exactly. Just because information is publicly available, doesn't mean it's easy to find or access. Doxxing makes it easy to access and reference, and bridges the gap between a pseudonyms and real identity
Fair, I should clarify: it is not illegal in any of the locations that Musk or Jack Sweeney operate in. Musk going after Sweeney would hopefully get thrown out at the anti-SLAPP stage. Unfortunately, my go-to person for such questions (@popehat) just left Twitter because of how awfully Musk is running it.
I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps up, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Come on. That is such a bad faith argument to read on HN. There is a difference between open data and someone publicizing it. I know you hate musk but let’s not write reddit-level comment please. If it had been a personality you liked you would have written a totally different comment.
Elon loves to shove himself front and center into the public eye and to stoke a fanbase. Large groups of people inevitably contain some crazy ones. Obsessive para-social relations often lead to unhinged fans stalking or harassing the targets of their obsession. This is so common it has a term coined by Eminem: "Stan".
> How can we prevent this from happening again?
Celebrities are often stalked not just by fans but by reporters. Princess Di was arguably put in a situation by photographers which led to a car crash and her death. It appears the solutions are either:
(1) Don't be famous, or be the type of famous person that has a low profile (there are a lot of them)
(2) If you are a billionaire then you can afford a security detail -- get one
(3) Support real mental health efforts and legislation which funds support for people with mental health issues, instead of sticking them in prison or making them live on the street
So the tl;dr: "If you don't want your kid to be stalked, and the car driving them assaulted, surround them with bodyguards 24/7 or stop being famous". HN really is turning into Reddit these days..
And Elon also goes against common advice and purposely paints a giant target on himself. Not all too irrelevant considering kids are taught at age 2 and held accountable for creating enemies.
Elon's case isn't exactly average even among the ultra-rich.
I expect he will sue those next, forcing them out of business and taking away an extremely useful tool for both general interest and holding people, companies, and countries accountable.
I really don't see how he has a valid case against them as ADS-B data have been public for a long time. An expensive case with very slim chances of winning. Elon is literally scope creep personified. Several of his companies are at crucial stages of management yet this is what he chooses to spend time and energy on (or perhaps that's intentional?),.
Doesn’t need one. Even with SLAPP laws he can make life difficult enough for these sites, none of which are huge with substantial resources, to force many or most to give up and create a serious chilling effect.
Well Alex Jones got sued and the judge said he has to pay 1 billion $, and all he was sued for (according to the prosecutor) was publishing the family's information which I'm sure he also found available publicly and they got harassed by other people.
So Elonjet taking the information publicly available, sharing it, and people "harassing" Elon is similar enough.
Again, before Elon bought twitter the narative was that twitter as a private platform could ban anyone they wanted for no reason at all, so if that logic was reasonable then it should be reasonable now.
Musk has now included a tweet seemingly trying to dox the stalker, including their license plate. How can he immediately turn from "people shouldn't post publicly available information that can be abusable" to posting someone's abusable public information?
It's possible to do great things and still be a terrible person. I know some people might find it hard to believe but it's also possible for people to change as they age/get richer/get more powerful/get less powerful/get poorer etc. Elon 10 years ago isn't Elon today.
> How can he immediately turn from "people shouldn't post publicly available information that can be abusable" to posting someone's abusable public information?
So you'd be calm enough to institute new anti-doxxing rules in your social media company before deciding to dox the person you think is bothering you? I could understand acting rashly while the emotions are high, but I find it difficult to see this chain of events that way.
Could you elaborate how that site proves anything? I can create a github page and type "Elon Musk hates all children". Does that also mean it's a proof?
The original source of that info was [1] - a reasonably reputable journal, I believe, and I would suggest an order of magnitude more reliable than "a github page". Not least because you can be sure that their legal team went through it with a fine toothcomb before it was published.
> On Wednesday evening, the account was briefly restored, with Twitter outlining new rules seemingly designed to prevent Sweeney from posting the real-time locations of planes used by Musk and other public figures as long as he included a slight delay. Sweeney, over Twitter, asked Musk how long he’d have to delay the data to comply.
> But Wednesday evening, Musk threatened to escalate the conflict against Sweeney, saying a car carrying Musk’s son, X Æ A-12, had been “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles, implying without providing evidence that location data had been a factor in the purported episode. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” Musk tweeted.
> Sweeney, 20, shared publicly available information about Musk’s flights, not his family members or his cars. The records stopped and ended at airports, and Musk has provided no further detail as to what legal basis Musk would cite in a lawsuit.
I heard that he gave his child a strange name, but... that is just something else.
On topic: I don't see how a flight location could be shown to cause that event. If I told you that I was arriving somewhere at LAX at around 0900 could you find me?
1. This has nothing to do with the location of his private jet.
2. You can't do whatever you want, even to protect your family. Elon has a lot of power, he can't be allowed to abuse it because some guy decided to stalk him.
Technically yes, however, by his own admission this is a genuine safety concern. Based on his own admission,the EU would expect a consistent ban on all accounts that share such information, not just the account that targets Elon Musk.
I am sure this will fly below the radar, however, once again shows there is no consistent moderation policy across Twitter. So far it seems Musk will only respond if it affects his own family.
Tesla's implementation is materially different in that it's not optional and cannot be trivially disabled.
Early Onstar vehicles are trivial to disable and later ones can still be disabled by removing the radio transceiver. The vehicle operates normally without it, unlike a Tesla.
Yes, otherwise it would be unusable by anyone living in a city, given that underground parking (esp multi-level one) tends to have no reception at all. Not even mentioning driving through countryside stretches on road trips.
The only things that won't work with no cell connection while you are in the car are things like spotify app in the car (but you can still use spotify through the car bluetooth connected to your phone, if you preloaded the songs on your phone) or being able to see live stats of the car in your phone app.
Sure. There are fleets of automated license plate readers, there are patents about tracking serial numbers broadcast by tire pressure sensors, etc. States sell their entire drivers license databases as well https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-pri...
This incident is entirely between the perpetrator and Elon. Jack Sweeney's bot has nothing to do with it because a bot relaying public info that could've been retrieved using a plethora of alternative means bears no responsibility for potentially causing this incident.
How is that relevant except that it demonstrates even further hypocrisy from Musk? Which is not surprising.
Also Musk isn't really trustworthy so unless this is confirmed by am independent third party there is no reason to believe the guy that moves tens of thousands of dollars to harass rescue personnel.
Even if Musk is not lying there still isn't a connection.
Edit: apparently the last data published from the elonjet account is from December 12th. Making this even more ridiculous. Not sure what I expected.
You noticed that slight of hand too? Go back to the original HN thread on this ban and you’ll find a poster asking for another “narrative” besides Musk being a rank hypocrite. This is that narrative his followers were looking for.
The slight of hand here is to conflate the car and the plane and the dates. This allows his followers to push a “it was for his child’s safety!” argument, in which yet again Elon Musk uses his children as a prop to avoid critical examination of his new story. Which, as you and others point out, falls apart due to the timing of the last tweet and the purported incident.
That's pretty much what happened[0] (given the PIA situation with changing plane numbers mentioned elsewhere in the thread), with the only difference that the person camping out and watching out for the plane didn't do the stalking of the car ride afterwards themselves. They just reported the data on the flight landing, it got publicly updated on the tracker, and then another person (who actually approached the car later, according to Elon's claim) stalked them using the info posted on the tracker.
[0]. Assuming the allegations about it happening are true.
Nope. As previously stated many times in this and the other discussions, the aircraft is not part of PIA and the accurate hex code is reported on the FAA site.
ElonJet didn’t tweet anything on the day this incident occurred, so that part is false too.
Sure, I am not claiming that this is what happened. My explanation of how it could easily work relies on the assumption that the aircraft was a part of PIA and that the events described actually happened. If his aircraft wasnt a part of PIA and the event never actually happened, it obviously all goes out of the window.
The link is weak but because you can track the plane you can wait at the private airport terminal and wait for the guy to walk out the door. There's very few people that go in and out of those terminals so it's easy to just wait for the person in question. Once they're out you can then follow and tail their car.
There's very few people that go in and out of those terminals
In Los Angeles there are hundreds of private flights per day, and wealthy people pay for hangar space. It may well be possible to stalk someone this way, but I don't think it's such a foregone conclusion.
It's also conceivable that a very wealthy person with a flair for hype and dramatic gestures would stage an event as a demonstration or object lesson; we know of celebrities who have done just that is a misguided attempt to solicit public sympathy.
I am not suggesting this has happened; it's just one of numerous possibilities, and I point it out to point out that it's no more irrational than other plausible allegations.
And? Literally everyone else runs this same risk who uses an airline. Maybe if home boy doesn't want to get tracked, he should stop using a means of locomotion where every flight plan is a matter of public record.
Zero sympathy here. I'm actually more upset that there appears to be a "hush hush, pay to anonymize" program, and that it isn't rolled out as a default. Billionaires do not deserve exclusions from the baseline risk profiles everyone else endures.
* was accused by an ex wife of lying about it. The same ex wife that notoriously does anything for media attention, writes online incessantly about her divorce with Elon, who's made multiple easily disproven lies, has publicly smeared him for financial gain during divorce proceedings, and had her own divorce judge not agree with the validity of any of her claims.
I'm worried about the side effects if Elon gets his way.
Could this cause people to face legal problems if they share tracking info on federal or military flights such as those who spy on people?
Could it stretch out to satellites, just how expansive would the ruling be if Elon won, and how hard and expensive would it be to narrow it back if possible?
yeah, this seems fake as hell. the coincidental timing, the clumsy on-the-nose nature of this incident, the "perp" calmly letting the guy take video of his (paper?) license plate...in what appears to be a parking lot? come on.
Yes except for the part where it's a car not a plane and some random LA road not an airport. Except for these things it's a perfect match, grateful for this context. Although this "Elon Musk realizes he is not alone on planet" arc is quite interesting.
Is there an archive/screenshot anywhere of the posts from the ElonJet account immediately before it was removed? I'm curious what recent info (if any) it showed.
Welp, guess we better set up a license plate anonymization program...
Law enforcement says NO! In the distance
Guess that's that.
Welcome to being a trackable number Elon. Remember, it's all in the public interest. Also, It's funny how billionaire's pander to this type of surveillance in the Board Room, but suddenly start trying to throw off the bit/yoke when it starts to inconvenience them personally once somebody is sufficiently motivated to start leveraging the data trail they all are instrumental in maintaining.
He owns car dealerships, why is he keeping a car long enough to require license plates? Like content moderation, his predecessors already figured that out.
Depends on which airport you're talking about. Difficult for LAX, but very, very easy for SMO (and since we're talking about a private jet, it was probably SMO and not LAX).
Don't Teslas have several cameras that may record such incidents. If that's the case, can't someone accessing the vehicle's controls share with Elon and the world that this was the case?
Musk considers harm to anyone's family other than his to be necessary for Twitter revenue.
> organizations who supported harm to my family
A significant problem in Twitter and social media in general. Musk seeks to protect himself, while opening the floodgates on others for his version of "free speech" by unbanning accounts previously flagged as abusive.
What I’d make of it is a desperate attempt to conflate two completely different things (one of which to my knowledge isn’t even verified) in hopes of gaining sympathy for pulling the rug on an account without looking like a complete hypocrite. Dude is looking more and more like a pathological liar and sociopath by the minute.
Now apply the same logic to libs of tiktok. she set off qanon extremists to threaten Boston Children’s hospital. but Elon encourages re-instated her account and regularly engages with her
I find it odd that his son would be traveling in a car with no dashcam and the only video from the whole incident is some guy sitting in the driver's seat of another car looking very relaxed. Also that there's no mention so far of any police involvement, as I'm fairly sure the LAPD would take a violent incident report by professional bodyguards as something worth looking into.
They added them in a software update at some point in 2019. It gets recorded to a usb drive that you keep attached. Any drive works, I personally prefer an external ssd.
When you press the record button, it dumps the past 10 mins of video from 4 external cameras onto the drive. When the car is fully stopped, you can either watch the video on the screen inside the car or unplug the drive and watch it on your laptop or on any other device that can read from usb/external drives.
There is also an automatic (aka sentry) mode that triggers dumping a video by any nearby action, but that's only when the car is parked and left unattended.
I don't know if it was even a Tesla car, but if it was they're sorta famous for having cameras out the yin-yang, I've seen lots of 'vandals caught by Tesla security cameras' puff pieces.
...is perhaps the hundred and fiftieth time I have read this (or a similar variant) nonsense of false analogy, already debunked explained and reexplained in hundreds of variants
I am beginning to think that the people who parrot it are not even interested in its response (already said and reiterated hundreds of times in the last 12 hours)
Who lives where, and their telephone number has always been public record.
It only started to become a real problem once people started automating telephone spam. Once again, an example of how Sales/Marketing/Advertising ruins every attempt at implementing a well formed public network.
> If you own a home, your address may also be publicly available via county records.
You responded:
> ...is perhaps the hundred and fiftieth time I have read this (or a similar variant) nonsense of false analogy, already debunked explained and reexplained in hundreds of variants
Someone asked for a link to any of those comments:
> Would it hurt to link then?
And you reference the start of this thread, which is the thing being questioned.
Your comments in this thread have been uncritical.
Anyway, I want to get it back on track if you're willing:
> I'm actually interested in hearing the counter argument.
There is no counter argument. This person was assigned their opinions by their chosen Internet tribe and has nothing to offer but feigned incredulity that anyone could possibly think differently than they do. 100% bluster, 0% substance.
Reading through this thread, it's hard to disagree with your conclusion. I still believe these comments are made in good faith (read: these things are actually believed) and that's why I point out the lack of a coherent argument. I'd at least like to extend an olive branch for a more productive discussion.
The thing he actually doesn't want everyone to realise is that he is a dumbass billionaire who goes on costly trips all the time. As soon as the world sees him as the kiddo who happens to have whims and does whatever he want with the mass of money he has (he bought twitter just for fun?), his aura will be over.
I don't care about costly trips. I mean, he has billions and works a lot. Spending a million here and million there is pretty frugal compared to some other people who need to prove their worth by upping each other on who has the largest yacht in the world.
> I don't care about costly trips. I mean, he has billions and works a lot. Spending a million here and million there is pretty frugal compared to some other people who need to prove their worth by upping each other on who has the largest yacht in the world.
> What I do care about, though, is hypocrisy.
Turns out, you should care about both. First of all, his private jet costs as much as a yacht, plus he doesn't own a yacht just because he rents them...
> While Musk famously owns a $70 million private jet, he hasn't sprung for a yacht of his own (unlike his space rival, Jeff Bezos). Instead, the group chartered a vessel — called Zeus which rents for over $7,000 a day.
Is it just me or does $7,000/day actually sound very cheap? That's the nightly rate of, say, the nicest suite in a top-end hotel, but for a whole yacht. Maybe that doesn't include crew (besides the skipper, which the article says is included), fuel, food, etc.?
Renting yachts seems like a great mitigation to me. One yacht can service dozens of billionaires' 1-2 week vacations without sitting around in port useless 90% of the time.
He has a jet because, honestly, he is traveling constantly for his work. Call it a tax on running multiple large operations. Given his long work days I can see how the jet pays for itself many times over.
And renting a yacht for $7k is actually super cheap. I know people who spend more on champagne in a club in a single evening, and no, they are not billionaires.
Even if this yacht was rented 365 days a year, which I do not believe, this would be $2.5M / year.
Even if this absolutely worst case (I don't believe for a second that Elon is partying on the yacht for large part of the year) you could still rent it for literally hundreds of years and still not match the cost of just buying your own large yacht. Forget about insurance, maintenance and staffing costs.
If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.
Dude, he also has a $70 million jet, which costs about as much as a yacht. Let's be honest here.
> If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.
Also :-)))
We're not talking poor here. We're talking "makes more money in 1 month than the richest lawyer you know" rich.
> Dude, he also has a $70 million jet, which costs about as much as a yacht. Let's be honest here.
First, I am not your dude.
Second, please, read the comment before you respond. I addressed it.
$70M is a drop in the ocean when you are in tens of billions of dollars especially when it is your work tool that lets you move fast between locations and save couple of hours on each trip.
The person complaining about saying "dude" already lowered the tone of the drasticaly debate by saying, apparently without a hint of irony, "stop thinking like a poor person." So I agree there's a lot of low quality, revolting posts here but the use "dude" doesn't really scratch the surface.
It's kinda cool that 19 friends and I could take a day trip on Elon Musk's yacht for $350 each.
The last boat I rented charged $200 for a 2 hour session and had a capacity of 12 plus you had to drive it yourself, so his would be a definite step up, but it's pretty modest for a billionaire.
>As an individual, he has probably had net positive environmental impact than the next 1m people combined.
This is such a terrible mindset.
So we're going to allow the rich to do whatever damage they want to the environment, personally, if they construct widgets that are slightly less harmful than the next best widget?
It's this sort of hypocrisy that prevents people from buying in to the environmental movement: celebrities lecturing the rest of us while they don't alter their lifestyle one iota. The proletariat will never accept it.
Jury‘s still out on that, mostly because it‘s still up for debate whether replacing gas cars 1:1 with electric cars is a good idea.
I don’t doubt that we actually need electric cars, the important question is just whether that’s all we need or whether we need other transformations (radically fewer cars and less space for cars in cities, for example).
This second goal is something Elon has actively worked against, for example with his Hyperloop bullshit.
Why has even HN comment field lowered to nothing but blind hate? Say what you want but the man has reformed rocket technology and jumpstarted the world's shift to electrical vehicles, both against all odds. Hate-takes like this are silly.
I do give him credit for those things, but the guy is one of the most powerful people in the world and uses that power to bully. He keeps using his position of power to punch down at people who usually don’t deserve it. It’s petty and pathetic.
For example, twitter’s former head of trust and safety had to leave his home recently because Musk told his fawning followers that he was a pedophile. It’s not even the first time Musk has called someone a pedophile unfounded.
> For example, twitter’s former head of trust and safety had to leave his home recently because Musk told his fawning followers that he was a pedophile.
Uh no. He simply posted a screenshot from the guy’s thesis.
> Uh no. He simply posted a screenshot from the guy’s thesis.
That is BS. Musk posted it with this false comment, which he knew would enrage his followers (and it did, I saw tons of "all pedophiles deserve to die" about Roth after this):
> Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis.
Which is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite of what Roth was arguing for. Here is what the DailyMail (not exactly a liberal rag) said about Roth's thesis:
> Roth wrote that, as underage youngsters use the app anyway, an age-appropriate version should be created to offer help to LGBT youth
In other words, he specifically wanted to separate kids from an app that was intended for adults.
Now, people can definitely debate in good faith whether Roth's argument is a good idea or not - I think it's most definitely not. But it's not because of the absolutely false trope that Roth wants to make kids available to adults, which is basically what Musk has deliberately whipped up his followers into a frenzy about.
When a very powerful man with a large following “just posts a screenshot”, he is supposed to be unaccountable for the actions his followers take, even if his additional context dog-whistles to his fans that the guy is a pedo.
When a relative nobody “just posts already-public information about a physical object”, suddenly that’s not just worthy of a ban, but of a nuisance lawsuit.
What you and I think are not really important in this conversation. Elon believes that the Woke Mind Virus is an existential threat to mankind. Perhaps he has been infected.
He also misrepresented what the thesis was saying in the same tweet, deliberately playing into homophobic tropes associating gay people with pedophilia.
It's possible to think he has done good things in the past, but is doing bad things in the present. And to believe/worry that his present (and future) actions may cause his 'net effect' on the world to become negative.
Adding to the "Too many of the good things he’s done seem to be despite him." - there was this tumblr post that passed by here on HN by someone who claimed to've been an intern on Space-X:
I never understood the point of the cake story, and it all might be total BS, but the longer this current saga goes on the harder it is to totally disregard the bit about "managing Elon".
Hate is not the opposite of worship - he can be great in some areas and a "dumbass billionaire" in others.
Looking at history, I can't imagine there's any useful technological advance (or adoption thereof) that depends on any individual - if EVs were meant to be successful I believe they would've been with or without Musk. Same goes for anything Space X does. Same goes for anything _anyone_ does. If you believe the world would be notably different without any one individual in it, that's what you chose to believe, I see no evidence from history for that.
Does he have valuable skills? I'm sure - if nothing else marketing and persistence. Was he involved in important stuff? Evidently. Did he get lucky? Absolutely. Does whatever perceived or actual good he did excuse the perceived or actual bad? Not in my opinion.
Naive people and children fall victim of hero worship.
Adults and people who can think for themselves are beyond that and understand that it's humanity as a whole which progresses forward, humans just make a fuss and all sort of drama to be the person who gets the merit and gets to sign off the progress do jour.
Musk got to sign off the peculiar niche of EVs and rockets which are niches nobody else wanted because they are dependant upon political support.
Agreed. Surely the workers would have gotten together on their own, pooled their resources and achieved at least as much as they have if it weren't for Musk.
/s
Seriously, this is just blind hate. He's a deeply flawed individual and I definitely think he's a jerk, but he's at least he's taking risk on creating something actually new.
The richest people I know made money on "safe" industries like civil engineering and plastic bag manufacturing.
Pushing the aerospace industry? Challenging the petrol status quo by making EVs viable? Credit where credit is due, he put in the investment and pushed people to make it happen. Obviously not single handedly, but surely accelerated it.
It’s not blind hate. People see the man for what he is, a douche bag and a charlatan, and are calling his behavior out. His luck in this world (and he has been incredibly lucky) is irrelevant.
Anyone paying attention to his tweets can tell this is obvious fake front that he tries to maintain (one that actually works on a lot of folks). On some level it's probably technically true part of the time, counting long flights in his private jet as "working", etc.
To be fair, I do think there are people who work hard, especially founders. There are also vocal pretenders like Musk. My guess is that the folks who do work really hard are probably the least likely to go around broadcasting that fact. That was my experience, at least.
I was never VC-backed but I did a couple runs (combination of bootstrapped and angel investment) and I worked like crazy all the time. I never really thought about the amount of work I did until after (I was too busy worried about failing). I never discussed the amount of work I did with anyone, especially not publicly, because I never felt like it was anything to brag about (I still feel this way). This post is probably my first public mention of it TBH. :)
Elon has recently come out as concerned for his life. Death threats and what not. Someone tracking his every move is of concern under those circumstances.
Why not? He is CEO, he owns the jets. If he wants to take a 1 hour meeting in person in another state that is his call.
If people have a problem with the carbon footprint they should be promoting all around higher energy use taxes. Not using a strawman against someone they hate.
Certainly it's his perogative and he's free to do what he wants. If I had as many businesses as he does, I would think a teleconference would be a more efficient use of my time, rather than the time spent physically traveling somewhere.
It's not about providing info that he flies a lot, but about sharing his live location without consent. Imagine someone kept posting a tweet about your every trip - when you left, when and where you will arrive. Twitter TOS are one thing, but I'm quite sure such things break EU's GDPR laws as well.
A lot of public figures are under scrutiny like this.
You ask others to imagine what it’s like to have location shared without consent. But, you’re ignoring all the shit Elon does as well as all the ways he voluntarily forced himself into the public eye.
Elon wants the luxury of saying and doing anything he wants without accountability. This is a tiny way for the public to push back. No sympathy.
Musk is doxxing someone while having banned the jet tracker he accused of doxxing (which was using public information...
) AND multiple reporters just reporting the story.
It's about tracking a plane which ALREADY has its location tracked by a transponder and published publicly. Like every other non-military plane in the world. Nothing is unusual there, except that this data is posted to Twitter.
Investors and marketwatch is very interested in this data. Because it can be used to build cases on mergers, bankruptcy, management changes and so forth.
If the private jet of a Shell manager is seen to fly to a Phillipine island a few times in a month, and the private jet of a manager of a Phillipine drilling company then flies to Amsterdam, it's likely that Shell is going to buy, build or anything over there.
First of all, when you're the CEO of what, 5 companies at the same time? you're probably not working that much. Or being a CEO should be a part time job, 20% of regular working hours.
Secondly:
Twitter is in San Francisco, Neuralink is in San Francisco, Tesla is in Austin, The Boring Company is in an Austin suburb, SpaceX is in the LA metro area.
I'm quite sure there are regular commercial flights each day between Austin, San Francisco and LA.
Let's be real here, he just uses a private jet because it's cool and convenient.
He was kinda forced to buy twitter in the end. He made a bid, but then the marketed turned red, and then didn’t want to buy it anymore. Now he is stuck with a company which generates less earnings than the interest costs from the buyout credits.
That’s also why he is even firing the kitchen staff and selling their kitchen appliances. He is so desperate for money to keep this company from bankrup.
Which is also probably the reason why he plays with QAnon stuff. I think he is speculating on someone to take twitter away from him. Maybe.
he wasn't "forced", he signed an agreement to buy it, and then did.
he failed to do any due diligence before signing and failed to include any outs in the agreement in case he changed his mind, but that's just stupidity or laziness, not being forced into something.
That’s like saying “I just bought a house for $4.20 million because I think 420 is a funny number, but now I’m suing the seller because I just realized I can’t afford the mortgage payments because my stock portfolio declined in value after the purchase”
That’s life. No one should have sympathy from Elon for making bad financial decisions. He’s smarter than that.
I don’t think it’s crazy for Twitter to ban stuff like this. The damning part is just that it explicitly goes against the stuff Musk has repeatedly said!
It's definitely hard to figure out the logic where it's OK to ban someone for posting plane data because it might be misused for dangerous while it's bad evil censorship to ban the President while he's actively trying to overturn the results of a lawful election.
Contesting the results of an election is entirely different to publishing location data with the intent to cause physical harm.
Disputing election results is also part of the democratic process, even if you disagree with it, and should be encouraged. There is nothing in the public interesting concerned with stalking people.
> Disputing election results is also part of the democratic process, even if you disagree with it, and should be encouraged.
no, a democratic election with proper monitoring will not have a dispute on the election result - after all, you would be monitoring the counting process.
What happened in jan is not a dispute of the election, it's a refusal to accept the results of the election. Aka, an attempted coup.
Not only does it contradict his direct statement about not banning @elonjet, it contradicts his statements about twitter policy being decided by a committee, as well as his numerous other statements about allowing free speech in general.
The policy itself I think makes some sense, although it's interpretation is ripe for abuse, just posting any random picture of someone in real time could be interpreted as a violation.
> If something might be harmful to my kids, I would ignore what I said earlier and protect my kids first.
It might be, but there isn't a shred of proof that it actually is.
Elon is quite literally hiding behind his youngest child in order to get away with something that he simply wanted to do anyway. He painted himself in a corner and this is his way out.
The account that got blocked wasn't active on the day that the alleged stalking incident happened. And until I see some actual evidence that the two are linked that will be my position.
And if I were a billionaire and worried about parties tracking my vehicle in real time I would be up front about it rather than to make grand statements about absolute free speech and leaving that particular account up. I might go as far as to say that I purchased Twitter with the express intent of shutting that account down, even though I knew full well that the information would remain available elsewhere because my children's health is priceless and 44 Billion is chump change to me.
I also would not use easily identifiable vehicles such as private aircraft.
Until you see some actual evidence, Elon cannot take actions to protect his family? That is ridiculous.
Even without this incident, having a twitter tracking your real-time movement already presents danger to your family. Even you yourself wouldn't like it.
> And if I were a billionaire and worried about parties tracking my vehicle in real time I would be up front about it rather than to make grand statements about absolute free speech and leaving that particular account up.
What does this have to do with his family's safety?
Apparently, he prioritizes family's safety over being called hypocrisy. This is a good thing, right? We all agree that Elon is taking a good action, right?
It's strange that you argue the other way around. It's like you want people to not prioritize family's safety. Weird.
> I also would not use easily identifiable vehicles such as private aircraft.
Ah the victim blaming. it's not the stalker's fault. It's the victim's fault that chooses the type of the vehicle.
You ignored half of his comment which completely negates your entire spiel.
It was 'that is my position', not 'he is not allowed to protect his family', and 'if I were him and wanted to protect my family' followed by doing everything you are arguing for except the being two-faced and disingenuous about the reasoning.
Please engage with good faith or just state outright that you don't care what the other person says and state your argument without quoting them as if you are responding to what they intended instead of what allows you to make a point.
> This is a good thing, right? We all agree that Elon is taking a good action, right?
For Musk the father, if what he’s saying is true then that’s good for him.
For me the internet denizen, this is not good. Because if we are to take Musk’s premise that Twitter was run by the whims of partisans as true, it is now the case that Twitter is run by the whims of Musk. This is not what he promised when he bought Twitter.
It might turn out fine if Musk has learned a tough lesson about the balance of privacy and safety on social media. Maybe he learned that “free speech absolutism” is a fantasy and not a tenable philosophy. If this leads to fairer, more balanced, and well thought out content moderation policies, that would be great.
But if the end result here is that we get more capricious and arbitrary policies that form to the contours of only Musk’s personal experiences, then no, that’s not good for anyone.
It seems to me that the rule at Twitter now is that Musk will take swift action to curb billionaire problems like private jet tracking, but will do nothing to curb (and even encourages) other forms of harassment like homophobia and transphobia on the platform. This is why people are so mad.
Except... Half of us have no recourse, and governments get carte blanche to violate this type of tracking anyway. Sweeney should just take it to Mastodon.
A police report would be good enough proof for me. Or a video of the alleged stalker engaging in any of the claimed activity. Not a video of someone calmly sitting in a car, recording someone recording them and saying "I'm not."
He is not allowed to take immediate actions to ensure his family's safety before filing the police report.
> Or a video of the alleged stalker engaging in any of the claimed activity. Not a video of someone calmly sitting in a car, recording someone recording them and saying "I'm not."
Yeah, I think the logistics was difficult around the incident.
You'd have to take the video all the way before you realized there was a stalker, and the stalker would have to be stupid enough to say "I'm the stalker" out loud while being recorded.
Are most the victims of stalking able to do that with the first incident? Is Elon an outlier here?
My conclusion is still valid. As of now, there is no way to satisfy your ridiculous criteria.
>He is not allowed to take immediate actions to ensure his family's safety without filing the police report first.
I never said anything remotely like that. A video of someone in a car is not proof of his claims.
>Are most the victims of stalking able to do that with the first incident?
No, but if they end up filming the alleged stalker's license plate I'd assume they do immediately contact the police. That's not a ridiculous criteria.
Changing ones views is fine, I would hope that we all update our views as we get a little older and wiser, but his whole raison d'être for the twitter acquisition was the pursuit of free speech.
He made a bunch of very recent, very public, and very direct commitments to that effect, and now he is backtracking on it.
It's absolutely something that he should reconcile with and address.
> He backtracks it because he prioritizes his family's safety. Is that a bad thing in your view?
It's bad that he's seemingly only interested in protecting his own. The moderation he decried as part of the Twitter takeover is often the sort of thing that's protecting others from harms of this nature.
If this helps him turn over a new leaf on the concept of "legal speech can still be dangerous to people and some of it shouldn't be on Twitter", great. I'll believe it if I see it.
> He even tweeted the new policy that tracking people in real-time is not ok.
That new policy is a hastily written ex post facto justification for the action he wanted to take. I think everyone suspects, with good reason, that it'll be inconsistently applied.
Let's not kid ourselves. All of us are mostly concerned about our own kids.
If we were concerned about other kids, we would drop everything right now and spend all of our time finding kidnapped kids instead. There are thousands of missing kids right now.
We would tell senates (or vote) to spend 10B or 50B a year of tax money finding missing kids. We would make it the top priority of the nation. We don't even do that
Musk being concerned about his own kids doesn't seem out of line.
Also, which kids are getting stalked by Musk? Maybe I missed the news
Yes, but he's not in charge of the largest megaphone on the planet, which Elon Musk has used to previously advertise his stance on the subject. To see him publicly retract that and re-state his new position rather than to have to infer it from his actions would help.
'Quietly updating your opinion' is a right reserved to those that quietly held it in the first place.
That tweet says that free speech will be limited by law. For that to be relevant to ElonJet he would have to specify which laws ElonJet broke.
People can change their opinions but if you’ve made big public statements about that opinion, spent $44 billion in part to enforce that opinion, garnered press & support for that opinion, then I’d expect that opinion to be strongly held and not dropped at the first test that affected you personally. Then if you do change opinion then you should be as equally public about it as you were previously.
No it's not. The speech didn't do squat. Some crazy did. I should be able to tweet his flight plans. If se stalker gets a daft idea, woopdie
Sue the stalker/get bodyguards.
Land of the free, home of the brave for a reason. The price of admission is living here at your own risk.
And you of course don't find promoting coups to overthrow the democratically elected government of you country to be a threat to family and kids, right? That all okay. Cool.
This is not a way to moderate Twitter or any social plattform. That‘s the pertinent point. It‘s awful governance even if his personal perspective may be understandable. But that doesn’t matter. Still makes this awful governance.
He could stand to get a filter for his mouth and learn to be more nuanced. Perhaps he could hire a secretary or something to handle some of that. It doesn't seem to be an innate skill he has.
Isn't Musk, or any other individual, allowed to change his mind? Many comments here seem to imply that a tweet sets your behavior in stone and any subsequent deviation is hypocrisy.
He even changed Twitter's policy and specified that it's ok to share the information of where a person was, just not track their movements live. You can argue in favor or against the policy, but we expect people to change opinion because of experience.
> Isn't Musk, or any other individual, allowed to change his mind?
of course he can, but if the change is "you know I used to say unfettered 'free speech' was the most important thing in the world and lack of it was killing western society? I've changed my mind, I don't want a twitter account publishing where my private jet is" I'd expect him to have to actually say that out loud and expect him to get a lot of shit for having such weak principles.
What I really like about ElonJet and Sweeney's other accounts is they included emission estimates. Really blew a hole in the idea that you could ever consider Musk or Gates to be environmentalists. A recent Musk flight between Washington and Miami emitted 9 tons of CO2 [1], which is nearly double what a fuel inefficient car would emit each year. How can you tell me I'm the problem with my single truck and couple of commercial flights each year when you've got multiple Teslas and hundreds of private flights each year?
> How can you tell me I'm the problem with my single truck and couple of commercial flights each year when you've got multiple Teslas and hundreds of private flights each year?
Because there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of other truck owners also using the same justification to keep their truck?
This isn't sticking up for hypocritical wasteful billionaires, just pointing there are not very many of them in the grand scheme of things. Truck owners reducing emissions by a few percent (let alone dropping to what a car would do) would have a much bigger effect than billionaires or celebs reducing by 100%.
So the poor and middle class have to go beyond comfort and make concessions every day while these billionaires are free to burn the world at a 10000x rate of a normal person because “there’s not enough of them?”
Great logic. By that strand, I suppose they could also be allowed to abuse people, I mean it’s more important that we make sure the general population doesn’t abuse right? That’s what truly moves the statistic, not the crime perpetrated by a few billionaires?
You call out "Great logic" with an immense whopper of your own.
Where did I say it was OK for billionaires to waste so much? Did calling them wasteful and hypocritical sound to you like I was supporting them?
If we want to extend the fallacies in the other direction - Why should the rest of the world do anything when these wasteful Americans insist on having so many trucks?
Total strawman. We want everyone to emit less (or pay a steep price for the privilege) including and especially billionaires. It's just that billionaires are a drop in the bucket so them altering their behavior will factually not change much.
The 15 largest shipping container ships produce as much sulfur pollution as all non-commercial cars on the entire planet put together. There's thousands of those ships. Of all vehicle pollution, something like 95+% of it is large commercial vehicles.
Your switching from a truck to a car makes effectively ZERO difference in global emissions. If EVERY non-commercial vehicle in the US went down to ZERO pollution, it wouldn't even be noticed in the statistical noise of the country's pollution.
But if everyone just cherry picks a worse example than themselves to justify not doing anything until they are the worst, then no progress will ever happen.
You are making the mistake of thinking that CO2 is the biggest or worst polluter and that only greenhouse pollution matters. Look up sulfur pollution. It is basically non-existent in gasoline, but rampant in other fossil fuels and is far more impactful.
FWIW, often statistics talking about CO2 are actually talking about CO2 equivalent, which is a way of normalising the harm levels of different pollutants. Typically this is used to compare things like farming and fossil fuels, which produce very different gases.
Unfortunately, I can't tell if the source linked actually uses this metric but isn't being clear, or if it's just focused on CO2, and I'm struggling to find another source that does use CO2 equivalent emissions as a metric.
I'm not presenting this as fact but the argument is clearly that Musk's net effect on the global population is positive through his career choice and life's work, and that jetting around is necessary for him to complete this life's work.
The thing that makes me think twice about that argument is that Elon has just spent an enormous sum of money on a social media website that doesn’t seem to further the goals of materially improving the world.
> doesn’t seem to further the goals of materially improving the world.
why should that be a goal of his? I mean, unless you expect that just because he's rich, that he's obliged, how his enormous amount of money is spent is not something anyone else can critisize.
He could do that shit with a Zoom meeting. Musk has enough money to get one of those really swanky Cisco telepresence tanks. He doesn't need a fucking jet to complete anything except being another asshole billionaire.
Agree this is the argument. I find it funny that people point to his individual CO2e footprint as kind of this gotcha moment. So thoughtless.
The baseline condition is everyone is still in ICE cars -- he changed that and have altered the trajectory - the transaction cost is his own emission to raise capital and build companies. Now add in the CH4 rocket fuel - might do some counter damage to the net impact but I haven't run the calculations -- probably could do a quick one. Should be using H2 if he cared about the environment ;)
> What I really like about ElonJet and Sweeney's other accounts is they included emission estimates.
December 5th: 28 tons CO2
That's more than the typical American does in a year and he did it in a few hours. Between Dec 1st and Dec 5th his flights resulted in 100 tons of CO2.
This is always the commentary about leaders and business people from all over the world flying their private jets to Davos to discuss solutions to climate change.
When people try to pin carbon emissions on an individual's travel it sounds willfully obtuse if not completely disingenuous. The trajectory of climate change will not be altered by a few thousand billionaires taking fewer flights. You know this, I know this, we all know this.
It won't but it will help to create more support with the rest of the people. Do as I say but not as I do doesn't work with adults any more than it works with little children.
I don’t agree with this. You can eat meat and try to convince as many people as you can to decrease their meat consumption. Or you can not donate but convince as many people to donate to charities as possible. Etc. Is it a bad thing? And if it a bad thing why’s that?
It’s a bit like telling people that volunteer that they’re just doing it to feel good and so that they’re selfish.
You are the problem. I am the problem (someone who’s never driven a car in his life and doesn’t fly in airplanes). Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and everyone else is the problem.
The sad reality is that it doesn’t much matter. The damage we’ve done is baked in and hundreds of millions of people in the next few generations are going to have it pretty rough. Can’t unring the bell of a century+ of society not giving a shit about the environment and just pointing fingers at someone else and calling them the problem.
If you’re loaded, you may as well just take the PJ flights and enjoy them.
I fear I must tell you you didn't make a difference and it's still up to policymakers (and people who elect them) to enact necessary changes to reduce carbon emissions.
Yes, this is the point I was making in my comment. Unless “policymakers” (aka people) are willing to enact some very unpopular policies then everything is just window dressing and rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Those flights emit a couple of tons of CO2. Tesla has saved millions of tons of CO2 from being emitted. It's nicely illustrative of how little a jet flight is compared to all the car traffic emitting CO2 that's been eliminated.
Emissions credits don't just shift CO2 production. They make CO2 production more expensive and increase the effective cost of other vehicles, resulting in shifted buying away from CO2 vehicles toward EVs.
And that's indeed what happened. A huge amount of the luxury vehicle market shifted to the Model S. Model S sales went way up and other luxury brands had years of record low sales.
Also in general, people are buying EVs to replace their old cars, so every EV sale is a "not-ICEV" sale. It's going to be rare that someone buys a new EV and a new ICEV at the same time to replace their old ICEV.
While, yes, the data could have been used to track him down, but reposting it on twitter is not enabling anyone to stalk. Crimimals that would want to hunt down Elon or X, would definitely have specialists who can gather this and other data without some random twitter user
Exactly. What elonjet posts is neither original or private. It is simply relaying information that could've been obtained via other means anyways. Placing blame on Jack Sweeney is a poorly thought-through decision. Sure he may have been emotional after the stalking incident, but the only case he has here is against the perpetrator, not Sweeney.
It is more nuanced than that. Professional criminals won’t have trouble locating Musk, but nut job activists may be not that smart and providing them location actually increases risk for Musk.
Well, the guy on the video looked much more sophisticated than a random nut activist. They would rather go the easy way: stand in front of SpaceX and harass the employees
He spread his reach too far and now he's neither a Lib hero (electric cars) nor a Plub here (being rich). And since he's a professional troll, it's really easy to not like him. Not sure he meant for it to go this way. He didn't even want to buy Twitter. That was probably the most epic Rick Roll backfire ever.
it truly is bizarre how many fanboys came here to post irrelevant and incorrect information to defend Musk doing a big 180 on a supposed deeply held principle of his because he got personally upset about someone making him look childish.
Not any more bizarre than how many people have come here just to vent off steam from reading so much Musk-hate online. Neither is providing any value to the discussion.
it truly is bizarre how many haters came here to post irrelevant and incorrect information to attack Musk doing a change in twitter policy because of reasons we don't know.
> Dismissing people with a label to invalidate their argument is ad hominem and is an eternally weak counterargument.
it is nice to be reminded that I guess this isn't a uniquely low quality site, and that comments like yours were endemic on k5 and slashdot and usenet, too.
I of course wasn't dismissing anyone based on a label, I was dismising them based on their low quality posting:
> it truly is bizarre how many fanboys came here to post irrelevant and incorrect information to defend Musk
you're right I shouldn't discriminate, and I do also have disdain for the non-fanboys posting irrelevant and incorrect information
“live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available”
This makes “I am at <concert> watching <performer>” a violation.
"Content that shares location information related to a public engagement or event, such as a concert or political event, is also permitted." Literally the next sentence in the thread linked.
It happens in public, but it isn’t a ‘public event’ by any reasonable interpretation unless Elon encourages people to come see him disembark the plane.
"Use of the national airspace is generally considered public information because pilots – whether airline captains or recreational fliers – rely on a system of air traffic controllers, radars, runways and taxiways, lighting systems and towers that are all paid for or subsidized by taxpayers.
As a result, flight data collected by the FAA in its air traffic control system – except for military and sensitive government flights – is public information. Web sites such as FlightAware post the data online, allowing anyone to observe the system and follow most planes virtually in real time."
Which is not to say that Elon setting foot onto the tarmac should be open to the general public - but the very fact that airports are restricted spaces makes this kind of information more comfortable.
That doesn’t make it a public event, the sentence even gives examples of what they consider public events - concerts and political events.
I’m not arguing about anything here except for Twitter’s new policy. I don’t think it’s a good policy and it makes the lie of Musk’s “commitment” to free speech but it says what it says.
Right -- that word "event" is a huge deal here. I'd guess it makes Twitter's newest policy under Elon its, by definition, most restrictive speech policy to date.
Actually, he’s celebrity, having deliberately sought the spotlight for years. That also means he has a lower reasonable expectation of privacy than a normal person, much like other celebrities and public people.
I wonder how does Elon expect any journalist to follow these rules? Big chunk of information from press is reporting on public figures location and sometimes this include reporting in real time.
Well, in the next hour, a journalist is going to get banned, a campaign will come up to get them unbanned, and Twitter will change the rule. We'll be fine.
According to these rules journalists are no longer allowed to publicly share information about Elon going to visit his Saudi creditors since it's wont be public event. Nice!
Yes. According to Twitter policy there must be "24 hours" delay since it's only way to follow "not same-day" rule. This will obviously makes Twitter useless for any news reporting.
Any social network post from celebrity X who mention they just seen celebrity Y on a private party of celebrity Z? According to Elon this information about him cannot be shared on Twitter.
PS: I'm not exactly into US celebrities, but I'm very much into stalking Putin and his cronies using OSINT reporting on Twitter. Now anyone who publicly share their movements can be banned.
Maybe not a technical violation since it said "earlier today" -- but a random student tweeting the same right after seeing him on campus would get the account suspended?
A fan saying "OMG, just saw Kanye at the Whole Foods in El Segundo" would be worthy of suspension?
News stories about various public officials secret trips for negotiations would be worthy of suspension?
Or just posting that you ran into your good friend Bob this morning and roughly where would presumptively be in violation, Twitter would have no way of knowing whether Bob consented for that information to be published.
Before coalition talks in Germany there are frequently news about politicians visiting this party headquarter or that party headquarter, practically always in real time. All of those are usually not public events. There are no press conferences, nobody in the press is told about those visits (except if it leaks).
> Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.
Seems like the rules would allow journalists to share a story reporting if Elon Musk visited any Saudi creditors, but if they include the location of the meeting in their reporting then they wouldn’t be allowed to post it on Twitter until after the meeting.
I mean, I have a hard time finding issues with 24h or 7 days delayed journalism for small news. If you’re covering war, or the government, or something of public utility I can understand a live coverage tho
OSINT accounts provide detailed information on a number of global conflicts, not just the ones that get covered in the media. And the level of detail and analysis is almost always better than what you get in the mainstream media.
It wasn’t clear that parent was referring specifically to military OSINT and I took it more as general OSINT which is often of civilians, and can be less ethical and lead to false conclusions.
It's not about militaries since military planes mostly have their ADS-B transponder off. But OSINT community depend heavily on flight trackers and also on sharing location information with wide audience.
It's possible without Twitter, but bans for sharing of location information will make it much easier for Russia to block investigator accounts.
It's a hastily-written rule designed to ban Things Musk Doesn't Like while allowing things he does. See also the exception:
> In addition, you may not share private media, such as images or videos of private individuals, without their consent. However, we recognise that there are instances where users may share images or videos of private individuals, who are not public figures, as part of a newsworthy event or to further public discourse on issues or events of public interest. In such cases, we may allow the media to remain on the platform.
So vague it's impossible to determine in advance what's allowed and what's not.
Man, I wouldn't want to be in the team of lawyers charged with writing this rule.
"You have 24 hours. You have to write some rules that make my private jet's flights that are public information available on a public website in real time disallowed, while also making Hunter Biden's hacked nudes allowed. Go."
So is Hunter Biden’s private media now banned again? Maybe not, as long as “Twitter” decides it is newsworthy (but in such a way that Elon’s media or location is not)? My head is spinning.
If that person didn't want their location shared, they should be able to request the tweet be deleted. Multiple offenses against your account? I'd say yes, bannable.
Meanwhile, half the bots I've blocked still show up in my news feed (when it loads and I check, both of which have diminished greatly in the past few weeks)
As a reminder, as Elon talks about personal safety, this is the man who posted personal information about a former employee of his on twitter that ended with him having to “move his entire family because of the death threats that showed up”
And Musk did this after saying he "trusts" Yoel. Why did Musk backstab Yoel within two weeks after publicly praising him? Probably because Yoel resigned from his position at Twitter in the intermim. Musk really is that fragile and narcissistic.
Your link does not say what you says it says. Nowhere in that post does it say that Elon posted personal information about a former employee on twitter.
Elon responded to a few old tweets by Yoel that some people had retweeted.
Yep. I wonder what went on behind the scenes there. I'm sure the next owner of Twitter will be happy to share all that in 'The Twitter Files'. They'll also be a lot more interesting than the present installments.
Maybe the booing in person and Dave Chappelle's comment about the booing being pending civil unrest spooked Elon a bit. His right wing shit posting on twitter reaches a lot of people and many dislike him for it.
I've been seeing a lot more people posting about boycotting Tesla and associating ownership with his views. I drive a Tesla and frequently people bring up Elon to me. I usually just tell people I don't like/care about Elon but I like the cars Tesla makes.
I don't want to support this guy in any way shape or form. The damage he's doing is rapidly undoing any good that he's done so far and he's on the expressway to net-negative territory.
I'm sure you have a point though: to step out of his bubble of yes-men must have been a cold shower.
Seems a bit of a stretch to blame the creator of elonjet for a stalker being able to find his car. The flight information is public information. Even if it wasn't and/or he flew commercial, people would probably be posting about where they saw him due to him being a public figure.
People keep saying this but I have never found it to be the case for me. I meet and collaborate with amazing engineers on Twitter, and often get help with tricky problems. I have also had a lot of success using it to spread the word about my own projects.
1. This is like the classic sorta thing where someone thinks a given freedom/right/restriction is ok until they feel threatened by it and suddenly it needs to be reconsidered.. it is ok in the abstract and then when the concrete harms possible become obvious your opinion changes (like being related to a victim of a mass shooting or being friends with someone gay that is being denied the rights of a "normal" marriage)
2. They could have just messaged the account owner and said "a delay of X hours is ok but real-time reporting is no longer permitted" and I am sure the account owner would have complied and they would have avoided this whole thing. It seems so deeply dysfunctional to have not done so - which is very on-brand for Musk-era Twitter.
> would you like someone making a website tracking you even if it was public information?
Mark Zuckerberg already did that. It's called Facebook.
But also tracking a plane != tracking a person. If Elon doesn't want his flights to be tracked he could always fly commercial like the rest of us plebs.
Having it show up automatically on your twitter feed is different from have to know bout and intentionally use a tracking platform to look for a specific person's plane.
If you are nuts enough that you want to shoot that person's plane, motivation is there to click on a link you can find in a minute of searching on Google
Of course spouting a load of nonsense about former Twitter employees to the point that they have to evacuate their home is perfectly ok by that same token.
“Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and his family were forced from their home after Elon Musk’s tweets misrepresented Roth’s academic writing about sexual activity and children.”
“Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and his family were forced from their home … according to a person familiar with Roth’s situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity”
Forgive me if I don’t give the Washington Post’s vague reporting and anonymous sources much credence. There are zero details here, and no claim of independent verification other than repeating the hearsay of an anonymous “person familiar” — not even a direct source.
How has this story been verified? If it was verified, how were they “forced”? Under what circumstances, specifically?
According to you then, you either believe in Musk way more than in Washington Post, or you must think that reasoning of Musk is also such a fabrication. Neither seems to me a well reasoned position with the current information available.
The article makes clear more details are not given for safety reasons, which is appropriate given harassment has occurred.
You can dismiss mainstream press if you like, but the point is it’s not a HN commenter being hysterical or equivalent to subreddit speculation: this is reported news.
I think we can all agree that celebrity stalking via plane tracking apps ought to have been prioritized above all the other safety issues Twitter is still fumbling around on ineffectually.
What does that have at all to do with posting the already publicly available location of his jet? Seems like a pretty obvious attempt to play on people's emotions and shut down any kind of rational thinking to cover up for Elon just banning people that annoy him.
I find the tabs on the Explore page return errors about 20% of the time. Also, yesterday Trending was offline for an hour or so, and random keywords like Telegram were blocked and then unblocked [1]. It's about as broken as you'd expect for a company that just lost ~70% of its headcount.
BUT that's some extremely bitter irony he experienced. He was proud to describe himself as a "free speech absolutist", meaning he's ready to allow controversial, offensive discussions that are on the limit of legality. He even said he will allow this jet tracker bot, to show what a cool guy he is. But now reality happened for him and he probably expected reality only applies to other people.
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok."
Can't wait for Musk to go against the FAA for requiring this info be publicly announced and not restricted time wise. He also probably won't affect any account(s) that publish this information so long as it doesn't affect him personally. You know, free speech as approved by Musk and all.
So he's not a big fan of free speech after all, I see. Censoring publicly, required-by-law, freely available data is definitely not something a free speech absolutist like Elon should do. Just my two cents. Make of that what you will.
The new rule seems to have serious implications for journalism on Twitter. Often a news story states or implies the present location of a person (and not just at public events).
The idea that this is somehow doxxing is beyond ridiculous. It's public data thaat anyone can read on a website (eg flightradar) or pick up themselves with a cheap receiver. That system is ADS-B. Knowing your plane (and not necessarily you) is at 37,000 feet above Iowa only represents a threat to someone with a serious SAM capability or interceptor jets. Or even that it's at LAX.
Think about this: we know where Air Force One is.
So why is this public? The design and history of ADS-B is an interesting topic that was talked about more during in its development and rollout. One of the design elements that's questionable is that there's really no verification on the broadcast data. You can broadcast what you want. There are demoes of people hooking up Flight Simulator and showing the ADS-B transmissions they could make that would mimic their location, altitude and heading. They didn't do broadcast it of course. It's a felony to do so.
All of this sprung from the desire to get rid of ground radar at airports. There are lots of reasons for this, some good, some questionable.
But it remains clear that this represents a plausible security threat.
So you can ask should ADS-B data be public? Well there's really no alternative. It's designed that way. The FAA has been working on privacy options for this. I'm not sure the current status.
Anyway, people rail on Elon in particular because he's so incredibly thin-skinned (eg banning people posting clips of him getting booed when onstage with Dave Chappelle) and he's a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist", which everyone knows is a complete lie. Elon banning ElonJet is yet more evidence of that lie. People take great pleasure in such people getting egg on their face.
To large extent, doxxing is providing public information in a venue it usually wouldn't be shown in, and where people with bad intentions who otherwise wouldn't think to look for that information will see it.
It's drawing attention to obscure public information, and most things that involve politeness do run on security by obscurity.
Just because public data is available doesn't mean it can't be weaponized against you. I'm sure there would be a huge outrage if someone started publicly posting ALPR data and you could track people by their license plate.
He should make up his mind about this 'free speech' thing and then stick to whatever decision he comes up with for at least a couple of months. This is beyond silly.
Yeah... if he really cared about anyone else's personal safety other than his own, he wouldn't have fired the twitter safety team, and then not said anything about a former twitter executive.
Elon mostly cares about Elon and the rest of the world are cardboard NPCs to him as far as I'm interpreting all of his actions for the last two months.
I don’t even think it was particularly about his personal safety. So someone gets a notification he has landed in Miami - are they going to race to the airport, hop the fence, run to his plane and confront him?
I genuinely think he just found it irritating that someone was trying to make him look bad. I don’t blame him, I’d probably feel the same way. But then I haven’t bought a social media platform and loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that I am a free-speech absolutist.
Unless Elon plans to ban the FAA from doing its job, people will know where Elon Musk's airplane is at all times.
Banning a silly Twitter account that copy/pastes data from the FAA won't change a thing.
The paparazzi have been using these things to follow celebrities since forever. It's an exorcise in ignorance to ignore the nature of FAA regulations / airplane tracking.
Well that’s the other thing - banning the account on Twitter doesn’t make this go away. It just means people will follow them on FB or just use flightradar24 instead.
> It's an exorcise in ignorance to ignore the nature of FAA regulations / airplane tracking.
It may be more of an exercise of Elon flexing his $44B investment over the heaters and the poor people: by this point he knows that anyone even slightly left of center is not going to love him, so he's full on embracing the far/alt right crowd by "owning the libs". "Free speech" is lip service at max that some people fell for hook, line, and sinker.
Exactly. A thread on Twitter about his Jets wouldn't touch his personal safety since the data is public, but it would attract more among the people who don't like him, therefore he would be giving exposure to discussions against his public image.
He has all rights to ban whoever he wishes since he owns the platform, but common sense should suggest him to stop talking about free speech since he's in no position to lecture anyone on the matter.
> Banning a silly Twitter account that copy/pastes data from the FAA won't change a thing.
Of course it does.
When you make something easier to do, the effect is it increases the chance of people doing it.
If your contact information is listed in a telephone book, it is publicly accessible information. Anyone can look that up. But who's going to do that? (to prank call you for example). But if some posts your info to a twitter account that reaches millions, chances are someone's going to call you. Why? Because popped up in millions of peoples' twitter feeds. And since it's so low effort, one or more people with nothing better to do will call.
> So someone gets a notification he has landed in Miami - are they going to race to the airport, hop the fence, run to his plane and confront him?
Even if congress shutdown ADS-B receiving or encrypting it somehow, people would just get out the long range camera lenses and take pictures of the tail numbers as the planes land and report it on a web site.
ADS-B is used all over the world, the trend is actually in the opposite direction: more and more airspace requires the use of ADS-B. Encrypting it would defeat the purpose of allowing airplanes to see each other as well (ADS-B to some extent replaces radar).
Congress could presumably pass some law but it would have to be ICAO or some other global organization that would formalize the change. Updating the systems on all aircraft would take many years. The current roll-out has been in progress for more than a decade.
These are repeated so often it's mind-boggling. Somehow we're supposed to believe that 1) The team before did nothing, and 2) That the new team, which is not team at all and possibly doesn't even exist, IS doing something? How do either of those make sense? But it's acceptable to so many people because pedophilia is the new Satanic Panic.
Not true. They censored that stupid H Biden lap top story _including in DMs which thus far had supposedly only been used for underage illicit material_.
Vern Unsworth is a cave diver who assisted with the Thai cave rescue a few years ago.
He was derisive of Musk, who wanted Tesla engineers to help rescue the trapped children.
Musk responded to this criticism by calling Unsworth a "pedo" and "child rapist" and hiring a private detective to investigate Unsworth. Unsworth ended up suing Musk for defamation.
Flawed is liking pineapple on pizza, not using your platform of millions of followers to call someone a child rapist. That's worthy of contempt to me.
You can admit Elon is extremely petty and short-sighted in private personal matters but admit he still attempts to do good in the greater scheme. That's where I'm at personally. I despise his lack of consistency and restraint in his position of power, but still respect his wider goals in reducing censorship and making bold investments in technological moon shots.
I'm cynical though, I only see lesser evils as all you can wish for in politics and culture. Trusting in politicized public figures = pure disappointment
The most sympathetic scenario re: twitter (ignoring the other Musk issues around FSD/pre-Twitter stuff): a few very public examples of him censoring people for petty reasons VS pre-Musk twitter banning (or silently shadowbanning) many thousands who happened to fall outside the current-thing Overton Window, using equally or worse biased/misguided reasons (ie, 'misinformation') and quietly taking requests from gov/intel agencies... still a net gain over all. But tons of work to be done.
Also doxed a Tesla short seller on Twitter and tried to get him fired. Also lied about some other person looking into Tesla and claimed he ran over employees in the parking lot, taking him to court.
This kind of "flawed" seems like a perfect reason to strongly distance oneself from any past suggestions of "being a fan" (everyone makes mistakes after all), but to each their own.
I don't know anyone these days who is the model of morality. People are pretty messed up in general. I think at least Elon puts most of his energy into doing things that are good for the planet and people.
As far as billionaires go he’s way more amusing than Bezos and Gates and Buffet all put together. Only Bankman-Fried has been close on the entertainment front.
A king is only as powerful as his subjects are loyal. If someone transitions from being amusing to being a train wreck, what is offered in return for the people to continue to recognize such power?
Everyone has issues, and does bad things from time to time. But I respect that he's been able to build the companies he has while enduring almost constant hate from the beginning. He had some supporters but CNBC and the like were constantly talking about how Tesla would go bankrupt and how it was a total waste of money.
And I think Elon does some really dumb things but in general I want him to succeed on what he is doing.
He's just speed running all the decisions and problems the last lot faced. They started with anyone being able to say anything too, and then spent 10+ years finding every exception and complication to that policy.
I think he and quite a number of people who wave the "free speech" banner are pretty consistent here. Anything the ingroup says comes under free speech. Anything the outgroup says is a shocking imposition on the freedoms of the ingroup.
It fits pretty well with Musk's "woke" obsession. He should be able to do and say whatever he wants. But if he gets booed in response, then "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters". Because the booers couldn't possibly be equal humans using freedom of speech to express their feelings.
He said in multiple tweets theres still rules particularly with direct harm to people. Idk why you would think doxxing and tracking someones location (which in this case they stalked his family) would be ok. I feel like this is just a talking point even though you and others know better but just dont like Musk. If thats the case just say it.
If your contact info was listed in a public white page directory, would you be okay with someone looking up that publicly available info and posting it to millions of people on twitter?
If I am using my real name, and if I am aware that my address is publicly listed, why not? If I worked in an office and made that information public, would I be expected to be upset when someone publishes the address of that office on Twitter?
Now, if I'm pseudonymous, that's a different matter: someone would be revealing my real name's association with that pseudonym, which may be a problem.
Elon’s contact info was not shared publicly with millions of people. The location of his private jet, which is public information, was republished on Twitter.
Most of us have the ability to drive to someone's house. Most of us do not have the ability to intercept a flight or gain access to the secured area of an airport.
As for me liking Elon Musk: I used to. And then somewhere along the line it changed and now I in fact do not like him. But my liking or not liking him has nothing to do with simply holding him accountable, he made some pretty expensive statements and he fails to live by them, even for a very short period. And conveniently just when he's decided to ban that account a stalker of his family pops out of the woodwork. I'm sorry but Musk has lost the benefit of the doubt with me, too many lies over too many years.
Why would he tweet “tweets about my location posted on a delayed basis aren’t that bad” then an hour later ban it again? It’s very odd and throws gasoline for his detractors.
This is after very publicly saying he would stand up even to people posting his flight info just last month.
I get being emotional about the kid being stalked but the mixed signals are just frustrating.
The link between his kid being stalked - assuming it even happened - and deleting the account as well as his previous statements on the subject simply do not add up. This could have happened at any point prior to him taking over Twitter, but it didn't and now, magically, within 48 hours of the discussion around blocking the account blowing up there is the silver bullet. I'll read the police report if and when it becomes public (again, assuming there is one, which presumably there should be).
Edit: an upthread comment states that the owner of the elonjet account says that the account has not tweeted since Dec. 12th so that the two can't possibly be connected.
I think even if his private jet went completely dark and no updates to its location were posted anywhere this wouldn’t have changed anything here. If this happened (who knows, maybe it did) knowing where the jet landed or took off doesn’t allow you identify the location of any of his children or ex wives/partners
The person who’s trying to fashion himself a free speech liberator while being a capricious egomaniac who invents transparently post-hoc justifications for his selfish hypocrisy on a platform with world changing impact and expects the same world to just accept his manufactured reality because he’s used to getting his way… yeah, that seems important to me.
Well so long as it's no longer the government asking him to censor things that aren't illegal and ban people they don't like, it's a private company so I don't see what the problem is.
It's only a problem if you want Twitter to survive as a platform where they at least try to uphold something akin to free speech. If you want it to become irrelevant then I guess it doesn't matter, and there is no problem. But if Elon says he wants it to be a place of free speech and he doesn't behave in a way that backs that up according to public opinion (which is highly subjective) then there will be some issues retaining users. Really it seems like an impossible task.
Indeed I gave Twitter a second chance because of this and this
makes it doubly hard to defend. I already cared little about defending the cult of personality thing.
Why would you have to defend anything like that to use it? Who makes any of the products or services you use? Do you defend the Chinese Communist Party when you buy anything made in China or by a Chinese company? Or defend petroleum and war profiteers and petrostate regimes whenever you fill your gas tank or take a flight or a bus somewhere?
I was defending the ideas he was pushing not defending Elon himself. All I’m saying is it makes it harder to defend free speech when people get to pretend he actually doesn’t really care about free speech because he makes occasional/rare exceptions to the rule for his own benefit.
Obviously it’s still way better situation than quiet censorship for everyone outside the Overton window and via gov request Vs a small very public group of cases for a billionaire’s petty exceptions to the rule, but it’s not helping the cause in the culture war pushing for censorship.
Okay thanks for the answer. That's interesting, I can easily defend free speech regardless of what anybody else says or does.
And so far I think the direction he's taking Twitter looks very promising in injecting some diversity into the social media landscape and shaking the government-corporate attacks on speech. Maybe not very much and may be futile in the long run with a meek subservient populace who beg to be ruled, but certainly better than before.
Agreed, the lesson from this for most Elon defenders is probably stick to your values and don't blindly defend celebrities.
The lesson for others to not be hysterical and look at the bigger picture of the net gain of reducing censorship (and the fact Twitter was already an ideological disaster that can either only get better from here.... or die - win/win) is probably going to hit a brick wall.
They have their own ideological battles to pick. And Elon handed it to them wrapped in a bow. So they might as well take the victory lap.
I don't think banning of real time broadcasting private peoples' location and travel is all that bad. And if applied consistently regardless of political ideology of the broadcaster and the target, really isn't the death blow to free speech on the platform that people are trying to make out it is.
It's not quite the anything-that-is-not-illegal that Musk was blathering about (although it's possible it could run afoul of stalking laws in some countries/jurisdictions), but it's really nothing compared with the politically motivated and government involved censorship and banning that had been going on there.
I believe they're referring to 2020 when two political campaigns were asking Twitter to remove stolen data. Of course, only one of those campaigns qualified as "the government" at the time, and many other organizations also make requests to remove stolen data, but I don't think they're using reason.
No I was referring to government agencies pressing for news to be censored and journalists banned by knowingly lying about certain stories being misinformation.
The emphasis on safety for Fauci's family while simultaneously dismantling community safety rules on Twitter is pretty disconcerting. Prosecute really is a wannabe feudal lord.
EDIT: Updated to include Elon's preferred pronouns.
That's the whole point: this is all just a figleaf, Elon Musk has a long history of going after people that show him up in every way possible. Next up: the lawsuit. Wait for it.
Heh, Ok. Checked that box. Very predictable though. Pity that he won the case against that diver. If he had lost that one it might have saved us all a lot of trouble.
Twitter 2.0 suspended a bunch of my legitimate accounts without any explanation. Also, my personal account, opened in February 2007, is also in some kind of read-only mode - I cannot change my name. Actually, I don't want to change my name, just to remove some emoji suffix. The error I'm getting is "Account update failed: Denied." Twitter 1.0 sucked, but 2.0 sucks even more!
> Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family.
Is he going to sue the FAA? His live might not be easy, but if he really wants Twitter to be a bastion of free speech, reposting very easy to find public information is probably not where the line is crossed.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the people who think of the most mundane things being said by ChatGPT are harmful are not the same ones siding with elonjet/sweeny here.
OpenAI is explicitly trying to filter ChatGPT from saying things that may insult people, describe criminal activity (like how to hotwire a car or how to make methamphetamine), incite self-harm and the likes. Instead, you will get a generic "I'm a language model and can't answer that" response. I did not see much people complain about ChatGPT in particular (most likely because the filter works quite well in non-adverserial scenarios), but previous language models have famously started insulting people and have gone as far as to try to convince people to commit suicide. In assuming best interest, though, the grandparent most likely referred to worries about it expressing non-politically correct views.
This is so disingenuous. The location of Elon's Private Jet is publicly available info just like any aircraft operating in the US. It also has nothing to do with the alleged stalker attack on his car.
Many people have been trying to get the point across that legal, unlimited free speech can put people in harm's way. Elon is happy to say that he's willing to trade harm to those people for his free speech principles, but as soon as his family is the one facing the repercussions, he's happy to change policy and sue.
My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.
Me suppressing my personal information is protecting my physical safety. You suppressing your personal information is an unacceptable breach of free expression.
Me revealing your personal information is transparency in the public interest. You revealing my personal information is doxxing and puts my life in danger.
In other words you’re just repeating that sticks and stones may break bones but words will never hurt. Hardly a well established / obvious statement, and one that’s covered in early grade school discourse
Often that's exactly what it is. People coming to your (or your relatives) homes, people physically attacking others at workplaces and restaurants. People setting up fires and behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them. We have seen many examples. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen.
You can take it any way you like. If you're not interested in hearing, I'm not interested in wasting time collecting the data, only for you to dismiss it with some lame excuse, it's just be a complete waste of time for me - it's impossible to convince a person that decided upfront not to be convinced.
Tim Pool is swatted regularly for example. Tucker Carlson had to move after his home was attacked. There was an attack on Brett Kavanaugh. There’s a lot of such stories.
In this particular case, there was an attempt at terrorizing Elon IRL. So why shouldn't attacks on him therefore count as "stochastic terrorism", insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept?
That's a terrible premise to start a conversation on HN. Let's not use extreme concepts invented by ideologues + controversial figures being petty as the basis for thought experiments.
Stochastic terrorism may be an extreme concept invented by ideologues, but the fact remains that if you have a big platform and you criticize someone harshly, that might cause crazies in your audience to go after them. So as a society we should figure out what is and isn't acceptable behavior here, and invent rules to apply universally and impartially.
You can't censor your way out of this problem regardless. People will still post Elon's flights details elsewhere.
Censorship is almost always counter-productive and every time it fails it just escalates. Eventually we'll be doing night raids on people's homes over tweets like the UK.
The costs are far too high for very little benefit. Just look at the moral and cultural compromises taken by the US/Canada/UK in Afghanistan/Iraq/globally to crush Islamic terrorism by force. It generated as many problems as it helped, at a very high cost of tons of freedoms for the western public (not just people in the middle east). Now we're on Part 2 of "compromise freedoms for the greater good". No thanks.
some people's personal information, if broadcast, puts them in danger like Salman Rushdie, while with most people nobody cares about them. what's your snappy hypocrisy koan for that? Salman Rushdie's exercise of free speech but not revealing where he was made him some kind of huge hypocrite?
some people's personal information is in the public interest, like Al Gore's electric bill or how often he and John Kerry fly to climate conferences, and POTUS's also, yet the secret service keeps his travel plans obscure to protect him.
many attacks may be consequent, and many are not; much of life is stochastic.
so I don't get your point. I think Musk is sincerely trying to make twitter more free speechy than the previous administration, and I think he's sincerely grappling with issues at the margins. I don't think this silly twitter bot's POV is no longer being heard.
The counterargument is that elonjet is only tweeting information that is already very public.
Elons Jet, by law, must openly broadcast, over the radio waves, location and route while operating. There is a legal right to publish that information. If he doesn’t want people to know his location, he can avoid traveling on the one private jet linked to him. But that’s not what he’s doing.
His child being followed by someone wanting to meet him has literally nothing to do with the location of his jet.
This is an emotional reaction to a situation that only affects him.
And given the massive negative PR some of his decisions have garnered lately, and his thin skin about them (just today he claimed that the booing at the Dave Chappelle show is because "people weren't letting him speak"), I take this vague claim which has only tangential relevance to the stalking with a grain of salt.
"Pursuing legal action against Sweeney"? Not criminal action against the stalker?
No video, not with all the cameras?
Proof that alleged stalker got the information from that Twitter account, and not FlightRadar24, or even the FAA?
Yeah, I would be unsurprised if it turned out that this was all just horse manure to try to provide cover for his decision.
Perhaps his security guys called 911, but so far LAPD says they have no record of the event. I'm wary of trying to draw any conclusions about the event absent some independent confirmation.
I'm not sure police would be eager to investigate "some guy followed me" type of complaint. Of course, if the complainer knows the right people, they would. But Musk is squarely in the "wrong people" corner with the powers that run LA now, I think, so not sure he'll get a lot of help from LAPD on this.
It only takes one lunatic to care about "nobody" and you can have a fatal outcome. The criminal registry is filled with lunatics such as domestic violence perpetrators or stalkers that found out personal information about a nobody and acted violently on it.
You might be star stuck and a deep believer of Elon the new Saint, but the original comment is pointing out the hypocrisy and danger of one person deciding on whose information we can spread based on augmenting it in the framework of "free speech"; but then essentially boggling it down to naive notion like you stated:
"nobodies" - who cares about them? It's about popularity and favoritism (free speech is the rhetoric)
"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)" seems like a simple rule that can be enforced even-handedly against both sides. On the other hand, "don't do speech that causes harm" is so vague that it guarantees endless battles.
If the New York Times writes an article criticizing someone, and then a crazy person shoots that someone, is the NYT now required to stop writing articles criticizing people? If not, then why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?
U.S. case law sets the bar for incitement really high precisely so you don't have prosecutors trying to silence newspapers in the way I described above. Some people have argued that Twitter should adopt a lower bar in order to prevent harm, but I've never heard anyone describe a coherent principle that wouldn't also allow the NYT to be banned as I described above.
This is a weak comparison. There are some pretty big qualitative differences between a critical NYT article and LibsOfTikTok. And… frankly if the NYT was routinely publishing content that was getting people harassed and threatened? Yeah we should be asking them to change something in their content too.
Humans can tell the difference between news that sometimes has negative side effects, and singling out people for harassment. If humans can tell that difference, so can rules - society isn’t math, the rules don’t have to be equations.
Humans can't tell that difference, except in the sense of "it's good when my side does it to you, and bad when it's the other way around."
Elon Musk aggressively criticized Yoel Roth, forcing him to flee his home in fear for his life.
Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz published the full name and address of the (previously anonymous) LibsOfTikTok writer Chaya Raichik, forcing Chaya to flee her home in fear for her life[1].
Most people think that one of these two events is okay, and the other one is very bad.
Again, I see major differences between those situations that don’t have to do with “sides”. It seems like you’re equating the consequences of the actions with the actions themselves. I.e. if both actions result in someone fleeing their home, they must be the same action.
They weren’t the same action.
The first difference that comes to mind is that the elon situation is an unaccountable individual billionaire, where the nyt is a group of journalists / editors. Dozens of people vetted the choice to publish her name - nobody can vet or check who elon decides to go after next. Plenty of more nuanced takes about the twitter files and roth have been published and didn’t result in angry mobs thinking he’s a pedophile - because those takes were checked by editors and a well established code of ethics.
Elon attacking roth is in many ways the same as what libs of tiktok is doing. Using a huge platform to point an angry mob in someone’s direction, while claiming innocence of the resulting harm. Where revealing libs of tt’s identity is an act of holding power accountable - you wield the power of the mob? The public deserve to know who you are. Elon attacking roth, is… what? Roth has no power anymore, isn’t causing ongoing harm, at this point criticizing him seems indistinguishable from trying to sell elon’s public on the righteousness of his twitter takeover.
What “sides” are those? I’m on the side of “billionaires are too powerful”, “journalism is generally pretty useful”, and “don’t send angry mobs at people for living their lives and having opinions”. Liberal agenda gone mad over here :)
> Humans can't tell that difference, except in the sense of "it's good when my side does it to you, and bad when it's the other way around."
Many humans can though. There's a very big group of people that think every corrupt politician should be investigated. This type of thinking is not equally prevalent amongst all sides of the political spectrum. It is prevalent amongst all extremist forms though, but that probably has to do with the type of person that becomes extremist in the first place.
Why did she have to flee her home? No one was after her. Do we even know if she did flee her home or was it just another lie? Seems like a scandal to gain attention.
>"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)" seems like a simple rule that can be enforced even-handedly against both sides.
He posted a real-time photo of X at twitter HQ like two weeks ago. And then a picture of him getting his badge.
Should Elon suspend his own account for doing that?
In the current political climate, anything that isn't political but does something one side of the spectrum dislikes, automatically becomes political. Elon has turned quite extremely and vocally to the right. So people on the right will view ElonJet as an attack on the right. Unfortunately, that's just how it goes.
These days you can't even write anything objectively anymore. You'll always end at a conclusion that one side will interpret as being against them and then attack you for it.
Slight tangent, but it's especially visible in people who support stuff they're actually not in favor of, just because the perceived 'other side' dislikes it. I've seen people who live environmentally conscious support farmers in the Netherlands, just because the farmers were protesting the current government. Dutch farmers have a huge impact on the Dutch environment and supporting them is the opposite of being environmentally conscious. Yet, people think that the enemy of their enemy must be their friend and the other way around.
Real time location tracking and harmful speech don't impact the ultra rich and normal people in the same way.
Location tracking can be dangerous to rich people because they are a target. Most people are not targets and therefore really would have significant extra risk from being tracked, although obviously no one enjoys being tracked.
Harmful speech is much more impactful to minority groups than it is to the rich.
The rich can chose to live in a bubble, they can move around the globe to avoid the issues and they can hire security. Normal people can't so easily escape the consequences of society becoming hostile towards them due to widespread hate speech.
>"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)"...why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?
LibsOfTikTok has called out doctors using their names, photos, and their place of work. Isn't that effectively revealing the location they will be at most days? Is it any less likely that a crazy person will wait outside those medical facilities to attack a doctor than it is that a crazy person will wait outside an airport for Musk? Isn't what LibsOfTikTok is doing even more dangerous considering they intentionally frame these doctors as a threat while ElonJet is purely informational?
> speech that may be harmful to tens of thousands of already marginalized people
What this means in practice is "speech that powerful, privileged, unaccountable people, who think they are worthy of controlling the thoughts of everyone else, deem to be 'harmful', based on their vague feelings and biases."
So if people who are marginalized go on Twitter to complain about it, their reports don't count? Perhaps some 'powerful, privileged, unaccountable' people do exploit this cause for their own selfish ends, but it seems to me that your argument is predicated on the idea that marginalized people are incapable of asserting any agency, and if they try to do so they must not really be marginalized. I think you should re-evaluate your premise here.
If you consider doxing as a real tangible harm then what about vulnerable groups coming under harm due to being singled out? LibsOfTikTok made claims about Boston Children’s Hospital that caused tangible harm and yet they were unbanned. You might say that LibsOfTikTok didn’t cause the harm, that the responsibility was on the people perpetrating the bomb threats, but the same logic applies to ElonJet and this “stalker” incident.
"harm due to being singled out" seems way too broad, e.g. every time a politician is criticized, they could complain on the grounds that they're being "singled out"
From my limited understanding of the whole LibsOfTikTok / Children's hospital thing, what they had posted was false and thus libel and thus illegal speech which is not allowed on the platform?
I don't connect to Twitter, but I thought that LibsOfTikTok posted evidence in the form of screenshots and recordings of what hospital representatives had said over the phone. Someone even found a paper where authors affiliated with Boston Children's Hospital reported 65 gender affirming surgeries performed when the patient was a minor at the time of surgery: https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm11071943 (Table 1).
From the paper: "The Center for
Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric
center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals
over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. "
Information being false or libelous is another reason to ban someone. That makes it more hypocritical that LibsOfTikTok was unbanned but ElonJet was banned.
May be useful to consider the hypothetical where the statement is true though. What's the right policy in that case? Seems like the sort of hypothetical our speech policies should be robust to.
The specific claims of surgeries being performed at the specific hospital, most relevantly, which was the specific thing that motivated the bomb threats.
> It's well-documented that children are being subjected to 'gender-affirming' drugs and surgeries.
Its well-documented that a small numbet of children with identified needs are prescribed puberty blockers, and that this is extremely significant in reducing suicide rates; its well documented that even smaller number of teens get hormone treatments to promote puberty of the gender of identity, and that a positively miniscule number of teens get (mostly) top or mor rarely) bottom surgery, as well.
> We'll likely look back on this as a huge medical scandal, just as we do for the frontal lobotomy craze.
It’s more likely that we’ll look at the drive promoted largely on the basis of religious conservatism to impose ascribed gender over gender identity and deny such care, with clear evidence that doing so is killing people, as a medical scandal, similar to all the other times care was denied or known harmful interventions were applied systematically to a targeted marginalized community.
> The specific claims of surgeries being performed at the specific hospital, most relevantly, which was the specific thing that motivated the bomb threats.
> It’s more likely that we’ll look at the drive promoted largely on the basis of religious conservatism to impose ascribed gender over gender identity and deny such care, with clear evidence that doing so is killing people, as a medical scandal, similar to all the other times care was denied or known harmful interventions were applied systematically to a targeted marginalized community.
Unlikely, especially with the rise in outspoken detransitioners who have been caught up in this gender madness, and whistleblowing medical staff. They have first-hand experience of how harmful these medical interventions are - and people are listening.
Some European health systems have already massively walked back their 'gender-affirming' care for children.
> especially with the rise in outspoken detransitioners
Detransitioners are rare among those who have transitioned, and of detransitioners, most of tjkse that are public about their views most support trans rights and access to gender affirming care. The propaganda narrative that you are being sold with outspoken detransitioners is, like everything else about trans issues from the same media channels that isn’t an outright lie, a distortiom.
> They have first-hand experience of how harmful these medical interventions are
The data shows that they are overwhelming helpful. You are, when the individuals in question aren’t lying about the specific cases, still just being sold isolated anecdotes with no perspective on relation to the normal experience, designed as emotional manipulation by professional propagandists, to get you to support a campaign of death (both through neglect and more actively) for trans people.
> Some European health systems have already massively walked back their 'gender-affirming' care for children.
Yes, and so have some American ones, as the consequence if an international political movement actively seeking the elimination of trans people, by death if necessary—and this walk-back absolutely, provably contributes to deaths.
> You might say that LibsOfTikTok didn’t cause the harm, that the responsibility was on the people perpetrating the bomb threats, but the same logic applies to ElonJet and this “stalker” incident.
Correct on both counts. Neither account should be banned or punished
I like that response; its a point of view with proper consistency. Twitter is also a private so another view is that you can ban them both and it’s also consistent and within Musks rights.
Of course it’s also within Musks rights to ban one and not the other, just because. But he’s also taken a very public position on free speech wrt Twitter so I think it’s reasonable to point out when those standards are applied inconsistently, and also challenge people who are trying to draw arbitrary lines to defend him.
This is an imaginary dichotomy, though. The proponents of content moderation on social media argue that hate speech causes tangible harm. For example, there are many mass shooters that say that they got radicalized purely online, such as Dylan Roof. This is not intangible harm, it is tangible.
Sure, but where is the line drawn? A lot of political rhetoric across the board is pretty extreme. The guy who shot up a Republican Congressional baseball game at baseball practice was into a lot of anti-GOP and anti-Trump stuff[1]:
> He had also joined several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including “Terminate The Republican Party;” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans;” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”
I'm all for people toning things down. But the entire online ecosystem seems to be full of various factions warring against each other with extreme rhetoric. Even the discussion of extreme rhetoric is filled with extreme rhetoric ("These people are going to get someone killed!"), which can (and is) used to justify all sorts of bad things.
There will always be insane people in this world. Was Hitler and the nazis radicalized through the internet? Was Timothy McVeigh? Censoring people out of the fear semi casual relationships occurring between them and radicalization doesn’t work.
It’s not like people who apt to deeply believe radical ideas once their source becomes censored they just stop there. Human beings don’t work like that.
I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.
> Was Hitler and the nazis radicalized through the internet?
They radicalized millions of people via their speech, which is the correct level of abstraction. Whether it was offline or online speech is a distinction without a difference.
> There will always be insane people in this world.
Mono-causal explanations are factually wrong. The Dylan Roofs of the world clearly have severe mental health problems, combined with being radicalized online by other people's speech. It's the union of all these factors that causes the observed outcome.
> I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.
Well, it's harder to make a case for libsoftiktok than places like 4chan. I think it's reasonable to say that 4chan et al. have literally caused people to die via mass shootings.
That's motte and bailey on "harmful". Nobody is banning people for saying Musk is a moron, nobody is advocating for "There is a <slur> walking on so and so street right now" tweets. Criticizing people vs revealing their precise current location to everyone on Internet are very different things.
This is public information. His own plane reports it. Anyone can buy a receiver to pick up the transponder, and websites exist to collect that data from people who do. All this Twitter account does is report that for one plane in that database. Anyone, including stalkers, can make a script to watch it.
If it is in real time then presumably yes. Perhaps with exceptions for previously announced or expected attendance at certain public events like award shows and the like.
Well there was an issue with other account posting information about school teachers being groomers and pointing people to their names, pictures, etc.
That account is still online, well and doing it. As others have pointed out, as long as the people that are affected are not Elon Musk, then it seems like for Elon Musk it is mostly fine.
Direction threats have always been against the law, what you claim is “harming already marginalized groups” is not at all the same thing, and not against the law.
Unless you mean specifically targeting people, in which case, twitter and other places don’t allow this.
>Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
The difference is that the information we're talking about here is already completely public information, repackaged in a different format. It would be more like an account that tweets the nearest homeless shelter to you - open information, packaged differently.
Where it might become more problematic would be if the account included inciting language with the information ("here is a homeless shelter, go and mob it"; "Elon's about to land in CDG, who wants to stage a riot"). But I think it's clear that that's not what this account is doing - it's just giving information out that already exists.
And for what it's worth, it's not just Musk who gets this treatment. Most British political events of the last few years have involved journalists excitedly gathering around flightradar24 and watching some poor minister's plane as they make their way back to London to get fired, hand in their resignation, etc. That's essentially the same thing that this Twitter feed is doing (albeit usually more focused on the event rather than 24/7 tracking of one vehicle), but it's not considered a security risk because it honestly isn't. I mean, when the Queen died, Huw Edwards did the same thing for the Princes' plane, and he'll probably win a BAFTA for it...
In all fairness, I have some sympathy towards Musk, as it sounds like he's dealing with the shock of his child being stalked. That's going to evoke a strong emotional reaction, and I can completely understand why he'd want to shut this sort of thing down. But that doesn't make it useful (the information is still public, and anyone motivated enough to track Musk down IRL doesn't need Twitter to find it), nor does it change the hypocrisy of the situation. It seems like he's just lashing out at the wrong person, and making decisions over things that he can control.
Trust and Safety is an extraordinarily difficult problem to handle at scale. Ideally guidelines should be public and applied consistently. That's a high standard.
Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.
>Trust and Safety is an extraordinarily difficult problem to handle at scale. Ideally guidelines should be public and applied consistently. That's a high standard.
Agreed.
>Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.
I agree, but the previous admin was not even trying to meet the "public and applied consistently" standard (see Twitter Files). So I'm hopeful that there will still be improvement in the long run. Hopefully this is a teachable moment for Elon.
It won't be his downfall. He still owns SpaceX, which is starting to become very influential. He still owns a large part (though less than he used to) of Tesla. If (when) Twitter crashes and burns, he will get sucked further into his dark abyss and I expect he will become the next Thiel / Koch and use his money to fuck the US political system even more than he's already doing.
For first point: https_//twitter_com/libsoftiktok/status/1592655096252608513
'Supports' does a lot of work in his post, 'mingles with' or 'enjoys the content of' is closer to the truth. Philosophical alignment with that kind of characters betrays contempt for certain groups.
For second point: https_//www.thefader_com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-talib-kweli-twitter-ban
A few boos are enough to make him re-platform a dude with that kind of public record? It shows brittle spirit, as his friend Dave Chappelle would say.
For third point: https_//nymag_com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-smears-former-twitter-executive-yoel-roth.html
This one is the one that's serious, this kind of thing could amount to stochastic terrorism, but no one cares, because he's rich beyond measure, and that makes people excuse his every indiscretion.
It was a cursory google search, and while the burden of proof is on the one making the statements, it costs little to check it yourself.
It definitely isn't a good look for him, and while looks aren't that important, it does paint a picture of a man that has principles only outwardly, a man that is petty, and a man that thinks the world bends to his very word. It doesn't matter, though, the title 'billionaire' tells us that much, and grants him those powers.
Doxxing is not free speech. The sensible majority of people understand that. It's only a vocal small minority of idiots and troublemakers that argue otherwise.
Musk disagreed with you until today, he explicitly said that he would be leaving this exact account up because he believed in free speech even when it was about his location.
The problem is that he is only learning when it negatively affects him. Plenty of people have already learned many of these lessons, he just has no interest in listening to them.
Sure. But if the only way Elon can learn why something is bad is through first-hand experience, will he act against speech that threatens minority groups he's not part of? What about those that are economically disadvantaged?
You can already see this lack of empathy at work in how he's trying to claw back severance he owes Twitter's ex-employees.
Evidence so far is that he’s not principled enough to do so. “Free speech absolutism” just meant he didn’t give a fuck as long as he wasn’t the one at risk. I don’t think that will change, but I’d love to be wrong.
Maybe if one of Elon Musk's children came out as trans he'd realize that trans people are just people and stop needlessly demonizing them with right-wing invective.
My preferred operationalization of free speech is "minimum intimidation".
Slurs don't qualify for protection under this operationalization, because they intimidate the listener without providing any information content.
Same goes for protesting a talk so loudly that the speaker is drowned out, or doxxing.
If your speech serves only to intimidate others into silence, I don't think it should be protected.
Curious to hear everyone's objections to this high-level approach. (Note: I would want to add a bunch of clarifying details before making this Twitter's official policy, but it seems more interesting to provide those details in response to objections, instead of writing a long boring comment.)
Same goes for protesting a talk so loudly that the speaker is drowned out
By this standard the speech of people booing Musk in a stadium the other day was not protected and they could be subject to legal sanction. I doubt this was what you had in mind.
I don't think legal questions related to free speech and Twitter moderation questions related to free speech need to have the same answers. I'm happy with the legal framework we have in the US.
The question I'm trying to answer: Suppose a large group of hecklers attend a public lecture. They disrupt the lecture and prevent the audience from hearing the speaker's message. Is there a sense that they are interrupting the lecturer's exercise of free speech? Or alternatively, is it the case that anyone who scolds them is interfering with the hecklers' right of free speech? (Does the scold also have a right to free speech? How deep does this rabbit hole go?) I think it's possible to thread this needle by defining the thing we want as "transmission of information", and the thing we don't want as "intimidation".
You could argue that boos are also transmission of information. I saw a short clip of the boo thing and it didn't seem like they were loud or numerous enough to overwhelm what was spoken into the microphone. So based on my current operationalization, those boos basically qualify as protected speech.
If audience members preplanned a large disruption which made it impossible to hear anything Elon said, that would be anti-free-speech according to my current operationalization. It intimidates and prevents information transmission.
I still have to think about the case where they spontaneously disrupt the event, unintentionally making it impossible for him to speak. It seems analogous to the case where people are killed because they're in a big crowd where everyone is squeezed into a tiny space.
Imo it's too simple a ruleset you've got here, though I get why we want to do this because in the end what we're all trying to do is find out how we could write down something enforceable, like a TOS or law. Those things can't be very vague... Sort of. Laws seem to allow for some discretion on the part of the justice system.
Anyway to me it's similar to saying "violence is bad," yet we probably both believe people should be allowed to emoloy violence when violence is being done to them.
I think similarly applies to hate speech. If a nazi shows up to campus to deliver their message of hate, it's ethical to drown them out and prevent any spread of the hateful message.
"But both sides but hypocrisy but free speech"
Imo tolerance is not a universal ethical position but instead a peace treaty. Peace treaties should not be suicidal. If you make a peace treaty with someone and they attack, you should abandon the treaty.
Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence. They don't have a place in civil society, civil society should not allow this sort of speech or behavior in it. Someone who is saying these sorts of things is telling you clear as day that they don't tolerate some part of you. So why should you tolerate them? They've abandoned the treaty.
What that doesn't mean is that civil society should go out of their way to hunt and kill anybody that likes to say slurs: that's the opposite of a peace treaty. More like they should be rejected utterly from participating until they're willing to again subscribe to a peace treaty (by being civil, not attacking people).
Deplatforming vocal racists is thus ethical. Their language is attack on civility and our ability to maintain peaceful society.
>Anyway to me it's similar to saying "violence is bad," yet we probably both believe people should be allowed to emoloy violence when violence is being done to them.
Yep, there's an important parallel.
I think a good frame is "protected speech". If someone says something to try & intimidate you, and you respond by trying to intimidate them, then nothing said by either party should be considered "protected" -- Twitter admins should feel free to delete the entire exchange.
I don't think a policy of "intimidating speech for self-defense is protected" is workable, because people will intimidate others and claim it was in response to something the person said to intimidate them, and adjudicating such claims gets messy. If you want to say something nasty to someone else because they were nasty to you, go ahead. Just don't expect your rejoinder to be protected.
>Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence.
I don't think we should use the word "violence" this way, because reserving the word "violence" for physical harm helps us avoid upward spirals of antagonism.
It's good if a conflict stays in the realm of words and doesn't go beyond that. Calling speech "violence" blurs the boundary between those domains.
Chain of effect - using words to call for someone's beheading is surely making them complicit in the physical harm that follows, particularly if the person is a figurehead that can feasibly assume their requests will be followed out.
Thus we grant that there's at least one case where speech could be considered violence, can we not consider others that might be involved in causal chains of physical harm?
The general air of racist rhetoric in the usa meant that black people were effectively dehumanized which meant that calls for lynching led to actual lynchings. With this context I feel it's reasonable to call the use of a racial slur, "violence". I should hope it's obvious I don't believe it's as harmful a form of violence as physically harming someone. We use the word violence to describe many remarkably different in nature things, so I don't think we risk devaluing the word.
>Thus we grant that there's at least one case where speech could be considered violence, can we not consider others that might be involved in causal chains of physical harm?
As a reductio ad absurdum, suppose you and I are medical researchers. We're trying to figure out the best way to treat Disease D. You favor Treatment A, I favor Treatment B. We participate in a public debate defending our respective preferences. Suppose as more data comes in, it becomes abundantly obvious that Treatment B works way better, and Treatment A actually exacerbates Disease D. I acknowledge that reasonable people could've favored Treatment A at the time we had our debate, and you acknowledge that the new data favors Treatment B. Nonetheless, some people in the audience of our debate felt you were persuasive, used Treatment A on their patients, and their patients died. Does that make you a murderer?
The scenario can be progressively modified: Maybe there was recent research showing Treatment B worsens Disease D, but you hadn't read it yet. Maybe you made a mistake in your statistical calculations. Maybe we decide you are a murderer, in which case no one wants to debate medical questions anymore lest they be declared a murderer, and the medical field languishes instead of developing new best practices.
>I should hope it's obvious I don't believe it's as harmful a form of violence as physically harming someone.
To play devil's advocate -- it wasn't obvious to me, and I think people with less context will find it even less obvious. So from the exact point of view you're arguing for -- creating a causal chain to physical harm -- I'd say overusing the word "violence" does have the potential to create harm, through the escalation of antagonism as I described previously.
(BTW, although I think you're mistaken about the use of the word "violence", I would consider your claim to be protected speech, and don't think censorship of your claim is justified -- e.g. if the HN moderator stepped in and deleted your comment, I'd call that an overreach.)
>We use the word violence to describe many remarkably different in nature things
Would you describe the gassing and burning of humans in the Holocaust as violence? Would you describe Will Smith slapping Chris Rock as violence? I think of those as almost unimaginably different in nature, but both forms of violence. The gap between a racial slur as violence, and Will Smith's slap as violence, is mundane in comparison. What do you think?
> , in which case no one wants to debate medical questions anymore lest they be declared a murderer, and the medical field languishes instead of developing new best practices.
In your example isn't the question going to be less "why did doctor X and Doctor Y hold positions they had in some debate" and more "Why wasn't it abundantly clear to all that T-A exacerbates D-D to the point of killing patients?" I don't think in this scenario the speech would be at issue at all... I'm trying to participate in good faith by encompassing the entire metaphor but I'm just stuck on that basically. Is this a real world example you're paraphrasing? I'd like to read about it. I mean it strikes me as far-fetched that one could be well researched enough on a medical subject but ignorant of a recent study that shows the opposite of your conclusions; I guess I've seen it in the financial world when a smug CEO is told during a press conference that their stock is crashing. In science, surely one has the option of simply retracting your statements? I just don't see the violence there.
> I'd say overusing the word "violence" does have the potential to create harm, through the escalation of antagonism as I described previously.
Well, context, I don't believe violence is inherently bad, in many forms. Elsewhere I note that tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. If the Proud Boys show up to town so as to kick around protestors, I believe it's ethical to use physical violence in return. The point for me is to show that the intent of racists is to do violence, they're normalizing the dehumanization, they're working towards their goal of physical forms of violence, and it should be seen as such and met as such. "But if you never lynch, where's the violence? These Proud Boys don't want black people killed, just the races separate! Peace, at last." Segregation required violence to enforce - the violence was there in the rare times black students tried to enter white schools, or use white water fountains etc. Just because most "complied" doesn't mean the violent enforcement structure isn't in place. Though reading that you're probably throwing your hands up, "everything is violence then!" No, just more things than I think people acknowledge readily.
> (BTW, although I think you're mistaken about the use of the word "violence", I would consider your claim to be protected speech, and don't think censorship of your claim is justified -- e.g. if the HN moderator stepped in and deleted your comment, I'd call that an overreach.)
I mean, I would be very confused if either of our comments got deleted, we're not violating the TOS and from my own value standpoint neither of us are trying to do harm.
Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence. They don't have a place in civil society, civil society should not allow this sort of speech or behavior in it.
I agree with your first argument but not your second. Yes, it's a form of attack. But rather than saying it is simply never allowed (which could be used by politicians to punish criticism) I argue that that the freedom to attack goes both ways and that people should be allowed to exercise self-defense rather than the issue being ceded to some monopolistic higher authority.
Can you give an example of harmful speech that doesn't also intimidate? I think most speech intended to harm also ends up intimidating people, but there are probably exceptions that aren't coming to mind.
An extremist discussion board, say dedicated to harming some other group. They may have no interest in advertising their plans, their speech is used to coordinate attacks.
I think that counts as conspiracy to commit a crime, so it's already covered in the criminal code? I'm focused on trying to develop speech norms for speech that's not a crime. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998327
Also: libel. It does harm, to the point that damages can be awarded, but it's not necessarily meant to intimidate the target, just to misinform others about the target.
Yeah, there’s always a pretext. That’s the point. It’s easy to say “I’d only ban speech that violates the law!” when someone else is running the show. But when you’re in charge and reality hits, well, of course posting someone’s location doesn’t count as free speech!
And so on and so forth. It happened with parody, it’s happening with this and it’ll happen with something else in the future. No one comes out and says “actually, I don’t support free speech anymore.” They just keep moving the goalposts. Which would be fine, except people keep trying to tell me they don’t exist.
From a legal perspective it definitely is in the US at least (unless it's pretty clear that you are calling for immanent action to be taken against the person you're doxing). Still a dick move, and probably illegal in a lot of other countries.
Reposting public information that is broadcast to the public in real time and required by law to be public while operating an airplane in the public airspace isn't doxxing.
How come this is only an issue now that Musk is throwing a tantrum? It's not like his situation is unique, the location data of every aircraft is broadcast and published in the same manner.
Elon Musk, within the last hour, sent out a request for a person to be doxxed with a video of someone's license plate and face. This is not a principled policy.
This is also rampant in US political discourse and action.
The minute someone gets shot on a congressional baseball outing, shit hits the fan. A few school children get shot every few months...thoughts and prayers.
"Free Speech Absolutism" is just another conservative boondoggle that they can endlessly talk about to attract voters.
Of course actually trying to put it in practice immediately falls apart, but that's not the point.
Nobody on the malicious side of the "malicious or stupid?" scale actually wants everyone to have unfettered freedom of speech (see: republican outrage at LGBTQ rights, people teaching/learning about systemic racism ('CRT'), drag queen story time, republican school districts banning books for some recent examples). They just want to be able to cry "muh free speech" to silence criticism of anything they say.
>people teaching/learning about systemic racism ('CRT')
This is less of a free speech issue, and more of a "what should government employees be paid to do" issue.
It's the difference between a gutter punk wearing a swastika, and a cop on duty wearing a swastika. The constitution prohibits the government from making a law regarding the gutter punk. But while the cop is on duty, they're an employee of the state, and it's perfectly reasonable for voters to say "we don't want to pay government employees to do that".
It’s a fair point. Systemic racism by police is a real thing, and the culture of silence and borderline extortionate tactics employed by police unions make it hard to change. Voters can say we don’t want to pay for that kind of institutional bad behavior. . . But all too often what we want doesn’t matter.
You assume I'm a conservative trying to "own" someone the second I say something you don't like. I was just trying to demonstrate how vacuous, lazy and generic the original statement was that it can be easily turned on its head while maintaining the same level of impact and truth.
I am not really sure what facts have transpired aside from people being outraged and having political opinions.
As I understand it...?
A) A guy who has a bot that shares public information on Twitter has been banned, sounds like that is free speech being suppressed, not that Twitter is under any obligation to support free speech, as we have been reminded many many times by people who wanted to suppress other speech
B) There is a different guy (?) who allegedly obstructed a vehicle containing Elon Musk's child and climbed on its hood, is this a speech issue? Or assault? Asking that question mostly in earnest
If someone hoards the attention of millions of people, of course that person will have problems when a tiny fraction of these millions of people inevitably exert their free speech.
Is the solution to ban free speech or to stop hoarding the attention of millions of people?
There are two sides to every coin.
I am not taking a stance but lately I have notice more and more how regarding a few matters that I used to think were black and white, there are good arguments on both sides.
Deciding on one vs another often comes to what is perceived the most pressing matter at the moment. The long term consequences are often not taken enough into consideration.
> Many people have been trying to get the point across that legal, unlimited free speech can put people in harm's way.
It would appear, based on empirical evidence, that in practice everyone agrees with this point. That may count as mission success for those many people.
Was free speech absolutism ever something Musk put on the table? The issue that Musk is addressing is Twitter's systemic suppression of right-wing political speech.
Isn't he suing the person behind the tracking thing? Musk thinks this is against the law, so he isn't being inconsistent with that tweet.
But even if he was, one tweet isn't really much of a commitment. People throw out tweets they don't mean all the time. 140 characters isn't enough to lay out an ideological position. Running a company like twitter is a bit more serious - they can't moderate just based on interpretations of what Elon tweets. And they were never going to.
Although if he was committing to keeping the plane account around he is definitely didn't think that through.
> Isn't he suing the person behind the tracking thing? Musk thinks this is against the law, so he isn't being inconsistent with that tweet.
You can sue anyone for anything. If you're going to say that only illegal things don't belong, you should wait for the legal system to produce a judgment.
> But even if he was, one tweet isn't really much of a commitment. People throw out tweets they don't mean all the time.
He's said it multiple times. If you don't mean it, how about you just don't say it?
> Running a company like twitter is a bit more serious - they can't moderate just based on interpretations of what Elon tweets. And they were never going to.
Except so far that's exactly what is happening. Musk promised "free speech", so far everything indicates that in reality what we get is "Elon rules". In the end it's simply about what he wants, nothing more.
Mind, I fully agree he's got the right to do anything he wants. It's his site now. I'm just pointing out the inconsistency.
Streisand effect refutes this, especially for a famous person very overtly banning something.
There is no gain from censorship besides a limited set of cases, most of which are illegal but obviously some cases beyond that. Still very very far from the level of censorship being pushed by the Reddit/Twitter crowd these days (‘misinformation’ being bannable is a cancer on society).
It's a private company, they can do whatever they so wished.
And as a non-US citizen, I don't care one iota about where the US billionaires are flying, for better or for worse those US billionaires don't influence my life too much. But I do care about censorship when it comes to US politics because those US politicians decide about the status of big boom-boom military stuff in my country, stuff that is employed in killing people (this recent video [1] was filmed about 20 km from the town where I grew up as a kid). The latest Twitter seems to really have changed its stance when it comes to fighting censorship in US politics. As such, I applaud Musk on this.
Rather hilarious watching how Ella Irwin and her team is making up rules with the sole purpose of pleasing the whims Elon and failing at their actual job - in this job market can see why they stuck around.
I am sure Parler/Gab will hire them in the future.
They didn't "fall back" to Facebook. ElonJet has been on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and Truth Social this entire time. And as of 7 hours ago Mastodon.social as well. [1]
Elon has lost the plot. He will end up disliked or hated by all sides -- he's alienated the left by embracing right wing narratives, and he will alienate the right by being wishy washy on things like free speech. They might rationalize him as the lesser evil, but deep down they will turn on him, and it will eventually surface.
And it's obvious to everybody that the actual complaint was never about the lack of free speech, but who got to control the speech. And by proxy, the issue with things like cancel culture is not that it exists, but that people that used to get canceled are now canceling the other side.
Indeed, airwaves in the US are public, and the FCC allocates spectrum to transmitters. But there's no law blocking who is allowed to listen on a given frequency. Read up on the Radio Act of 1927 for rationale. See also Executive Order 13642, "Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information".
I don't quite understand why everybody is ok with doxxing being something we should avoid because of the harm it can cause, yet everybody seems to be "hey what about free speech" when publishing peoples live locations like it isn't a safety issue.
There are instagrammers that were robbed due to promoting theur live locations which they no longer do. Why the weird double standard from an honest attempt to let people speak freely, yet also preserve people's safety (even if it is a self interest)?
LibsofTikTok are doing it but not getting banned. My problem with Elon's decision is he's only banning people providing his information. He doesn't care about anyone else just himself.
It will be interesting to see if republishing public available data does count as aiding in the doxing. I don't think so. His doesn't profit or calls for doxing on the account.
According to mlinder's comment below, Jack is doing a bit more that isn't public.
> This confuses the issue though. ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement and if an aircraft was going to takeoff that had an unknown ICAO number he'd have someone at the airport to figure out it was Elon's jet that had changed it's ICAO number.
IMHO Elon is causing controversy to keep Twitter relevant. Amongst his many skills, he's a showman. Every little thing he tweets gets amplified by the media and places like HN. He needs activity to maintain relwvance and revenue. He's also become a diety of sorts for conservatives and IMHO likely trying to pull them back in after they left Twitter for other sites, or even for good.
You see a skilled showman. I see a petty billionaire hell bent on pushing through his way whilst trying hard to sell us on him being a good guy. And I'm not buying it.
Anyone know how much of a headache it would be to just lease an aircraft short term for these kinds of flights to avoid having a specific jet tied to his identity?
I'm assuming it's a logistical issue more than a financial one, or else more people would do it. (or private jetters can't abide to not have their own aircraft, always available and set up the way they like it)
Remember that Elon is powered by attention so you have to be critical of everything he says. Who knows if there was actually a stalker? Was Elon really targeted or was it just random? Could have been some homeless guy trying to clean the windows.
The elonjet thing has been an annoyance to Elon for a long time, now that he owns the company he can force the guy onto another platform - and fuel the attention engine in the process.
I think it’s as simple as that - not the grand commentary on free speech that people are trying to transform it into.
Considering how much newspaper and magazine space is consumed by Elon related materials, I think his carbon footprint is actually pretty awful. Giving Elon attention often costs billions of dollars so the price per watt is very high.
Is he afraid of a stalker following him in a plane? He uses this as an excuse, then discredits himself by going on to threaten legal action against Sweeney. Wants it both ways.
Knowing when/where a private plane lands makes it a lot easier to stalk the passengers of that plane.
This is of course entirely separate from whether such info was used against Musk or his family, or whether such a possibility is sufficient grounds for attempting to silence those who make it easily accessible (it's still accessible thanks to ADS-B for anyone with basic technical skills and cares enough).
Conclusion: if you are concerned about stalkers do not use private planes. Because that information is out there anyway and closing the one account on Twitter is definitely not going to stop any determined stalker.
Step 2. Copy one of the tail numbers from the first result: “N628TS, N272BG, N502SX”
Step 3. Paste one of the tail numbers into any one of the flight tracker apps.
If your stalkers can’t even figure that out, you don’t have to worry about them. Otherwise… it’ll take them an extra 45 seconds compared to finding the ElonJet twitter account.
Yes, note that I did not justify banning the twitter account in question and pointed out that it was hardly a leap to get the info even if they banned that account.
I was simply replying to a comment that inferred the only way flight info was useful for a stalker was if you planned on stalking them in another plane... which is obviously incorrect.
The first blocks it from showing up on sites like flightradar24 which filters out LADD aircraft.
The second makes it so you can't go from tail number to tracking the aircraft once the ICAO has changed and ADSB Exchange doesn't manually update their database of which pseudonymous ICAO numbers are connected to which tail numbers.
ADS-B allows planes to track each other during flight so they don’t crash into each other. It is public because that’s the point: to broadcast their location publicly.
All those FAA rules do is mask it in their own public data set that they make available. Anyone with their own data set (aka an SDR at SMO if they’re trying to stalk Musk) like ADSBExchange is not required to mask that data and any law trying force them would run afoul of the first amendment and compromise aviation, since ADS-B makes flight safer for hundreds of thousands of pilots.
However on your second point you seem to be confusing two different things. There's two different systems that you're lumping together as one. The one you're talking about is LADD. Discussed here: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
FAA even caveats themselves:
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
Now to your point, you're incorrect. PIA, as mentioned in that quote by the FAA, literally changes the aircraft's ICAO number to a new number and delists it from public registries. Using an SDR or the data from ADSB Exchange only gets you that psuedonomynous ID. Once that's changed again you have to stalk someone by following them to the airport and align the takeoff time of when you know they left with the new ICAO number. That's the ethically/morally/legally quesitonable aspect about all of this.
> In order to mitigate these concerns, FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO aircraft address program with the objective of improving the privacy of aircraft operators in today's ADS-B environment by limiting the extent to which the aircraft can be quickly and easily identified by non-U.S. government entities, while ensuring there is no adverse effect on ATC services.
Thank you for the link, I wasn’t aware that PIA allowed spoofing the identifier.
Maaaybe it’s more ethically/morally questionable [1] but I don’t think it’s a legal issue. Reading more on the PIA, it still require the owner to have their own operational security. Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
[1] or in this case Musk’s actions on Twitter are less ethically/morally/legally questionable?
I mention legal as in some jurisdictions stalking is illegal which this may fall under. I am not a lawyer though, so I only give it as an open question that I myself have.
> Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
That's true, but that falls into the stalking or doxxing category and Twitter already had long standing terms of service statements against doxxing, even before Elon bought Twitter, even if it's not illegal (which I still have open questions about).
I definitely see your point, I’d be consulting a bunch of lawyers if I were Sweeney just to be sure. California’s (cyber)stalking/harassment laws are pretty specific on what constitutes doxxing and stalking, though. For the sake of this conversation between laymen, I just don’t see it.
Musk can do whatever he wants on twitter and IANAL so what do I know, but between the public interest argument and the public availability of the information, I don’t think Musk has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That said, anyone using the information to follow him around or harass him is liable to get prosecuted.
Bernard Arnault (the new richest person in the world, and head of LVMH group) gave up his personal private jet to avoid this kind of tracking. Elon Musk can too if he wants to avoid the scrutiny.
Yes, he's not about to fly commercial first class like one of the poors. He just has a better sense of opsec than Elon Musk, and a desire to stay out of the spotlight.
So posting where it was yesterday would not violate the guidelines, assuming Elon, excuse the typo, I mean: someone, doesn't stay in the airport the whole day.
He sure wasn't concerned with publishing real time information 6 weeks ago when he staged that cringe-worthy PR stunt of himself parading around the Twitter office lobby with a porcelain sink:
I've noticed this lately as well. I think it is to be expected, Reddit is getting worst and worst every year, people are leaving Twitter etc. and they are all looking for alternatives.
I really hope HN can steer away from the classic narration of a great place getting too popular to sustain the quality.
As an asside to this, I'm surprised Elons using a Gulfstream G650ER. Given how much time he seems to spend in the air you'd have thought he'd want something a bit bigger with bedroom and shower facilities.
Why is this topic dominating HN?? It's just a private website enforcing its own made up rules. They can do whatever they like, ban whoever they don't like. If you have a problem with it make your own Twitter.
Hundreds of millions of people use it. That something happens to be under some control of private interests, doesn't make it necessarily a private thing.
To the extent that something is in the commons, well it's public. At least newsworthy and much more.
The Federal Reserve is privately owned but we don't treat it like some rando llc.
Your are confusing 'legal ownership of assets' with control, influence and power.
It's difficult because the former perspective is more formal than the later, but really, it's not at all.
In 1900 if your home was burning down, the firemen would only come if you paid a specific firehouse for insurance. If they were fighting a different fire, or if you didn't pay - then your place burns down. Even if all the firefighters are doing nothing. And your house will probably cause a bunch of other fires, creating viral destruction.
Obviously this is completely stupid. So we socialized it, and even with 'government inefficiencies' it still has better outcomes than the former scenario.
TikTok is a 'private company' until we decide it's not.
There are externalizes in everything.
If you want multi-generational asset permanence, you can stick to property ownership.
Very sure that I've seen the same statement made before the Twitter takeover that it being a private platform and they can do whatever they like, add and enforce whatever rules in their TOS they like and ban whoever they like as long as long it is legal. It is still true now and it always has been for Twitter.
If anyone doesn't like the bans on impersonators, unlabelled bots, real time live location trackers and the now removed illegal CP and child exploitation images being posted on Twitter which stayed their for years on Twitter before the takeover, they can indeed build their own federated Twitter to post all of that garbage.
Twitter has always been a cesspool and the people screaming here about it should have left Twitter years ago; before Musk, instead of tolerating the garbage that proliferated on the site.
If you wish to keep tracking noted free speech absolutist (and owner of famously thick skin) Elon Musk's private jet you can do that on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
Could this all be part of the plan? If he appears to be going against his own principles and publicly embarrassing himself, it strengthens his detractors -- perhaps setting them up for a fall?
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok."
This seems like a reasonable policy to me, especially when involving stalking well-known people (as opposed to taking a selfie with my mates at Micky D).
The problem is, that Elon very publicly and explicitly promised that @ElonJet would be allowed to continue as it is. His words mean less and less…
Such a slipper slope for a guy who announce during TED talk, he is okay with all freedom of speech and leave it to government to decide aka if something is illegal then it should not be under free speech.
It is 24 hours now... what about in the future breaking news at Musk conference will require 10 years space.
Also the whole idea of doxing him... is he special or not? Otherwise we should not track anyone's flying info... but then government keeps this data open. Funny, the government turned out to give you more freedom of speech than a private company!
This account didn't track a flight of a plane but Elon Musks movement. That purpose of registration numbers (and ADS-B) is helping air traffic control and general safety. Not surveillance of personal movement. The same accounts for license plates of cars.
If Twitter want to do something useful they should reconsider their own standards regarding privacy in general.
They missed the 'Boss someone did something that is ok by all of our rules, in fact the ones that you yourself set and publicly announced but that are probably going to upset you'.
As the once-upon-a-time moderator of a very large website this list reads all too familiar. Thanks for posting it!
Part of why he's now hated by a lot of people is that he's saying things like "free speech" rather than "ban all T Man all places!" It's oddly connected. I'm sure Kanye will show up in this battle of the moneymen at some point.
whether this policy is good or not this is going to hurt Elon because he went back on his word. however, isn't this kind of doxxing why kiwifarms got banned from the internet?
"My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk" - Elon Musk, Nov 6, 2022
In principle we would turn off the user flags and software penalties, but the thread quality is so wretched that I see no upside. I'm shocked, and I don't shock easily after 10 years of this.
Those two things are unrelated. Discussion that breaks the HN guidelines is destructive, whether or not it's tech related, because it pushes HN in the direction of going down in flames. Preventing that from happening is the #1 job we have.
Arguably the default fate of internet forums is to eventually burn out and become scorched earth, but the idea of HN from the beginning has been to stave that off for as long as we can.
legal asked us to ban it again after they learned elon's goal.
which was to shadownban-2.0 the account when needed to delay news of certain travel. he came up with the idea when we pointed out other smaller accounts started to post the info and we were considering flagging them as bot last week.
When he is crowing with #TwitterFiles faux leaks about how an internal cabal were making policy decisions about banning people, then making an extra-policy decision banning something he didn't like (posting public information) and then trying to backport policy for it.. The whole thing rings a bit hollow.
You've been posting a lot of comments lately using HN for ideological battle. We ban this sort of account, regardless of what they're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Besides that, someone has pointed out to me that your username is trollish (yes, I'm slow sometimes). We don't allow that - see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Between that and your comments that have been breaking the rules, that's too much. I've therefore banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Serious question: Why is a home address considered off limits? For most people, you can find their home address with 5 minutes of Googling. For someone like me, and I imagine the average HN reader, that time is more like 5 seconds. Your address is not usually considered private information, except in this context.
We used to have a thing called the phone book that put everyone's name, phone number, and address together in a book and sent it out. None of those is a piece of private information.
jacquesm didn't decided to be public figure who owns a jet, and no one asked Elon to do the same. Elon is free to walk away from it the moment he chooses to be.
So why are his haters still so angry? They are against free speech and supported the right for a private company to moderate how it wants. That's what they've been saying the past several years. Elon has come around to their position!
I am looking out for you, yes, little guy. Point is I am skeptical as to whether that individual has any actual insight. Then again, making a different account to post that one message may make sense since it is sensitive info. Sounds incorrect either way.
That does not sound unreasonable to me at all. In other words, the idea that some posts might warrant a delay for a range of issues or to allow for investigation. That, to me, again, sounds very sensible.
In the case of the travel plans of certain high-profile people, you know, with so many crazy folks out there, yes, sure, give the news enough of a delay so the person can safely get to their destination. The world doesn't need to know when Elon, Messi, Buttigieg, Oprah or David Letterman in real time unless they choose to disclose details.
This is complete idiocy. Celebrities and billionaires don't get special speech rights. There are very good reasons all aircraft are tracked publicly. If Elmo's plane ever goes down or gets hijacked he might appreciate why. According to Twitter's new "policy" any person who takes a picture of someone in front of the Eiffel tower or any recognizable place can be accused of doxxing and banned.
I think calling someone an idiot is against HN policy...but, what do I know, I am obviously an idiot.
That said. OK, well, let's publish everyone's travel plans. Name, flight, seat, from/to, etc. Make the system 100% open to for anyone to see who is travelling, where and when.
You know, so folks profiting from breaking into homes while people are travelling can be more efficient in their scheduling.
In our neighborhood we've had a few cases of homes being burglarized when people travelled out of town and posted about it on Facebook. Lots of people are not aware that they might be posting to the entire universe. Those wonderful pictures of your vacation in Hawaii let smart crooks know you are not home in Los Angeles.
I am 100% certain everyone would be against their personal, family and business travel itineraries being posted in a publicly accessible website or database in real time. Understandably so. Why, then, is it to that this is OK for those who might be obvious targets of violence and other potentially negative outcomes?
One argument I saw in this thread is about not creating special rules for a small group of people. Fine with that. Let's publish everyone's travel plans then. Or, on the other hand, have the common sense to understand that personal safety is important to everyone and move to make posting such information illegal and protect everyone, no matter their station in life.
I get it that on HN there exist a subgroup of people who are millionaire/billionaire haters. Good for you! Enjoy the hatred. That group aside, once common sense enters the room, it is generally clear that privacy is good for everyone, regardless of who they might be.
As much as I dislike politicians, this should also extend to them. Yes, of course, their travel details should be released and made available for all to review. However, this can be done well after the fact.
Surely you can see that there's a difference between a billionaire who can hire private security and the common person? A billionaire's house cannot be broken into because that house is in a gated community with private security. Even at the airport, a chartered car with a personal driver and security is likely coming to meet Elon.
This is the definition of concern trolling on Elon's part, and you're carrying water for his bad faith arguments in favor of restricting the republishing of information that is free and open to the public by design. I don't think you even really understand the implications of what you're saying.
I hope you are joking. The husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the third person in line for the presidency of the United States, was brutally attacked in his own home with a hammer. A billionaire cannot possibly buy better security and resources than the US Secret Service and local police combined.
I don't understand hatred based on financial standing.
However, I do not think this is the real motivation in Musk's case. I can see people hating on Musk these days because he is uncovering just how deep and wide one political party has reached in the United States in order to control the media and messaging. Something that Putin and totalitarian regimes have done for ages in other nations has been achieved in the US by brainwashing people at universities and then asking them to restrict or reshape the message in favor of that ideology.
Anyone who does not think this is revolting and should not exist in the US should take a moment to imagine a scenario where the same level of indoctrination and control would be had by the other party. This would be just as revolting and just as undesirable. Universities should not be centers of indoctrination. Political parties should not have any control on what the public can and cannot hear. That's a formula for progress, not one where one or the other party can exercise ideological control.
> I don't think you even really understand the implications of what you're saying.
I don't think you have taken a single minute to explain what you think the implications might be.
Interestingly enough, I am arguing in favor of privacy/security for all. You seem to be saying that someone with money does not deserve it. Why?
The Pelosi case is under a lot of public scrutiny precisely because it is nonsensical that the husband of the speaker of the house could have someone just waltz into their home and attack him. Unfortunately the narratives around the attack have been censored or tamped down and we may never know what happened.
But there is still an order of magnitude difference between Pelosi and the wealth of someone who can afford to own and fly their own superjet. That you don’t believe better security can be had does not mean it does not exist, it does.
I think you’re revealing your ideological biases. The Twitter files did not just contain information about censorship by the democrats. The Trump White House was also heavily implicated. That is not the partisan issue that you want it to be. Instead, perhaps the liberal ire towards Elon could come from the fact that he is catering towards the right?
As far as public safety goes, it’s ultimately moot. If you choose to own your own plane and fly it using public infrastructure paid for with US tax dollars, you have no expectation of that data being private. Reporting that data is protected by the first amendment, which of course doesn’t apply to posts on Twitter, a private company. Someone who wants privacy should choose to travel via other means, it’s really that simple. Flying via your own private jet is not a constitutionally protected right, it’s a privilege that is subject to the terms and regulations of the United States of America and it’s regulatory bodies. And arguing that we should change the rules for the ultra rich is an absolutely tyrannical prospect, lord knows we do it enough already.
> That you don’t believe better security can be had does not mean it does not exist, it does.
Did you read about Musk's kid being stalked by someone who ended-up threatening him and jumping on the car?
How do you feel about that? It's OK because the guy is rich? C'mon.
> I think you’re revealing your ideological biases.
Happy to spell it out: I am a Classical Liberal. I detest what both Democrats and Republicans (the parties, not the drones who follow them blindly) have become. I also understand that the extreme left and right have cause more destruction around the world and across time than one could probably list.
Today, in the US, we are in the grips of the extreme left. And that's a problem. They tyranny, today, in the US, is coming from the left.
Our universities have become extreme left indoctrination centers. Our media is brutally dominated by the left. Our social media and internet companies, same (I forget the number, something like 96% to 98% of those employed by places like Twitter, FB and Google donated to the Democratic party?). Etc.
The narrative and the "news" people are exposed to is overwhelmingly controlled by leftist ideology. I have spoken to people who only watch networks like CNN. As an example, they have no clue whatsoever what is going on at our southern border, none at all.
This is a formula for disaster. And, yes, I would be saying exactly the same thing if the dominance belonged to the right. Neither one is good for a society. History has proven this time and time again.
I mean, the left claims to be for women's rights and the protectors of, well, just about everyone. And yet, we are having a human trafficking crisis at the southern border and EVERYONE on the left is ignoring all of it. In two years, nearly five million people have poured in. Millions of pills of the most dangerous drugs have been smuggled into the country. And human trafficking has grown by leaps and bounds. All we get from the administration is "the border is secure". Really?
This, BTW, is also a historical fact. The way the left works is to claim to solve the problems of all those who (they convince) are oppressed and make enemies of everyone else. If you study the history of pretty much every country in Latin America you will discover patterns that, today, might be familiar to all Americans. One of the problems in the US is that people are not educated well enough to know much about history. That's why this population is so easy to fool.
Look at the minimum wage mess. They promised $15 per hour would solve the problems of millions. This is how they bought these votes. And then gasoline goes from $2 per gallon to $5, $6, $7 per gallon; food prices go up 30% to 100% (our dog food alone doubled in cost). And more. Now $15 per hour is more like $5 per hour. And, on top of that, we let in five million people who will more than likely take minimum wage jobs away from the very people who were promised this new minimum wage would help them.
How much more of this nonsense is it going to take for people who support these politicians to understand they are being played for fools?
What is being uncovered at Twitter is important because the vast majority of Americans have been led to believe none of this was happening. The vast majority of Americans have been the subject of carefully engineered ideologically-driven shaping of the messages. Having the FBI interact at the level they have with Twitter staff (and likely FB and others) IS NOT GOOD FOR SOCIETY.
I always say the same thing: Imagine a scenario where the ideological right had this level of control over universities, social and traditional media. If you think that would be horrible, first, I agree, second, you should be incensed about the fact that the ideological left is in that position today. The fact that riots have broken out at universities when speakers with contrasting viewpoints are invited should have everyone take pause. Again, imagine if the roles were inverted before you opine.
> which of course doesn’t apply to posts on Twitter, a private company
Oh, please, what these people have done is criminal. If not criminal, immoral. If not immoral, unethical. If none of those, it is horrible and detrimental to any society. You don't build progress, harmony and tolerance this way. You build hatred, resentment and destroy a society from the inside-out.
Or they could choose to fly commercial like a destitute multimillionaire. The only reason this information is public is that they literally own the jet and the locations of aircraft in public airspace is required to be broadcast for obvious reasons.
Flying commercial wouldn't gain Musk any anonymity. The second he sets foot in a public airport social media of all forms would be flooded with photos of him, what gate he's waiting at, etc. And that's MUCH worse for Musk because everyone and their uncle can see what gate the flight he boarded is going to disembark at, meaning a crowd of people with less-than-kind intentions would have time to gather there in advance of his arrival.
Aircraft location data cannot be "delayed" for some very obvious public safety reasons. The FAA requires that every aircraft loudly announce itself at all times unless they're on the ground.
I can understand that this information must be real time for aircraft flight control purposes.
Not sure what the laws, requirements or practices say about the entire universe knowing where any aircraft might be in real time. I mean, if a bad guy wanted to aim a SAM at any given aircraft and this data is live and real-time...
Again, I don't know how this works in terms of the law. Opinions don't matter. What's the law?
US civilian aviation rules require that an on-craft transponder emit altitude and location information so that other craft can avoid collisions. Obviously, this makes aircraft more vulnerable to surface to air missiles. Thankfully, that's a vanishingly remote threat, so the FAA has decided that valuing collision avoidance over missile evasion is the correct set of priorities. I don't know how this would work in situations where surface to air missiles are a real threat, but I would guess military aircraft only follow civilian rules when it doesn't compromise their mission.
As far as "the entire universe knowing," I think the relevant legal principle at play is that there's no expectation of privacy associated with flying a private aircraft (for the reasons stated above). Airpsace is a shared, national security-sensitive resource, civilian regulators get to set the rules governing use.
Maybe the argument is or should be about who is on a plane rather than where the plane might be.
Expanding the concept beyond Elon, I personally don't like the idea of anyone being hounded by elements unknown just because of being famous. Do actors have the right to travel with their kids an not be mauled? I think they should have that right.
There seems to be this general idea these days that acting like a complete jerk and without one ounce of civility is now acceptable. Harass people at restaurants, threaten to hurt politicians and their families, stalk actors and celebrities, burn down entire business districts, etc. What the hell is wrong with people?
> Maybe the argument is or should be about who is on a plane rather than where the plane might be.
Well, that's not public information. Private jet owners can loan it out to friends (according to [0], Taylor Swift does this often), and you can't tell from flight plans who will be a passenger (or whether it will be carrying passengers at all).
Just like you dislike people being rude at restaurants, I object to billionaires trying to carve out new kinds of privacy to hide their excesses. Civilian use of the skies requires cooperation and is an act that occurs in public.
Hey remember the last time Musk used a claim about one of his kids to justify an action that against was what he previously said would be his policy? What was that, a week ago?
If your response is that it doesn't qualify, neither does reporting information about his private jet.
The leson here is more general - having a platform should be seen as a big responsibility where great care must be taken to prevent one's actions from having unintended consequences.
Come on, if you didn't notice the unfounded insinuation that a former high-ranking corporate officer at Twitter was really a pedophile and the resultant fallout over the last 72 hours, then you are really not paying attention.
Elon have an army of followers with size of multiple 4chan's and some of them are obviously less stable than others. He is aware of this fact and over years he did not act responsible about it.
Also he is protected by an army of lawyers so he can smoke some weed and tweet that he thinks that you @memish is a pedophile or Hunter Biden friend or MAGA supporter or whatever. And you'll get tons of death treats as result.
He's being inundated with explicit death threats even more than usual, and usual is a lot*. Leaving the Twitter account up, and those like it, but delaying data by 24 hours is a sensible compromise and the policy applies to everyone's physical safety.
No one asked either of them to be public figures. They can go away whenever they want. Their status is not an immutable law of reality and humanity tends to have a history of not giving a toss about being helicoptered by self aggrandizing individuals.
The data is available real time by law elsewhere. He’s not routing around anything, just trying to insulate himself from consequences of his actions, and cement his genius by flailing around like the party drug using, half wit he actually is.
By Elon making the statements that he did against Fauci and claiming he should be prosecuted, by using his bullhorn he instigated the attacks against Fauci. When you are a powerful public speaker it should be that you consider more carefully what you say in public, because you can influence people to make rash judgements.
Compare this situation to when McCain responded to that woman during his presidential campaign who said something along the lines of "Obama is a scary Muslim" and McCain showed himself as a man of true honor, saying "No, he's a good man, loves his family." and maybe said something like [I disagree with him politically but he's not a dangerous threat].
I'm not sure "free speech" equals "data is public", and I'm not sure that the flight tracking data at least for private jets should be made public at all.
Or at least I don't see a difference between private cars location being vs private jet location data being released.
If a certain law or policy instructs you to jump off the roof immediately, would you necessarily do so? Also, technical means (ads-b) and regulations around accessing the data are two different things, no?
Also, why do you have to show that directive agressive tone to me? I didn't do anything bad to you.
I believe the worst thing you can be is a hypocrite. We can disagree about value systems, but if you don’t practice what you preach then I have no reason to respect you.
I don’t care if Twitter decides to allow this kind of information or not, but don’t claim safety and then disregard the safety of others. Don’t claim free speech and then silence speech you don’t like.
Elon is clearly doing what’s best for Elon, and that’s fine too. But I won’t tolerate him pretending he’s doing anything other than putting himself first. And I’ll make my own choices based on that. If I think my interests align with his, I should stick with him. But practically none of our interests align. We don’t share any common problems.
Elon doesn’t think he needs me or anyone else (and he has so much wealth he really doesn’t). I wouldn’t count myself lucky to be in the same lifeboat as him on the off chance he decides I’m dead weight and tosses me overboard.
I find it fascinating that people hate Elon Musk so much that they think he deserves being harassed. Everyone hates the mob that SWATs and doxxes streamers but fully supports the same when it's toward this guy. I feel like I'm in a very small minority for having no special feelings against him.
I don’t have strong opinions on Elon Musk: I’ve heard such contradictory accounts from people with first-hand knowledge that I don’t know what to believe.
Certainly what he’s doing with Twitter looks weird at best to another veteran of the social media business, but I can’t even claim to have put rockets into orbit, so what do I know.
He was known for publicity stunts and deliberately contrarian statements for at least a decade now.
But I think it’s a barometer for the degree to which 1-bit red team / blue team stuff has dominated the public head space that he went from peerless hero to menace to society right around the time he started talking some Trumpy shit.
I’m roughly left of Lenin, so I personally have about zero patience with MAGA shit. But as concerning as MAGA shit is, I find the echo chamber even more worrisome.
I am fully expecting this thread to be swarmed by HN users claiming this is a righteous upholding of principals and Elon Musk is a pure man free of hypocrisy, with only the thickest skin. Wont stop me from being mad about it, though.
Actually, the new policy against live-tweeting people's whereabouts (with the obvious exceptions) and enforcement of a 24h delay would have been pretty easy to defend, had it preceded the account suspension rather than the other way around.
A rule of "don't piss off Elon" is much more honest and easier to follow. It's really not a big deal either, most Twitter use cases don't involve Elon at all -- all it takes is Elon losing face about the free speech thing.
It's trying to be both ban-everything-elon-dislikes while letting Elon claim Twitter is a full free speech zone that makes it entertaining. Trying to make rules around how Elon is feeling that day, and probably how high he is at the time of the pronouncement is always going to make for ridiculous results
But it was clearly a last minute deal with no accounting for things like talking about public speakers, concerts. And talking about such things is a big part of what reporters do. So now they can add and judge who is a legitimate journalist. It opens up entire new cans of worms.
Aren't the public govt data feeds of the actions of notable public figures public events? Define public event? If I see him going into safeway to buy some cheetos is that public?
Let's be honest - he owns the company and he have every right to do whatever he want with it including burning it all to the ground. So he could just ban that account to begin with and everyone would just learn that Twitter is now his private fan club.
Instead he given some empty promises about "being free speech absolutist" and "not banning account that track his private jet" just to do exactly that shortly after. It's hypocrisy and he should pay dearly for that with what reputation he still have.
The problem he's going to have to contend with is that you can't be a partial free speech absolutist, especially not when all the exceptions have to do with your own person. It puts the lie to most of his statements on the subject so far. Not that there was any doubt.
Seems to me that the reputational damage comes from the amount of money these flights cost and their carbon footprint. That part would be difficult to defend someone wanting to hide.
The information is out there already, but this practice goes a step further by shining a spotlight on a person (and their children's) locations.
People would have a different attitude if this guy's niche was live tweeting female celebrity's locations instead of billionaires.
In todays geopolitcal situation flight over US soil with transponder off will end rather shortly I guess. Fortunately for us rules for getting pilot license are rather strict.
Elonjet was marked as automatic bot account. Both the bot and Sweeneys accounts were suspended. After updating the location policy Elonjet was unbanned.
However, Sweeney started using elonjet bot account to tweet his non-bot stuff and it got banned. I assume ban is for incorrect use of account or getting around his personal ban.
It's a private space. He can do what he likes. We draw conclusions about what we think, but thats going to good-or-bad justified-or-unjustified consistent-or-inconsistent as matters of opinion.
I note that he said he wanted a space with less constraint. He said it quite simply and directly. He's capable of both changing his mind, and in believing this is consistent, and in not caring either way.
I left twitter some time ago. Long before Musk's offer to buy kicked in. I think this is a fight amongst people I have little in common with.
This isn't really a "who cares" post because it is interesting. And arguably important. Mostly it's importance goes to the problem that Musk is now overtly in Politics, and has declared his non-neutrality in the US domestic political sphere. If he hadn't done that, I think there would be little more to remark on here than when Jack Dorsey did mildly irrational things. But a declaration to partisan views in politics changes that somewhat: he has control of a massive media machine in a politically charged context.
It is theoretically possible the FTC and the FCC both are looking at this wondering what (if anything) they can or should do. I suspect its reached a point where neither can, arguably even if they should: they lost the moment of force and the basis of "why" has also become politically charged.
The FTC would only really be driven to act if he imperils US citizens private information or interferes in trade between entities in the public eye, Or if this influences investment decisions to the share value of SpaceX and Tesla assuming there is a public share concern.
The FCC would only be driven by communications law and since Twitter isn't a common carrier or ISP as I understand them and isn't in mobile communications or RF spectrum management spaces, I don't see their role.
He may now have burdens with justice department and warrents to examine logs and data as an ongoing cost of doing business. Not because of what he says but because of the evidentiary status of what Twitter is for other people in the context of the US LEA and justice system.
The EU wants to talk but their legal paths to talk to him about what he is doing to European cultural norms, LEA and related, regulatory, location of data, GDPR whatever else, is pretty complex. And as long as he provides other outcomes like EV for the transition off Gas, and starlink to circumvent ISP monopolies they probably don't want to yank the chain too hard either.
I'm curious where people see Musk in terms of his politics. I see him as center/right-center (U.S) with the occasional right troll post.
The part that I don't like about him taking over Twitter is this:
When he initially took over I was under the impression that he wanted to promote a free-speech platform that is primarily designed for thoughtful dialogue between people. However, I'm not sure the platform will trend towards this when he has so many troll posts (given his influence on the platform).
I think that given its current trajectory the platform in a few months will consist of primarily right-leaning individuals, and far-left individuals who feel it is their duty to constantly debate the right.
I used to believe his brand of libertarianism was an attempt at "neutral right" but the anti-union thing really strongly tilts right. He has since declared publicly he backs a GOP outcome. Given some of whats going on in the GOP that makes it very very hard to put him soft-right because a declaration of preference like that demands questions: what does he think about J6 and what does he think about vote suppression.
His commercial engagements in Europe and Asia (china) do not actually define him politically one way or another. Nor does the starlink/Ukraine thing although I value that immensely as a buffer against destruction of telecommuniations utility functions in Ukraine.
Several respectable US political long-term trends analysis suggest the GOP cannot be used as a "pole" in left-right center discussions unless you accept it has moved significantly rightward on many fundamental matters of civil rights. Views which previously would have been considered untenable have become normalised, and the overton window has shifted. It used to be the overlap in right DNC and left GOP was strong. It's no longer the case.
I am of course Partisan in this. I don't believe the shift has been a "both sides" thing. But others might disagree.
TL;DR what makes you right leaning now, puts you very firmly right in any 10+ year analysis of what "right" side is.
I should also be clear I am neither a US voter nor US citizen or resident so my views may count for significantly less no matter what.
My gut feeling (as a U.S resident) is that there has been a shift on both sides, but the overall country has moved more towards the left (so the shift on the right has maybe looked more extreme). I also think the overall media has become less trustworthy/more biased in their reporting so if you follow most western msm (which I believe is primarily left leaning) then even some right-center people can begin to look like strictly right (as I believe Elon is being made out to be).
My impression of Elon is that he just doesn't really like the left's 'holier than thou' political correctness (I don't think this meshes well with his corporate personality).
I agree he really doesn't like the largely left leaning media. So we're aligned on that. But his fundamental opposition to unions is different. I don't see the US news as pro-union, its not about the press. Its really down to his own core views.
I found south parks 'smelling their own farts' thing about Cali. prius drivers pretty funny, but that said, I'd rather there were Californians driving EV than not. Its kind of a dual-edged sword. So he hates the PC side of things but he's selling the drugs which feeds them (so to speak) -a rather strange state of affairs.
The burning Coal mob are going to have a cow over the Tesla big rig. I expect more than a few to have truck-nuts, and confederate flags and gun-racks on them.
I'll come back to the 'shift both sides' thing. I cant prove it, so its just opinion. But my gut feel is there has been some leftward tilt in the media overall, fox excluded, if we limit ourselves to news media ex-print, and we exclude the moonies investment, and maybe Bezos.. yea. Its there. But its like 10:1 the rightward/leftward shifts. So its polarized, its not a symmetric movement. The middle being assumed (which btw is a stretch because its divisive if there even IS a middle) then the press moved a bit left and the GOP and the Randean IT dotcom billionaires (Theil..) moved a very very long way right.
Sure, a biassed comment. But it is what I think.
Both D and R do gerrymandered stupid tricks on electoral zones. I don't think they do it equally either. I don't think as many D governors want to replace the electoral college movement with faithless voters they appoint. I could go on, but my underlying point is that there is a core of what the constitution is and means, and there are the things which undermine it, and "both sides" assumes equally both sides: I just don't think its true.
"defund the police" is a very stupid rallying cry. Sure. its a reaction to "blue flag" rightward behaviour in the cops but its alienating the middle ground which leftists need to secure as voters to win. Likewise the independent portland thing. It was fun. Its not helpful to securing national votes to run the country. Actions have consequences and if you believe in burn it down or destroy the joint, left-right is both burning and destroyed at that point. So a lot of comment here assumes maintenance of some perceived status quo politically around voting and state/federal boundaries and the role of taxation.
Historically the D were dirty as. Tammany hall, the carpetbaggers, people forget that was often the D side of things. the R side is not the party of Lincoln right now.
I guess I'm just talking about the movement in the last 10 years or so (I'm not old enough to remember much before that :D). I think the left had a bigger movement left in the Obama years and the right definitely had a bigger movement in the Trump years. Actually now that I think about it - if you're talking talking strictly about the politicians then I do agree that the right has shifted more (almost entirely due to Trump's presidency imo). However, I'm not sure that voters as a whole have shifted as much.
I'v lived in Texas, Minnesota and California (all within the past 10 years), and honestly none of them have lived up to their stereotypes in the media (with maybe the exception of the distrust between the police and black communities in Minnesota).
Sure California is noticeably more left and Texas is noticeably more right, but the people you see on the news are always the right or left most few percent. I think most people in both parties still fall somewhere in the middle (even if the political representatives don't)
Personally I'm a centrist and I'm not really too concerned with right-leaning politics - the reason being is that I think the party produces a lot of noise, but there isn't generally much substance behind it. I usually check right-leaning media just to see what the left-leaning media isn't talking about. Most of it I find to be bs, but sometimes it's worth exploring more.
On the other hand I find the left-leaning media more reliable, however, I also disapprove of the 'holier than thou' mentality behavior that some people have. I think this creates a lot of superficial communication where people fear they can't voice a strong opinion without offending others or being ostracized. I'm also concerned about the left's ability to persuade what I believe is a more educated audience with subtle biased reporting (i.e. smart people trust what they believe is a reliable source so much that they don't question biased conclusions). I also don't think that the left media's message to marginalized groups is that beneficial to those groups - I think at some point it becomes toxic empathy and leads to people have a 'victim' mindset (but I suppose you have to try to appeal to your constituents somehow :/ )
Anyways so far from what I've seen from Elon he seems to fall somewhere in line with that (i.e. occasionally trolling both sides, and never really falling in line with one side or another). I think that his recent actions definitely make it look like he falls inline more with the right (especially in regards to his trolling), but I think that might also have to do with the fact that since the takeover he has been getting deliberately attacked by the left msm. I'd prefer to seem him stabilize and drift back more to the left, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
"It’s likely Musk will turn to Hughes for guidance as the Federal Trade Commission threatens more legal challenges. If the FTC finds that Twitter misled users over privacy protections, that would violate a decade-old consent decree. NYT reported that the FTC has already sent Twitter letters asking how staff cuts have potentially impacted Twitter’s ability to uphold that agreement. Before he was dismissed from advising Twitter, Spiro had previously said that Musk “puts rockets into space” and was “not afraid of the FTC.”
Neither SpaceX nor Twitter immediately responded to Ars’ request to comment."
What this says to me is that the FTC already has a basis to put pressure on Musk, private ownership or not.
Why the weird Elon hate over this? My understanding was that this broke Twitter TOS and that he was leaving it up as a gesture of good faith. If he wants to take it down to keep things consistent across Twitter, why the hate? I know the Elon hate boner on HN is strong but this seems absurd.
A thought experiment would be to wonder if the same people that think it's ok to share "public" knowledge of the location of Elon's jet would agree to the same for Hillary Clinton, Obama, Newsom or Fauci.
I'm genuinely curious how uniformly these beliefs are held, or if it's just a determination that Musk ain't in the club any longer and is considered fair game.
Tracking flights of politicians is most definitely important public knowledge. It's one of the most useful tools to get some insight into what might be going on in the world, like the recent visit to Taiwan, yesterdays visit by Russia to Venezuela, etc.
I love it here. The guy who is building the worlds most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile and military delivery system, should not be upset about his real time location being public.
Like what world are people living in here? It’s amazing elonjet has been public this long. This isn’t just about journalists or stalkers tracking him (and his family) it’s basically a national security issue.
Grow up. The us is in a proxy war with Russia and relations with China are worse by the day.
"Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.
Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family."
Make that what you will.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944