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.
