All: be on whichever side of this saga that you please, but make sure you're following HN's guidelines while posting. There has been a drop in comment quality lately. Not cool.
Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar.
> Update: Musk just weighed in on the suspensions, characterizing them as intentional. “Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else,” he tweeted in a reply.
> It’s worth noting that the policy these accounts violated, a prohibition against sharing “live location information,” is only 24 hours old.
It seems like a good rule, but in this case the application of the rule seems less impersonal than it could be
Let’s try to make a comment that creates less outrage than most…
This is why it would be interesting to post public information about politicians collected from the online spyware that tracks all of us. It would rapidly motivate new laws that at least somewhat improve privacy.
This always happens when rule makers are personally affected by a problem: the problem starts getting attention
I don't know - it doesn't seem consistently applied Donie O’Sullivan published a tweet containing a statement from the LAPD and was banned; and personally I don't see it being upheld once Elon's fixation on this story wanes.
Furthermore, it just seems that Elon is doing what he accused Twitter of doing for so long; enacting arbitrary rules to silence political opponents. It's his site and he's free to ban who he wants but does he see the cognitive dissonance of how he's running the site?
Was it capriciously banning journalists that said anything the CEO found offensive? That’s what he’s doing, and I really, really don’t think that’s what twitter was doing.
It's also worth noting that revealing real names and workplaces of anonymous accounts is still allowed. The doxxing that is banned is a specific class of doxxing that isn't often considered to be doxxing.
That's probably true for everything about how he runs Twitter. It's his personal platform now, and not a public town square anymore. He makes up the rules to suit himself, and he'll enforce them the way he wants.
most of what you say is spot on, but lets be clear:
twitter has never nor would it have ever been "a public town square"
anything owned by a private company is the literal opposite of a "public" anything.
and way more importantly, anything with a character limit of 280 characters is absolutely thoroughly inadequate to discuss the most complicated and nuanced subjects that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries with entire tomes and libraries worth of space.
I completely and wholeheartedly agree. These companies always love to present themselves as a public space, while simultaneously leveraging their control over it.
And I definitely prefer social media that support long form posts and contextual discussions instead of these weird loosely linked twitter threads.
While “anymore” may be out of place, I believe OP was referring to this (among other similar quotes): Musk said the reason he acquired Twitter is to have "a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner."
I was thinking about this last night during the Space chat. Jason Calacanis was insisting that the level of tracking represented by ElonJet was something new and all I could think of was paparazzi. For decades, movie stars have been monitored in a far more intrusive way.
That doesn’t mean the plane tracking was or wasn’t good, it just surprised me that Calacanis was so unaware.
Yes, if (1) you had confidence Biden was on the plane at the time, and (2) if you posted it in order to cause physical harm.
Most doxxing that people worry about isn't just "oh look, biden is coming to town! cool!". It's more like "Supreme Court justice lives here with family. Go outside their house and start 'threatening' them now", followed by some sort of fake "no violence" post to CYA.
I wasn't referring to the policy, but the concept of "doxxing" at large. Twitter's specific rules can be whatever they want, but most people know doxxing when they see, no matter where or when it happens.
> Most doxxing that people worry about isn't just "oh look, biden is coming to town! cool!". It's more like "Supreme Court justice lives here with family. Go outside their house and start 'threatening' them now", followed by some sort of fake "no violence" post to CYA.
The whole debate about the killing of JFK is less about Oswald or his motives and 100% focused on the failures to protect the President.
Musk is not special, he occupies the same 10 square feet as everybody, and he has the resources to enforce a physical perimeter of security way larger than that around himself and/or whoever he might be interested in.
People have the right to know where he is and what he is up to, that comes with his position, if he doesn't like it he can start offloading his billions to the less fortunate.
Musk failed to protect his family (btw what family?) in the physical world and now wants to have his vengence in the online world. Doesn't work that way, he should start spending on security like any other billionaire to ensure safety for himself and people he cares about in the physical world and leave the online world alone, including the ability to track him (and dare I say it?) make fun of him.
But it will never happen because this guy doesn't care about common sense, he only cares about being a Techno-God among mortals , in a world where rules don't apply to him and everybody genuflects to him.
"People have the right to know where he is and what he is up to, that comes with his position, if he doesn't like it he can start offloading his billions to the less fortunate."
Total rubbish.
What right? And where is that right enumerated? I've read the federalist papers twice, the USC countless times, and know my way around the US Code. Nowhere is it defined that YOU have a fundamental right to keep track of people ...ostensibly because they are more successful than you?
Why can't we track losers, too? Make sure they are going to work or school and not just draining the retirement accounts of their parents?
You have no fundamental right to anyone's privacy. Full stop.
> Why can't we track losers, too? Make sure they are going to work or school and not just draining the retirement accounts of their parents?
Doesn't work that way, poor people have no power by definition.
The separation of powers isn't just something between a handful of elites such as Congress members who can impeach and convict the POTUS, or a bunch of judges, generals, chiefs etc.
The ultimate separation of powers is that there are ultimately 8 billion of us keeping an eye on each other and preventing an individual from going rogue and engage in selfish and anti-social behavior, and that is true whether you are a journalist, President, judge, general, chief...whatever and also billionaires.
It's pretty much an accepted concept, by everybody, except from your guy , the guy you are defending so much who'd absolutely love to be the unchallenged and undisputed dictator of the online world, and tomorrow the physical world.
Probably the carve out is because Musk doxxed that short seller guy, 'Montana Skeptic,' and tried to get his employer to fire him.
But he already made a location carve-out too: he himself posted pictures of the alleged stalker guy and a license tag. That would get someone banned under the location rule. Even if it was a day later, the incident itself happened a day later than any elonjet post I believe, so that's within his real-time timeframe.
> This is why it would be interesting to post public information about politicians collected from the online spyware that tracks all of us. It would rapidly motivate new laws that at least somewhat improve privacy.
There's history of this kind of thing spurring political action: what comes immediately to mind is the Video Privacy Protection Act, enacted after a reporter got hold of Robert Bork's video rental records. At the time, Bork was in the middle of a contentious (and ultimately failed) confirmation process to be named to the Supreme Court, and Bork's views on the lack of a constitutional right to privacy gave the writer an idea.
The actual movies were nothing interesting, but general distaste for the move, plus a healthy dose of worry from members of Congress about the contents their own records, led to a law that explicitly penalized video stores that handed out that kind of info about their customers.
I think you're right in general that people are pretty blasé about tracking now, though.
> It seems like a good rule, but in this case the application of the rule seems less impersonal than it could be
I don't think it seems like a good rule. Not only is the information public but I think it is not hard to dream up reasons why it would legitimately be in the public interest to report on the comings and goings of someone's private jet.
There is also a pretty easy solution to this if you want privacy: sell the private jet and use charters. This is why Bernard Arnauld sold his recently.
Public or not, it is a security concern, especially for a celebrity/politicized figure/widely hated person.
I wouldn't want my live location posted on the internet either, and there's a lot fewer people who want to hurt me than Musk (AFAIK, no one wants to hurt me).
You do realize you can buy a $100 antenna on Ebay and pull the live-to-the-second location of every airplane in your visible sky, directly from the aircraft, right?
There are websites displaying this exact same data where you can watch US Military Air Tankers in active refuelling operations with both US and other nation's aircraft in active war zones.
If I own a plane and you track that plane, there's nothing I can do, since that information is public. Websites that publish that data through an API are publishing data they got from the aircraft itself.
There's a number of ways one can avoid being tracked and Elon saying there aren't is a blatant lie.
Well, it won’t stop a dedicated stalker but having to plan an execute is already a significant barrier of entry for 99% of the bored, drunk, unstable minds that would come up with the idea of walking up to someone.
A "stalker" is pretty much by definition "dedicated". Otherwise it'd just be a casual observer.
But what it most important to keep remembering is that the whole discussion of elonjet account is a distraction. Sure, it's one guy posting the data for whatever motivation he has. But it doesn't matter at all, because the source raw data is public domain information available to the whole world for free on many other air traffic websites. Even if Elon were to shut off, somehow, every website in the world, the data is literally there for the taking out of the airwaves since it is being transmitted in the clear, by government mandate.
There isn't any conceivably rational argument to claim this data is private.
Off the top of your head can you link to a couple of these easy to reach sources, or the hardware, the drivers and the configuration needed to capture this data.
Let's see if its really that simple, reachable and affordable such that any mildly disgruntled oaf can do in an impetus.
_This aircraft (xxx) is not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator._
Which proves my point.
A motivated stalker will dig in and research but that’s inevitable, but the other 99.999% losers will self-limit to whatever is available for the minimum effort.
This translates to harmless yelling at clouds, unless some cheeky troll does the homework for them.
For under USD$100 / EUR€80, build a Raspberry Pi with a USB ADS-B receiver that can run dump1090 and PiAware. View data locally or via FlightAware Users that share data with FlightAware automatically qualify for a free upgrade to an Enterprise Account.
I don't quite understand if you're deliberately ignoring my point of if you're that out of touch.
Perhaps you've forever lived in an academic/industrial bubble, but a significant part of the population and definitely the vast majoirity of those that would engage in taking a virtual confrontation to IRL, are borderline illiterate, have significant difficulty parsing simple manuals. You're describing setting up a computer with Linux, configuring an SDR and configuring some software to parse the data stream.
Are people on HN of all places pretending to be cutely ignorant about doxxing? Back in the days of Internet forums it was understood to be a bad thing to publish someone's home adress or a picture of it. It's not that home locations were thought secret information, it's an invitation to random crazies.
we're not ignorant, we're taking many things into context. Musk is a public figure, he's being hypocritical, he's not actually being "doxxed", and his kid wasn't threatened by somebody who used the plane's location.
If Musk actually regarded flight tracking as a security risk, he would have signed up for the LADD program and restricted this info to FAA Source or added his aircraft to the Subscriber Level blocklist. He also could have requested a Privacy ICAO Address.
Any of these things would have put an actual stop to @elonjet, and the PIA solution would have prevented harassers from simply picking up with FlightRadar or any other tracking service.
The fact that he didn't do anything to increase his own security except for banning one of his company's users tells me this is not about personal security, but about exerting control over his company. That's his prerogative, but it's bizarre that he chooses to put up a facade instead of just adding "don't be an asshole to Elon" to the terms of service, which appears to be the actual endgame here.
The alternative method is just people ad-hoc tracking the aircraft with their own ADS-B receivers. LADD doesnt allow aircraft to stop broadcasting. Only that data vendors like FlightRadar must respect the privacy requests. But antenna owners can choose to share their data with vendors that dont respect the LADD program in which case there is 0 recourse.
You can buy the antennas for like $100 and share the data in real time with whoever you want.
Given that you can view the accurate ICAO hex address for his aircraft on registry.faa.gov, it's clear that he's not part of the PIA programme. ElonJet didn't do anything other than automate an API feed from ADSB Exchange, which uses the hex from the FAA.
I don't find it credible that someone is committed enough to doing you harm that they're willing to rot in prison for the rest of their lives but not quite committed enough to look up the public data themselves instead of finding it conveniently collated for them.
I'd like to think I'm smarter than the average nutcase who tries to assassinate a celebrity, and I would not have known how to get that information before people started posting it online. I wouldn't have even known it was possible.
All you get from the flight tracking websites is flights with serial numbers. There's no obvious way to know which one belongs to Musk. His jet isn't registered under his name. People had to do some sleuthing.
Edit: I think you're also implying that people who have attempted to assassinate or assassinated someone are a) rational, and b) believe they'll be caught. But often neither of those are true.
The entirety of my sleuthing: google "site:faa.gov elon musk registration"
That gave me the tail number and ICAO code in the first result. I had no idea what I was even looking for, just that I probably needed "site:faa.gov" - it worked on the first try.
I'm working on my pilot's license so maybe I'm an outlier. I even knew that the FAA was in charge of aviation! :-)
I'm not sure how Google has associated that page to Musk, but notice that Musk's name is nowhere on that page. I suspect Google is able to associate that record to Musk because of the sleuthing people have done. Likely there are links to that page that identify it as Musk's jet.
Look at the registered owner: FALCON LANDING LLC located at 1 ROCKET RD, HAWTHORNE, CA (Guess what other business is at 1 Rocket Rd on Google Maps)
It wouldn't take much word association to connect the two without human involvement. It doesn't matter to the purpose of this discussion though, since Google has created this association it's available to everyone.
If you're talking about tracking his jet today, then you don't even have to work that hard (or even know what the FAA is). Just googling "Musk jet number" or "Musk jet tracker" will find his jet. This information is plastered all over the internet. That's not going away.
But it's all over the net because someone, possibly @elonjet, originally figured out it was his jet and posted it online. That made it easier for people to find his jet, and that is a security concern for Musk. I'm not saying this information was originally super hard to uncover for someone who knew what to do. I'm saying there is some increased security risk now that this information is easily accessible.
I think most of us would be uncomfortable with being tracked live in his situation.
It's very clearly not. Even if the Internet didn't exist, the data is there over the airwaves ready to be picked up by anyone with the slightest interest to listen.
Also notice how this applies to everyone, every airplane. Every celebrity, every politician, even every little private plane, even the president. Those are the rules. Elon isn't special and doesn't get special treatment.
> I think most of us would be uncomfortable
Uncomfortable, perhaps yes. But that's the price of being a celebrity. Paparazzi and all that. When you're unimaginably rich and famous, people track you. Happens to every famous musician, actor, etc. That's the deal. Elon doesn't get to be special.
It very clearly is. By watching ADSB data, I can build a picture of your travel patterns. I will be able to determine where you go, when, and could lay an ambush for you once I've found a pattern.
Same thing if I put a tracking device on your personal conveyance.
AF1 routinely turns off their ADSB transponder, as do military aircraft. They generally do not when operating in high traffic areas, but will if they are over commercial airspace and want to mask their position.
While this data's purpose is primarily for safety and to make ATC job easier, it was never intended to used as a public tracking system.
If this was actually a security threat, the man could take chartered flights anonymously forever with a rounding error's worth of his money. Opsec is clearly not important to him.
It's the Elon show. He needs the attention and doesn't care if it's positive or negative.
The problem is that because he owns a jet, any passenger on it is at risk. That’s why his son was accosted by a crazy stalker.
I find it absurd how many people are against automated license plate readers (even privately owned ones) but simultaneously welcome the complete lack of privacy for aircraft. If someone replied, “Just use a taxi/Uber/Lyft.” in response to ALPRs they’d be downvoted into obscurity, and rightly so. But change the transport mechanism and suddenly it’s fair. The hypocrisy could not be more obvious.
It's not a real problem for Elon. He's not posting about any serious concerns for his safety. He's posting "I love Barbara Streisand lol" and "Twitter right now is (four fire emoji)"
He created this 'problem' out of nothing. It's an act. If he feared for his family's safety there are ways to tackle the problem that aren't purely performative.
Did you miss the tweet where he talked about a crazy stalker jumping on the hood of a car that Elon's son was in?[1] Or the fact that the FAA gives Elon's jet a PIA, but Jack Sweeney brags about being able to get around that privacy protection?[2]
What would it take to change your mind about this? There have already been close calls. Would someone actually have to harm Musk or his family? And you didn't address my ALPR analogy at all. Why does it matter whether the mode of transportation is a car or a plane?
I did not miss that tweet, nor did I miss this one[1] that seems to geolocate that video the video and found it nowhere near an airport. In addition, that incident was on December 13th. Elonjet posted his plane landed in LA in December 12th[2], a full day before that went down. Not seeing any evidence at all that this was connected to what ElonJet posted.
There's also no context in that video, it's just a clip of a person in a car. I do not take Elon's word for anything, he's demonstrated over and over and over that he will act in bad faith. The one party he probably would/should not lie to, the police, doesn't seem to have any report from him about this event.
You're on to something with automated license plate readers. They exist, as do apps that take pictures and videos and aggregate the license plate numbers.
Credit card transactions also aren't protected from marketing tracking activities, neither are Twitter or Facebook ads, neither is what my isp can discover from my dns requests, cell phone providers can sell my location metadata, and the credit bureaus are ordinary businesses with huge data leaks.
This is public information, police can operate on it without a warrant, and whether we're driving, flying a private jet, walking in a town square, or purchasing a coffee, or browse the internet - other private entities can too.
LifeLock and identity theft protection are sold to everybody, tax forms allow anybody to try to use someone else's number - the government refuses to do anything, and companies have minimum privacy + security requirements.
Musk (or one of his associates, I forget which) has in the past posted pictures online of him walking to and from his aircraft with the registration clearly visible. It's not something he even tried to hide.
It's almost never difficult to find out what private jets companies and celebrities own in any case, except when obfuscated behind multiple layers of shell companies and with strict opsec, neither of which Musk practiced.
Every aircraft is tracked and trackable this way, only Musk is turning it into a big deal using outrageous claims about safety. Get real.
That is literally what happened with the Pelosi attacker. He wrongly assumed she would be present (she was definitely not). He absolutely intended her physical harm- and attacked the husband with a hammer in full view of the police.
We could also say that he was motivated by the same kind of fringe political content that Elon has brought back after it was previously removed. Is there any kind of consistent principle we could use to explain why removing that was illegitimate but this isn’t?
The Pelosi attacker got motivated by DECADES of Republican hate propaganda. Not responsible journalism speaking truth to power.
The rich and famous cannot have anonymity because you can't be rich and famous being anonymous.
Of course the elite wants to have it both ways: report only what I want you to report.
> because you can't be rich and famous being anonymous
What about Satoshi? And funnily enough it was exactly Musk status circa 2017. A billionaire known only by people following the stock market and tech/auto sector specifically.
He made his own bed ever since the accusation of pedophilia against Vernon Unsworth who was participating in the Thai cave rescue.
The combined wealth of Brin and Page also would land them at #1 in the Forbes list but nobody knows them. So it's possible to a degree, it was never possible for Musk however because he has a deep need to be a primadonna
ADS-B transmissions are not "public data" you can look up, what you're referring to as "public data" are datasets of dubious legality from the likes of flightradar24 who operate ADS-B logging devices around the world.
For example, in Europe what they're doing is strictly in violation of the GDPR.
Nope, you can get an SDR dongle and track planes all you want all the time even in the EU. Plane doesn't equal person, and I doubt the EU courts would argue any other way otherwise we'd need to criminalize tracking of UPS trucks and the like.
> Nope, you can get an SDR dongle and track planes all you want all the time even in the EU
For example in Finland you would likely be violating the radio secrecy laws by merely listening unless you're actively involved in aviation (e.g. flying a plane or sitting in a tower)
Again, this is public data and nobody has been able to successfully make a case that aircraft movements are cases of indirect PII in terms of the GDPR.
It isn't! These are ephemeral radio transmissions which contain PII. You might collect those transmissions and publish them somewhere, but that would be illegal.
> nobody has been able to successfully make a case that aircraft movements are cases of indirect PII in terms of the GDPR.
So you're just trolling. That's not how the GDPR works, you don't get to make any kind of case at all. The government will when they eventually get to it after clearing decades worth of backlogs.
There is no PII in these transmissions. You clearly have no idea what this actually is or how it works, you’re just looking for reasons to defend Musk. Bizarrely.
> you're just trolling. That's not how the GDPR works, you don't get to make any kind of case at all. The government will when they eventually get to it after clearing decades worth of backlogs.
To “make a case” for something means to provide a persuasive argument for it. If I had meant pursuing a lawsuit I’d have said so.
> You clearly have no idea what this actually is or how it works, you’re just looking for reasons to defend Musk. Bizarrely
What? Where am I defending Musk? You seem to have an unhealthy obsession with the clown. I haven't even mentioned the guy!
Unlike you, I don't give a shit about the guy. I'm just an European aircraft owner who's not a fan of these websites.
>There is no PII in these transmissions.
>To “make a case” for something means to provide a persuasive argument for it. If I had meant pursuing a lawsuit I’d have said so.
Are you kidding? Mere pictures of license plates associated with timestamps have been found to be covered by GDPR, perfectly analogous to what's being discussed here.
Private cars have always been treated differently to private aircraft in US, UK, and EU law. So, no, it’s not analogous.
Nobody would even contemplate a public registry of car owners, for instance, but all of those countries maintain one for aircraft.
I’ve seen multiple attempts to make the same argument you are by disgruntled private aircraft owners every now and then. None have succeeded in any official venue.
In Portugal anyone can request the registration certificate from the IRN, that contains the owners information.
The governments aren't bound by GDPR and can totally do this, but as a private party it would generally be illegal for you to scrape this data.
>I’ve seen multiple attempts to make the same argument you are by disgruntled private aircraft owners every now and then. None have succeeded in any official venue.
Same is true of literally all GDPR violations, we've only just introduced these laws and catching up on the enforcement backlog will take decades.
Not only that, but most governments are doing a very shit job funding the enforcement authorities.
The obvious solution will be to allow impacted individuals to litigate GDPR violations by themselves.
In the GDPR sense any information that can be tied directly to a person is "personal data" but since nobody in this story lives in Europe I think it's neither here nor there that this is the case.
Beyond that, you see a lot of mocking of GDPR rules from American industry and we still have a lot of websites that block on the basis that they want to divulge your personal details to any and everyone.
And, worse, they abuse the HTTP 451 status for that.
No, I don't live in a country that censors the website - it's the company who owns the website that wants to do things with my data that my country (and myself) considers illegal.
How is that supposed to be abuse? The website is unavailable because the way they operate isn't legal in your jurisdiction. 451 seems perfectly appropriate
Maybe when Europe takes control of the global financial system they'll be able to go after US citizens for doing things that aren't illegal in the US but in the meantime I don't see what difference the jet visiting Europe makes either.
GDPR has nothing to do with citizenship, why would you even bring that up?
Really, it even has nothing to do with residency. It's all to do with jurisdiction, when Elon happens to be within EU jurisdiction he is protected by the GDPR.
When Elon takes his jet to visit Greece, he is indeed protected by the GDPR (even if just interacting with US based companies while he's on holiday, GDPR still applies)
Does it? I'd look it up but, well, @ElonJet i.u suspended. it seems it mostly goes between SF, LA, and Austin though. It's a G700 which has a range of 8,053 mi though.
Also, given that the GDPR only applies to people of the EU, I'd say it, at the very least, has something to do with living in Europe,
since, umm, y'know, that's where most people with citizenship in an EU county live.
GDPR does not only apply to people of the EU, GDPR applies within the jurisdiction of the states which have implemented it. GDPR protects Musk when he flies to Europe, you'd have to treat that data differently than flights within the US.
This is all well and good but even if the EU claims jurisdiction over people who aren’t in the EU publishing information about the EU (not clear from this article that this is the case; it just says that it applies to you if you are in the EU even if you’re not an EU citizen), how would they enforce that?
I've never heard of this happening and, besides this, ElonJet was being operated by a private individual and not for profit. You think they're going to get his bank account shut down over it? I can't imagine the bank entertaining that.
How could it not be? Your plane's location data is just as personal as your car's, or your cellphone's. There's no special aircraft exemption in the GDPR.
Do you have any evidence to share which might suggest that GDPR treats private aircraft differently than ... literally everything else?
If not, why would we just not accept that GDPR treats aircraft exactly how it treats everything else? The law, as written, clearly offers no specific coverage or exemption for any types of vehicles.
A big reason these jet accounts were popular is people enjoyed calling attention to how wasteful many of the flights were, which I can’t imagine Elon was unaware of.
There are services you can pay for (in the US) to track a car’s (almost) real-time location without gps. It’s based upon license plates and widespread webcams and it’s not illegal (yet).
A plane is not a person, a phone, a car, or a home. Elon Musk is often the passenger on his jet, but I am quite sure he is often not on board while it moves around.
> Why would a plane be treated differently than a car in a GDPR context?
A car is generally registered to an individual. A plane isn't.
You could also -maybe- argue that because there's multiple people on the plane (assuming Ol' Muskie isn't flying it himself) and that those people are potentially different every time, without a passenger and crew manifest, it's not identifying individuals (but I suspect you'd not get far with this.)
Planes are very often registered to individuals, and that doesn't even matter! The plane being company owned doesn't magically change anything, what matters is who's being transported and whether or not they will be easily linked to the aircraft.
From a GDPR perspective it also makes no difference whether it's 5% or 90% of planes that are owned by individuals as opposed to by companies.
>edit: Specifically mentioning planes and their locations, I mean, not "extrapolating from cars to planes".
You have to be trolling. What leads you to believe that the GDPR which never mentions either aircraft or cars would treat these two kinds of vehicles differently?
Can you find anything in the GDPR texts to suggest that cars and planes would be treated differently?
> the GDPR which never mentions either aircraft or cars
ICO's guide to the UK GDPR does have a specific example of cars being identifiable[1] - "A vehicle’s registration number can be linked to other information held about the registration (eg by the DVLA) to indirectly identify the owner of that vehicle." Nothing about planes though.
[2] covers car registrations and explicitly discounts company owned vehicles from being PII - "The registration plates of commercial vehicles are not personal data of an individual as the vehicle is owned by an organisation."
All of Ol' Muskie's jets are owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a shell company.
>ICO's guide to the UK GDPR does have a specific example of cars being identifiable[1] - "A vehicle’s registration number can be linked to other information held about the registration (eg by the DVLA) to indirectly identify the owner of that vehicle." Nothing about planes though.
Car registration numbers is a very common kind of data for businesses to handle, of course it makes it on the list of examples.
Same is not true of planes, of course they don't make it on the list of examples.
>[2] covers car registrations and explicitly discounts company owned vehicles from being PII - "The registration plates of commercial vehicles are not personal data of an individual as the vehicle is owned by an organisation."
>All of Ol' Muskie's jets are owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a shell company.
This doesn't work, you can't wash off PII by tying one aspect of it to an organisation. My phone line might belong to a business, but that doesn't give the carrier a free pass to do whatever they want with associated location data.
As has been repeated often, aircraft movement information is public.
None of this represents tracking his or his family's real time location, because:
a) We can't tell which aircraft he is on from that data.
b) He can use other aircraft, including charters.
c) This only applies to while the aircraft is actually airborne or departing from or arriving at an airport, which is already easy to observe and record by spotters, and does not track him or his family anywhere else.
There are ways to do that job that don't involve poking the proverbial dragon every waking minute. You can call Elon a hypocrite for banning people who attack him relentlessly, but all humans are hypocrites. Perhaps they should take a break from the "Elon beat", because their reporting appears increasingly personal in nature.
The crowd that got banned seems unusually thick-headed, and they'll probably just attack Elon (and Twitter itself) even harder once they get unbanned. Karl Popper explained it better than I can, but Twitter doesn't have to extend unlimited tolerance to those who seek to destroy Twitter.
I don't think it's difficult to become inflammatory when people are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to paint what Twitter/Elon did as justified. You're not arguing in good faith and I see that as far more harmful for HN.
That is simply your view, and I don't agree. Again, its no big deal, people can disagree. People are attempting to moralize the issue due to a personal vendetta against Elon (such as the poster I replied to).
Since HN is basically the nerds from tech, it makes perfect sense.
Are there any Oracle employees that can comment on the hivemind?
You can even see it before you read it. Comments like yours that are entirely reasonable, and trying to protect what HN is supposed to be in good faith are being faded out of existence because you corrected misinformation that they prefer over the truth.
I have this crazy idea.. If only there was.. now hear me out
Some type of team at Twitter that could look at more tweets.. the resources to look at ALL of Twitter.., systematically, for these issues of “trust” and “safety”
You could the create a very clear policy, and work to remove any doubt such a policy was consistently enforced!
A more accurate label would be "Ideologue Strawman" teams. The idea failed, but not for the reason you think - even when doing a decent job with a very hard problem, the corner cases create a lightning rod for criticism that results in a breakdown of public trust.
But still, a bureaucratic committee that produces relatively stable results instills a lot more trust than a single forum addict who then buys the forum so he can ban anyone who argues with him.
We, which very much includes myself, had come to take bureaucracies for granted. We focused on their failures, got frustrated at their stifling nature, and concluded the whole concept was worth raging against. But the resulting rise of individual-autocratic personalities has shown the value that bureaucracy had been bringing - slow moving predictability. All hail our Beige overlords?
Having said that, on the larger topic, I've been waiting for "web 2.0" to be revealed as the authoritarian dumpster fire it is since someone coined the term "AJAX". The obvious answer is decentralized systems that get the meddlesome third parties out of our personal interactions completely. And if this rampaging petty tyrant will help many more people to realize the intrinsic tyranny of centralized webapps, then I guess these events are a good thing?
Additionally all links to anything in mastodon (may be server specific) are also being blocked. Mastadon users are reporting this morning that they aren't able to post links to their Mastadon accounts with error messages that Twitter has identified the site as harmful.
Banning all links to Mastodon? That's just censoring the competition. Lots of people have been leaving Twitter for Mastodon, so silencing that might be a welcome side effect of widely overshooting his elonjet ban.
"Lots" might be an overstatement, in relativity at least.
The peak of the Mastodon migration was mid November, reportedly around 400k per week. This sounds like a lot, however a) many have moved back to Twitter due to it not being what they expected and b) Twitter has over 300m monthly active users.
It's still a lot. Mastodon has grown enormously. If Twitter keeps burning and Mastodon can handle the influx (the latter is the bigger 'if' here), that it may continue to grow.
It's entirely possible (although I personally think it unlikely).
Regardless, < 1% is not a lot of Twitter users by pretty much any stretch. I think people in tech or fringe communities are seeing a high uptake in their own groups and assuming that to be reflective of Twitter users at large.
How does the 24 hour delay location tracking rule agains DOXing benefit somebody who doesn't have a private jet to hop around the world in every day, and always sits at home in the same place, isolating to not get sick, and working hard at home to pay the bills and feed the cats?
Is it just fine and not DOXing to track and publish the location of people who don't move around all the time, after a 24 hour time lag?
Sounds like this 24 hour rule is specifically designed to protect Musk himself, and only incidentally anyone else who happens to own a private plane.
What is everyone up in arms for?
This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants.
That is what everyone has been saying for years. I mean, it turns out they were wrong and Twitter was actually colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment. But censorship and targeted suspensions were defended tooth and nail by internet commenters.
Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Surely people wouldn't be so shortsighted?
> Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted?
Yes, this is exactly the problem but in the opposite direction you are implying.
Musk believed that Twitter blocking the sharing of an article about ToS breaking behavior was worthy of the “Twitter Files” when the story was bad for his political opponent, but he thinks it is fine when the story is bad for him. It shows that he has no actual principled beliefs. He simply is acting in his own best interest.
Odds are people would be more willing to accept Elon’s rules if Elons’s rules weren’t a constantly moving target of whatever benefits him the most at this exact moment.
In other words it strongly implies that the shifting current moods of individual high profile people are not a good way to sort out the rules of public discourse.
It's perfectly legal under the current rules as they apply to Twitter (in the United States) but one has to wonder (now and before) if it is advisable to keep them as such.
That is the public discussion societies around the world will have.
Elon Musk highlighted this issue by falsely and strongly claiming impartiality
Elon is showing exactly why we moved from absolute monarchs to constitutional systems with rule of law. He's running twitter as an absolute monarch, making up new rules to suit his whims, while he is above those rules.
And I think this also shows why corporate capitalism is inherently at odds with democracy: every corporation is effectively a dictatorship, their internal economy a plan economy, its rules at the whim of the CEO. And Elon is more eager than many CEOs to abuse this power. I wonder if it's going to lead to a revolution against corporations similar to the revolutions we got against monarchs.
In a word, Hypocrisy. Everyone is up in arms for Hypocrisy.
Musk's statement was that free speech would be allowed on Twitter. And yet, here he is chilling free speech. It's not surprising. It's just also really bad. So people are up in arms that they're losing a platform that, while by no means perfect, was better for free speech than it currently is.
The irony is that this is also the most transparent decisionmaking at Twitter has ever been. It's a live public view of the negotiation with a userbase over the future of the platform.
The release of the previous management's internal communications showed the liberal and comfortable application of euphemism, justification after the fact, and technical deniability in upper leadership.
Twitter showing outage not over evidence that the culture of banning and de-amplifying both users and public interest topics without agency or notification, condemning by decision of a secret, unauditable council under influence of the federal government and corporations, and doing so under the tack of keeping their CEO in the dark shows how carefully calculated their appearance was. Remember, they lost their canary.
I don't think Elon Musk is much if any better. I also can't say that Twitter is any worse. Speech was being chilled and controlled before, and unless your definition of "free speech" is "being free from what offends me or is counter to my opinions and beliefs", it's more likely the hypocrisy you worry about is nothing more than actually being able to draw a line between an action and its cause and a target you can confidently level a finger at.
People will adjust as they ever have. However, the ones who interact now will be the influencers of what Twitter becomes. That is what matters, not any confused and petty logic that our leaders should all be infallible and godlike.
We all know why these rules are being made, that Elon musk's feelings were hurt and he's lashing out, but Twitter is pretending that it's for some consistent rule. Transparency would be for twitter to say straight up that it's against the rules to say things Elon doesn't like
And the "this is private" company folks are seething now private company doing private things.
All these American political flights are so incredibly dumb.
> And the "this is private" company folks are seething now private company doing private things.
No. It is 100% A-OK for Ol' Muskie to ban who he wants for whatever spurious reasons he wants to post-hoc claim. It's his company, he can do that. 100%.
What people are correctly pointing out is that he rode in on his "FREE SPEECH IS GOOD" horse waving a "BOTS ARE BAD" banner, loudly proclaiming that "Only illegal speech will be banned", re-enabled a whole bunch of accounts for bigots based on bot-ridden unreliable polls, swerved hard to the alt-right lane, picked up a transphobic smoothie and blew both his feet off with a +100 Shotgun Of Hypocrisy by starting to ban people who mock, track, or report on him.
Not seething. Just pointing out that we were right all along. The “free speech absolutists” never cared at all about free speech. They just want freedom from criticism. No one has argued he isn’t allowed to do these things. He’s free to trash Twitter as much as he wants. Just as we are free to laugh at the idiocy and the Musk defenders twist themselves in circles trying to justify his behavior.
I think it's less that Twitter doesn't have the right to do these thing (frankly I agree that in the specific case of ElonJet that it's reasonable to have a policy around that), and more that a lot of chaos that affected a lot of people had to happen in order for Musk to realize that it's not as simple as "just have free speech, bing bong so easy".
Except Musk has selectively applied and prioritized whatever he deemed harmful to himself prior to anything else on top of having hamsters in his head run overdrive on how he still 'supports free speech'.
It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.
It's just bizarre that the same people complaining about this are the same people that said "Twitter is private and can ban whoever they want" and defended censorship.
Then Elon turns around does the same thing and suddenly they flip and claim they were always "free speech proponents" all along.
They should just be honest and admit it's all political.
But anyways, this NH post is now at 1320 comments. It's like CNN's talking heads shouting at each other.
HN is not one person. Unless you have examples of actual people flip-flopping freely between the two, your comment amounts to "Person A said this thing, it's weird that Person B said something different!".
> That is what everyone has been saying for years.
You're making a false equivalence between the left and the right on this topic.
The left has said that moderating online communities is legal because of the First Amendment. They're private companies. The right then called for an end to the First Amendment as we've known it by banning private companies from moderating their platforms.
There has been no such call from the left. The left (and this thread) laments what Elon is doing, but no one is saying he's breaking a law or that he should be breaking a law. No one is calling for the government to step in.
Twitter is allowed to be run by jerks who ban people for any reason they want.
The problem is that people like Musk have spent ages arguing that banning fascists is bad because free speech absolutism is an important value. It turns out that free speech absolutism was never actually a value they cared about - the only thing that matters is that their guy is the one choosing the bans. If people like Musk had instead argued that platforming fascists is actually good this whole time then the discussion today would be different, but because they didn't want to publicly support fascists they had to fall back on the free speech absolutism argument, which has shattered into a million pieces.
It seems plainly obvious that Musk was radicalized into a far-right conservative by the one-two punch of transphobia (his kid came out as trans, Grimes left him for a trans woman, and he'd always been somewhat transphobic) and lost profits due to COVID policy. This put him in alignment with the most radical wing of social media - the anti-COVID measures and anti-trans community.
Combine this with a general support of conservative fiscal policy as a wealthy business-owner and the libertarian ideals of a gen-X nerd who came of age during "information wants to be free" and obviously suffering from a compulsive social media addiction (pot calling kettle black here), and it's no surprise he's completely bought into "free speech conservatism", where slander and hatred are placed on even footing with legitimate political argument.
What is the significance of the word “billionaire” in that sentence? Is it worse to be a hypocrite if you’re a billionaire? Do you think it’s unethical to be a billionaire?
Billionaires wield untold power and influence over the economy and government and are unelected and effectively mini-dictators. They are incredibly powerful because of their wealth and have effectively no checks and balances. And because of all this, they often come with or develop egomaniacal and sociopathic tendencies that further remove them from the reality of common people.
That’s why its significant. Don’t act as if billionaires are just “one of us” when it comes to influence.
I would consider billionaires some of the biggest threats to democracy and national security.
Yes. Billionaires have a disproportionate amount of power in our world and their bad behavior and beliefs leads to greater harm than similar behavior and beliefs by people who do not have as much power.
Genuinely curious and open, not sure why downvote.
So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree.
Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold?
If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
> So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical.
I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial.
> Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires?
This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical.
I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.
I think it’s self evident that very rich people have more capacity for both good and bad, as they have more power in a capitalist society. To debate further there is a debate about capitalism, and whilst I’d like to see more social democracy and less laissez faire, going beyond capitalism is not something I want to jump into…
So I think ideally you’d like to see billionaires give up their wealth voluntarily, right? That seems internally consistent.
I think your last point is a good one, particularly a good response to those on the right who are always against progressive taxation: the cash should not be the only or perhaps even primary incentive. At least for entrepreneurship.
One issue with saying “900m enough” etc. is that often billionaires (or rich folk) are really just rich on paper. If your company is private it’s not necessarily easy to liquidate, for example. And maybe sometimes you want people to “own” lots of money in the sense that they need to steward it (maybe you want them to be an Angel investor, for example).
I guess I took you away a bit from “unethical” to “how do we solve it?” And it is still valuable to have ethics that cannot be enforced, because you want to be ethical yourself and be able to advise others.
I'd like an actual policy that prevents people from accumulating (or at the very least, leveraging) $1b in wealth. But I won't let the complexity of said policy affect my opinion about the ethics of accumulating so much wealth. Those are completely independent topics.
There are logistical issues with illiquid assets. Everybody knows this. This is not, in my opinion, an interesting concern.
One way to help solve it is to call billionaires shitheads whenever possible.
In the interests of full context, Huey Long was an authoritarian populist and the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith was a white supremacist by any meaning of those words. (Long wasn’t, but he was certainly happy to work with Smith.)
> If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
How do you think people's internal motivation systems work? I don't think anyone in history ever though "oh golly I can only make up to $999 million in my life, what a bother, guess there is no point in working hard".
I don’t think that’s how such a system would work, right? It would most likely mean higher taxes all the way up. Otherwise you’d get all sorts of tax avoidance tricks.
I think being a billionaire is unethical, and the way to prevent them is to ensure that the people along the way get their share.
Entrepreneurs are self incentivised rather than being externally motivated by money, and if the chances of not being a billionaire we're to stop somebody from being an entrepreneur, we wouldn't have entrepreneurs already
Mind you, if we jumped back a couple hundred years and asked: "does banning slavery disincentive entrepreneurs from starting plantations?"
The answer would be irrelevant to whether slavery should be banned
Non-billionaire hypocrites don’t spend $44 billion to disrupt my life so that they can play king at a social media company.
This man has done real damage to actual lives and communities in service of his ego, and he can’t even be forthright about his intentions. He can’t even stand by his own professed deeply held convictions, the entire reason he said this needed to be done, for more than 2 seconds before his own selfish ego takes precedence.
Is it now genetally agreed upon that Twitter was actually “colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment”, or is that still a hotly contested statement?
(My understanding was that the Twitter files did on the end not contain such evidence, but information overload … I may have lost some consensus)
By some internet commenters. Personally I found Twitters bans distasteful. Even if they could do it.
I also find Musk's bans distasteful. Even if he can do it.
Oh, and he's revealed himself to obviously be full of shit. As is anyone cheering him on in the name of free speech. But I guess principles only last until they get in the way of petty tribalism.
It's no more sophisticated than that. I used to think it was. But look at conversations about Musk following the twitter purchase, compared to conversations about Musk regarding Tesla. I've come to see that it's just people and their personal relationship to their toys.
I don't give two cares about Tesla and have like 5 Tweets in 14 years. Conversations about either never really made sense to me when looking from the perspective of someone emotionally uninvested and just watching things come and go in the world. But look at tech as toy and it all makes sense.
> What is everyone up in arms for? This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants.
Not exactly. At least here in Germany, there is established jurisprudence that Twitter and Facebook are public "town halls" for discussion and as such have to maintain some sort of freedom of speech, with the borders being set by German laws. That means that for example Holocaust denial, which is perfectly fine under US law, has to be regionally blocked for Germany, while some instances of what Twitter/FB consider to be "hate speech" under their rules still has to be made available.
The general judicial consensus in Germany is that while platforms do have a requirement to moderate discourse (e.g. to remove libel and outright Nazi content), they also aren't allowed to moderate too strictly.
The problem is that Musk is suggesting that anyone posting anything regarding ADS-B data, sites, applications, and so forth are violating the rule which isn't the case. These are legal and open radio topics, we're not talking about posting his bank records, we're talking about posting where a plane was last seen in the air which isn't the same as posting his private address.
It's not a good rule. It was implemented for the sole reason of preventing people from saying where Elon Musk's private jet is, even though that is publicly available information by law.
Those journalists weren't reporting specific locations of his jet...they were reporting on a legit news story about it. Musk didn't like it so the journalists are now banned.
The dude is truly off his rocker now. The "rules" are whatever he makes up on the spot. He's self-destructing before our eyes...no longer the richest man in the world. Telsa stock tanking all because he can't STFU and acts like a spoiled 12 year old.
It almost look like the clown ran into the ops room and yelled. "Ban everyone mentioning @elonjet, EVERYONE" and someone just ran SQL query with LIKE %@elonjet% AND user != musky_boy ...
> The "rules" are whatever he makes up on the spot
But two years ago, the rules were whatever Vijaya Gadde made up on the spot. Why is this suddenly a cause for outrage? Twitter has always been like this.
Both are bad. The idea that one person doing wrong makes it right when someone ideologically opposed does the same thing is bad logic, and I've been seeing it way too often recently.
I worry the American education system is failing us.
I really hate to ban a 14 year old account, but you've been posting abusively so consistently lately—in fact it seems that's all you've been doing—that I don't see what choice we have.
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.
No they weren't they were tweeting the new location of the @elronjet account - all this has been through the courts a bunch of times now: posting a link is not the same as posting the content it points to
Maybe, but the last straw for me on that platform was preventing tweets from linking to arbitrary, non-doxxing Mastodon profiles (try it and see). I tested it to confirm and deactivated my account afterwards. Who would want to be on a social network like that?
Because it was a dubiously sourced story at the height of a highly chaotic election campaign. You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress, not because they’re Democrat sleeper agents - but because they don’t wanna be responsible for swaying the election because of fake news.
> You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress...
No, I 'literally cannot even.' I cannot see how a platform might want to suppress anything except, perhaps, gore videos and child pornography. And that includes links to Mastodon and the ElonJet account, but I don't feel like I should have to put this disclaimer up just so people will stop telling me that I wanted to look at Hunter Biden's penis.
Sure, I can follow the proposed line of reasoning, but it is evident that instead of swaying the election because of fake news, they may have swayed the election because of not fake news. They were aware of this possibility, and yet the soldiered on censoring that story, so I'm not convinced that their actual reasoning was that they honestly did not want to sway the election.
Did you miss what happened with facebook in the wake of the 2016 election and brexit? They took the blame for all the misinformation that was flying around, being a vehicle for russian troll farms, etc. A lot of that was rightly so, imo, but even if you don’t think they did anything wrong the perception that they did something wrong hurt them financially. You may believe that a company like twitter or fb should act like a dumb pipe - but they’re operating in a capitalist system - they have a huge incentive to avoid things that will hurt them financially. You think they did it because they wanted to swing the election dem, but i don’t believe that for a second. I think they were motivated by wanted to not be seen as swinging the election at all. That means suppressing any sketchy stories.
Personal politics may have made them a little more skeptical of a story sourced from rudy guiliani than one from a sketchy source on the left - but honestly if you’re not deeply skeptical of stories sourced from rudy at this point, I’m sorry to say but you are biased away from truth.
If you want twitter / fb / etc to be dumb pipes you need them to operate outside of market forces. Either by being regulated by gov as a common carrier, privatized by someone with high minded ideals enough to resist banning anyone who criticizes him and doesn’t mind losing money on it, or by being run by some non-governmental foundation. Under capitalist motivations, you’re not going to get a dumb pipe.
So far none of those things are happening. Expect twitter to continue to be not a dumb pipe, not a zone of free speech, just biased in a different way under its new management - less about maximizing $$ and more about protecting its owners interests.
Same thing. But the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only fake news, it was completely irrelevant, because Hunter Biden wasn't running for office, and unlike Trump's children, Biden's children don't work for him. And yet the fake story was leveraged by political operatives to sway the election. After all the issues of fake news swaying the 2016 election, Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.
The part it contained about "10% for the big guy" (Joe Biden) was 100% newsworthy.
It wasn't fake news and deep down all the downvoters know it.
Suppressing it when it was known to be true was also a story.
>Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.
Actually they were at the forefront of spreading fake news as three actual journalists disclosed. Did you not even read the coverage? Because it sounds like you didn't. I even provided links to all of it above.
Let me know after reading it if your views have changed.
They probably tried to mitigate the worst of the fake news. It's pretty hard to stop all fake news these days.
Most news about Hunter Biden seems to be coming mostly from tabloids with a questionable relationship with the truth, and a political axe to grind. Even Fox News, a station known for its flexibility in what they call truth, passed on the story due to credibility concerns.
As far as I can tell, there's no convincing evidence that any of those questionable emails are authentic, and although a few of the emails do seem to be authentic, it's not clear that the hard disk itself is, and there's plenty of evidence that that hard disk has been messed with and has lots of content planted on it by others.
So everything about this smells like a dirty political hit job that even half of the Murdoch empire doesn't want anything to do with. And even if there is something here, it still pales in comparison to the corruption that Trump and his kids are still getting away with. Everything about this smells like a dirty political witch hunt based on made up or strongly manipulated "evidence".
Yes, you absolutely are. Nothing in my comment suggested you are not.
The comment I responded to specifically was upset about censorship targeted at tweeting Mastodon links and not another version of censorship which came in the exact same form but targeted X links. I just gave X a name.
I find it somewhat absurd that a person would become indignant when the link is Y instead of X.
Hey, you broke the site guidelines exceedingly badly in this and other comments in this thread. We have to ban accounts that do that.
I'm not going to ban you for it because I understand that people go on tilt sometimes—it happens. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it.
Sorry? Could you please identify what, specifically, you found homophobic about the comment? I think your comment reflects more upon you than it does upon my comment.
Given that the police is mostly a hassle and pretty useless otherwise, especially when you are part of the uberrich, I am not surprised. Why spend valuable time at the precinct trying to make a high-school-dropout in uniform understand what they are supposed to do if you can just hire private security?
When you are spinning up lawsuits (allegedly) to sue induviduals around an indident that occured (allegedly) - it makes your case, that these induviduals were party to a crime, much stronger if you have at least a police report, statements etc of the crime in question.
On that note, for anyone who would argue he didn’t consent to giving up his right to privacy on where he travels, he explicitly used his presence as a tool to endorse companies, people, and activities.
You can’t actively imply people give you and your business partners money because you physically showed up to a location and then be upset that people care where you are physically located
That's a ridiculous argument. Just because he does some public relations stuff doesn't mean it's ok to blast out his location to the world. Yes, it's public information, but so what? Would you want a Twitter account dedicated to broadcasting your movements to the world?
If I owned a private jet, I would assume it is broadcasted, because it has to be, legally. Nothing you can do. Anyone can find it, so what’s the difference if a Twitter account links it?
Obviously it’s a different story if someone would indeed make his (and his family) real-time moves outside his jet known. But I haven’t seen that unless he announced it himself.
On that note, for anyone who would argue he didn’t consent to giving up his right to privacy on where he travels, he explicitly used his presence as a tool to endorse companies, people, and activities.
You can’t actively imply people should give you and your business partners money because you physically showed up to a location and then be upset that people care where you are physically located
What adsbexchange, flightradar & co. are doing is almost certainly illegal in Europe under the GDPR.
This isn't exactly "public flight data", in many cases it's illegally collected and published flight data.
E: I can't reply to "imnotjames" below thanks to HN ratelimits, but here you go:
It's an obvious GDPR violation, just like it'd be an obvious GDPR violation to publish a similar database but with phone IMEIs and associated locations instead of aircraft.
The FAA has a program called LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) and high-profile individuals, etc can sign up to it. The major players in the flight tracking business like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware follow that. But sites like ADS-B Exchange do not adhere to that, so you can see a lot more flights that are blocked on the others. Also anyone with a Raspberry Pi and a cheap antenna can build their own ADS-B receiver and get that unfiltered data.
I don’t see how it is an obvious GDPR violation. The GDPR is a lot more nuanced than “all private data is protected”. It has exemptions for data published based on a legal requirement (could be the case here), data that cannot easily linked to an individual (number plates are not protected by themselves) and data regarding companies is also exempt. This jet isn’t owned by musk, it’s owned by a company. Journalists (including citizen journalists) also have broad protections in European law and those must be weighed against the GDPR protections.
There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it’s very far from obvious.
Not sure how GDPR is relevant since Elon Musk isn’t the EU data commissioner so it’s not up to him to enforce GDPR, and neither Musk, nor Twitter itself, nor the journalists, nor the sites concerned nor the information in question is in any way European[1].
Here’s the definition of personal data under GDPR[2] for anyone who’s curious. If this information hypothetically were to be published by a company with a European or UK connection about an EU or UK data subject and that person were to complain to their national data protection authority we might be in GDPR enforcement territory.
[1] or UK because UK GDPR is a thing even though the UK is no longer in the EU
Well Elon still isn’t anything to do with the apparatus of gdpr enforcement so it’s still irrelevant and secondly enforcement would be against the sites which are supposedly infringing rather than people linking to them on twitter. This is a sideshow.
I think of it as about the same as the recent complaints that Elon Musk posting 'prosecute Fauci' means he is responsible for Dr. Fauci receiving death threats, or whatever the actual consequence was of that. That is, the idea or information already exists and is publicly available to anyone, but it has been 'amplified' here and this makes it much more serious.
Not quite. Some of the journalists linked to a Facebook page about the topic, which is a small but crucial distinction. Banning for linking to peripheral news stories is pretty bad.
Perhaps now we can see how Freedom Ain't Free. You can't claim to be a free speech absolutist, or a supporter of the second amendment, but then go ban stuff you don't like as soon as it concerns YOU.
Doxxing isn't illegal. I thought Elon claimed that ONLY violation of national laws could be the basis for deplatforming. As if his understaffed team can make legal decisions on the spot, and output true/false about millions of tweets that fall into gray areas. They don't even KNOW the whole body of law, and they aren't the judge or jury either.
I had two discussions with Noam Chomsky about how capitalism has co-opted Freedom of Speech, just like it has done with Women's Lib and many other things
In general yes, for example https://www.flightradar24.com/ shows right now FORTE10 plane (Northrop Grumman RQ-4B Global Hawk) which is UAV heading toward Black Sea where it will be spying over Russian invasion of Ukraine and launches of Russian missiles from Black Sea in their bombing of Ukrainian cities.
Flights supplying Ukraine were routinely top viewed flights on that website (they were flying to Rzeszów in Poland, so there was no real risk of Russian shooting them down).
AWACS planes and tanker flying in holding patterns over Poland, Romania and Baltic Sea used to be top observed planes on flightradar24 but I should be now working not looking through flightradar24 planes over Poland ( so I will link https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-60612255 that has video of inside one of them ).
Obviously planes flying combat missions are not publishing data there. Presumably ones training in restricted airspace are not either for also obvious reasons.
You can actually track a large number of military flights on websites such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ a large amount of the time they fly with there transponder on because they don’t want to hit other aircraft.
“We should remove transponders from private airplanes as the occupants privacy is more important than the safety they provide” is certainly a plank someone could run on if they wanted to change the current laws.
It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.
Transponders are in planes mostly for safety. Their automated dissemination is part of the safety mechanisms of that transport medium and putting up with them (when required) is part of the privilege of using that public good. Similar to requiring drivers licenses to drive.
Isn't it pretty established in the US that e.g. companies selling bulk license plate scanner data is completely legal, and any "right to privacy" isn't really a thing in public space? (very different in other parts of the world, but US seems to be the relevant context here)
My understanding is that in the US this kind of thing doesn't work on "need to" basis. It's something planes broadcast (for air traffic control reasons) unencrypted, anyone can receive it, there is nothing banning people "hearing" unencrypted radio from telling others what they hear. (Similarly to how police scanners or listening to ATC radio is legal)
In Europe it's not always legal to listen to unencrypted radio transmissions if you're not the intended recipient, but this is heavily country dependent and not rabbit hole worth diving into here.
But what's definitely not legal anywhere in the EU is to record unencrypted radio transmissions, use it to construct a database full of PII, and distribute it like Flightradar and friends do.
Tesla HQ is in Austin Texas, Twitter HQ is in San Francisco California. Tesla shareholders have been criticizing Musk for spending far more time at Twitter than he said he would while Tesla's stock has dropped. Therefore, there's a public interest in whether he is in San Francisco or Austin.
So any time some shareholders are upset it automagically legitimizes the use of cyberstalking the private vehicles of the company’s executives?
Sorry, but that is a really weird justification. It seems to me that is just the type of issue that corporate boards are designed to handle without the need for vigilanteism.
This reads along the same lines as "we must watch our employees because we don't trust them to get their work done". This doesn't seem like a genuine public interest so much as reaching for a justification given the circumstances.
This is a ridiculous comparison because there is little to no power differential between Elon and his shareholders while a significant one exists between an employee and his employer.
These kinds of comparisons, where two vaguely similar situations are considered equal regardless of the wealth, power, or influence of the participants remind me of this quote by Anatole France:
> The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
But in this particular case there is a lawsuit that says he is not doing his job. This isn't a micromanger checking door access logs for every employee, this is a manager saying "X isn't getting his work done and there are rumors he's not even showing up. Check the logs."
In this context it is a bit of a reach but I don't think they're wrong, and I don't think there's a reason to expect normal workers and CEOs to follow the same logic.
I don't trust him to get work done. It's common knowledge he's not actually doing anything useful at any of the companies he "runs". There's a whole culture of "handling Elon" so he can't make terrible decisions and run a company into the ground. Twitter doesn't have that, so we're seeing everything out in the open.
holding people in power accountable (musk visit D.C. musk flies to china. whatever).
tracking & pointing out grossly polluting means of travel.
market making information (musk spends more time visiting ___ faltering plant or ignoring ___. Musk makes trips to __ location, acquisition in the works)?
elon is a public figure and his movements/actions create legitimate news. same as any other celebrity or politician.
gawker did this first and that was actually stalking precise irl real time locations of celebs.
People keep saying that yet no one has been able to define to me what “legitimate interest” the public has for tracking a private plane. I don’t believe one exists.
If you are sure of yourself, do a little experiment. If you truly believe it’s legitimate, why not just buy an AirTag and hide it on a person’s car…perhaps a local well known business owner. Create a website that publishes the live location of the vehicle. Let us know here how that goes for you.
Ah, personally, I think getting hung up on the whole " legitimate public interest" argument is a distraction.
The simple fact of the matter is that due to how this data is created, it's publicly accessible information: All airplanes flying in civilian airspace are required to broadcast ADS-B data for safety reasons. It gives controllers (and other aircraft in your nearby airspace) a view of what's happening. Your airplane essentially broadcasts a payload every second that sends out your GPS coordinates, heading, speed, altitude, aircraft identification information, etc.
The COOL thing (speaking as an aviation geek), is that you can buy a cheap little antenna, plug it into a Raspberry Pi and start seeing these raw packets from airplanes FLYING OVER YOUR HOUSE. FlightRadar24 and ADSB Exchange basically crowd source a bunch of real-time data from people who have these antennas and are running various types of software.
Basically, since this is happening in public view and the data is available (primarily for safety reasons), then there is really no reasonable expectation of privacy. In a way, it's like people taking a photo of you on the street and posting about it -- since you're in a public space, there is no expectation of privacy. You might not like it, morally it might feel wrong, but there is no reasonable legal reason that bans this.
Fortunately (for Elon), he is a billionaire and can lobby to change laws he doesn't like if he so wishes.
Data can be created and used for a legitimate purposes, using this data for aerospace safety is a positive and legitimate use of the data. Hobbyist use of the day could be considered legitimate and appropriate as well. However, the same data can be used for negative reasons too.
I don’t question the legal right to use this data this way, although I think good arguments could be made that if you are using the data this way, your intention is suspicious and you invite scrutiny. I am challenging the folks commenting here that the data being used this way is a positive use of the data.
> People keep saying that yet no one has been able to define to me what “legitimate interest” the public has for tracking a private plane. I don’t believe one exists.
If you have an objection to this tracking, you'd have to take it up with the FAA. Because the legitimate interest is that the rules require airplanes to transmit this information any anyone is free to listen to it.
Which is a great thing for aviation safety, so I'm glad the rules exist.
I mean, that particular individual is in turn weird and not okay.
But who am I to say? And what does it matter if something is weird and not okay? Lots of things fit that bill, and that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.
Not the same thing. The airspace above the United States belongs to the people thereof, who have promulgated regulations requiring aircraft to be equipped with ADS-B. You might not see the "legitimate interest" but frankly nobody asked you. Those are the rules.
So the private vehicle driving around a public road equipped with a government required license plate that can be used to ID who owns the vehicle…yada yada yada. Zero parallels there.
Also I should note, that nobody asked me if I think people who intentionally cyberstalk folks online using public information are slimy either…(but I do).
I recently read this book. I think you could benefit from reading it. It's about how escalation of language—as you just did my moving up to "cyberstalking"—is used by people to escape responsibilities.
Just exactly what “responsibilities” do you perceive me to have in this discussion? Others are advocating monitoring another person’s property using technology and publishing it on the internet. I am suggesting that there is no reasonable civil reason to do so. The only “responsibility” I have here is to be true to my opinion. I stand by it.
Also, I used the term “cyberstalking” because that is exactly what it is. Here is a Wikipedia page on the term:
But there’s no evidence the dangerous situation happened at all (and even the counter evidence of there being no police report). He’s previously lied about another son dying in his arms (to justify not unbanning Alex Jones) so it’s very feasible the entire incident is made up.
The last flight tracker post was several days before the alleged incident. Totally unclear what link exists between the flight tracker and the alleged incident, unless an ADS-B transponder is on the car and the car is flying.
Even if there was a link, a dedicated stalker is perfectly capable of retrieving the flight information themselves from government websites or other tracking websites. Elon hasn’t even asked for it to be restricted information - which just requires asking the FAA, most flight tracking websites voluntarily comply with the list as well, though not all. That would be a reasonable first step to make, along with privately discussing the incident with the account holder.
That’s a very fair point. Also possible his ex-wife had a false memory as well.
I’m reading too much of my disbelief Elon is a good parent into that story. I think I am retroactively applying modern Elon (weird breeder thing, arguably abusive child naming, repeated attacks on his daughter) to an earlier stage of his life. And that’s also not likely fair or accurate to who Elon was at the time his son died.
This approach won't solve the problem. Especially for a celebrity. Twitter's censorship was dumb before, but this is equally or even dumber by being so prominent and kicking the bees nest.
This is demonstrably false; Elon didn't even file a police report.
> Sweeney said he hasn't received any notification of legal action, and the last time his bot tweeted anything was Dec. 12, "which is not last night, so I don’t get how that’s connected.”
Indeed, though not necessarily mutually exclusive.
I have personally seen the claim debunked on numerous platforms almost immediately after it was made, however, I concede that someone else may not have been exposed to that yet.
What does the phrase “free speech absolutist” mean to you?
He’s described himself as one, and I can’t see a way to square the idea that he says he is a free speech absolutist with the excuse that free speech is hard to regulate in the real world. He’s either a moron or was incapable of understanding even first level consequences of his actions or he’s an actual moron
> I wonder how long it'll be before Musk starts remotely shutting down the Teslas of people who say things about him that he doesn't like.
Now that would be a perfect case for a lawsuit. I mean, Elon probably will do it anyway, but he will get reined in by the courts. Time for him to learn he's not above the law after all.
I'm annoyed by everyone just making things up that they find ideologically convenient. I'm annoyed when Elon does it, I'm annoyed when his enemies do it.
I'm not defending his choice to ban it. The person I was responding to made the claim that the journalists were banned without even having posted the banned information. If that's true, that's bad in a different way than the choice to ban the information in the first place.
My position is that I don't like his decision to ban this information, but I understand it. If, however, he is using this as an excuse to capriciously ban his enemies, that is something I don't like a lot more.
You know, I’m sick of people saying AOC is the far left version of Elon, or more often, the left’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. Bullshit. AOC is more left of center than most in Congress but if you follow her, she’s mostly earnest (especially for a pol) and she does the work. Even when I disagree with her, I find her to be considerate and intellectually honest. She’s not the left’s Elon, MTG or Boebert, she’s far, far better.
Please, Elon’s companies rely on so much establishment money in the US, the establishment’s control over its population in China, etc.. He’s as establishment as it gets. Just has a veneer of anti-establishment that, checks notes, leans right / authoritarian.
Does AOC own her own jet? If not, you're just trying really hard to make two things that are not the same, the same in your mind. The rest of us are looking at each other with raised eyebrows intimating "what's this about?"
There are multiple issues here and people can be upset about some while not being upset about all of them. Musk specifically Saif he would not ban the account that reports on his jets location. He then changed his mind and the account was banned. Journalists reported the ban and were themselves banned for their reporting.
Personally, while I think banning the jet location account is hypocritical I don't have a serious problem with it. I do have a problem with banning journalists reporting on the ban.
I don't necessarily believe him without evidence. But i'm not going to believe anyone else who doesn't provide evidence either. It'd be great if people would just stop making things up all around.
There’s nothing wrong with asking for evidence, but as we can see from your other comments, there is no way for anyone outside of Twitter to definitively prove what the accounts tweeted before they were banned.
A certain amount of skepticism is healthy, but allowing people to flood the water with BS allows them to get away with lying more often than not (people just throw their hands up and say “who knows!”). Ties go to the liar.
At a certain point you have to pay a repetitional penalty and Elon has spent more than his fair share from that account. If he’s going to claim something I’m not even going to entertain it until he proves proof.
> There’s nothing wrong with asking for evidence, but as we can see from your other comments, there is no way for anyone outside of Twitter to definitively prove what the accounts tweeted before they were banned.
That's not entirely true, if someone had a copy of all of the recent tweets from one of the banned accounts, then it'd be relatively easy to check if any of them violated the new policy in any reasonable sense.
> A certain amount of skepticism is healthy, but allowing people to flood the water with BS allows them to get away with lying more often than not (people just throw their hands up and say “who knows!”). Ties go to the liar.
However, I agree with you completely here. What I disagree with was the original comment I was responding to simply declaring that he had banned them despite them not violating the policy. That statement may end up being true, and maybe that person has evidence for it, but if so they should provide it. And if they don't have evidence for it, they should say something much more like what you've said here.
I think Elon should provide evidence for his claims as well, and I'd make the same criticism of him. If you're going to ban high profile journalists who are critical of you en masse with a new rule you just enacted, you'd better publish receipts along with it, at the very least.
I think it's fair not to draw conclusions either way without confirmation. But if that's what's happening here the statements should be framed in those terms, not as a declarations that he banned people who didn't even violate his new rule.
Given past performance, along with behavior like banning links to Mastodon, it's also completely fair to guess that Musk is likely lying again. It's a common behavior of his, and far more likely than some of these journalists lying, when the journalists could easily be proven wrong, at great cost to themselves. Musk pays no penalty for lying.
Edit: that said, there could be some small tenuous grain of truth to what Musk thinks happened...
They weren't. From what I understand, some of them merely linked to the already banned @Elonjet account on Twitter. They didn't link to his location by even the loosest interpretation.
You're asking for evidence that they didn't tweet something? It isn't our job to prove a negative. Just take a look at their tweets and show me the ones where they DID report on the location of the jet. Can't find them? Neither can Elon Musk? That's odd, maybe they never existed after all.
The new poll also has a 24 hour timer, so 'now' is effectively a 1 day ban. I kind of suspect the length of time has other motivations (but that's really just me being cynical).
amzn and zoom were the kings of the hill during COVID shutdowns, it only makes sense that there would be a fall after that rise. Nvidia has been ruined by supply chain shortages and the end of proof-of-work on Eth. Facebook has been on the rocks for years, and the Metaverse has been a complete debacle. The only one in that list imho that could be taken as a general "state of tech stocks" is GOOG, because while GOOG's products are having rocky performance they always are.
That is what people are doing with TSLA. Cherry picking one of many tech stocks that went down and trying to attribute to something other than macroeconomic factors.
Elon, quite literally, immediately asked for the Internet to doxx someone right after making this rule change. He posted a picture of a car/license/person and demanded everyone find this person. Strangely, the 'incident' was never important enough to actually contact law enforcement over...
But the principle won't be applied equally. No property of the universe will swoop in and force Musk to take action when trans people are threatened. It is an error to assume that systems that protect the rich and powerful will be used to protect the poor and oppressed.
I agree. Principles are the only way out of this. People need to feel faith that an evenhanded application of impartial standards will protect both them and their ideological foes alike. Whatever privacy standards are established need to protect everyone the same.
It's easy to point out Musk's hypocrisy and shifting standards. Conservatives did the same when it was more liberal people who ran Twitter. We need to appeal to something higher than "everything is great when people who agree with me are in charge."
It's interesting that many are debating the value of this 'rule', when this action is blatant abuse of his powers to silence his critics. He has now a lengthy and growing history of this type of behavior, so it was 100% foreseeable. He could just come out and say that its his twitter and he can do what he wants, but no, because he also wants to be seen as a 'defender of free speech'. He acts like a-hole, but then expects unquestioning adoration.
> He acts like a-hole, but then expects unquestioning adoration.
Very typical narcissistic personality disorder symptoms. Narcissists are made not born, by other narcissists, thru treatment that is dehumanizing and inhumane from a very young age. We should give him our compassion and empathy, but not allow him any power. Power in the hands of a narcissist is dangerous, as the orange man showed us.
Not going to take a position on the latest Twitter drama; just want to point something out:
>Narcissists are made not born
I have a background in abnormal psychology and this is false. Narcissists are either born or the behavioural disorder forms in very early childhood. I'm on mobile right now but will find a source and come back to edit this reply.
Again, not taking sides or even care much about the Twitter thing. Just wanted to point that misconception out.
“Narcissistic features can come from childhood environments characterized by excessive deviations from ideal rearing, where either neglect/abuse (not enough caring attention) or over-pampering (too much caring attention) is present (Stone, 1993).”
“Narcissism tends to emerge as a psychological defence in response to excessive levels of parental criticism, abuse or neglect in early life. Narcissistic personalities tend to be formed by emotional injury as a result of overwhelming shame, loss or deprivation during childhood.“
> Causes
It's not known what causes narcissistic personality disorder. The cause is likely complex. Narcissistic personality disorder may be linked to:
> Environment — parent-child relationships with either too much adoration or too much criticism that don't match the child's actual experiences and achievements.
> Genetics — inherited characteristics, such as certain personality traits.
> Neurobiology — the connection between the brain and behavior and thinking.
There could be a relationship between neglectful parenting and narcissistic personality disorder, but I definitely agree with the other person who replied to you — at the very least, it’s disingenuous and misleading to present the cause concretely and unambiguously as “bad parenting”. We really know so little about most mental health conditions.
He literally worked to hurt people by vetoing same-sex marriage (twice), refused to supervise healthcare providers or approve a public option (again, vetoed twice), expanding use of private vehicles (he’s too old to care about climate disaster).
I can rant about Brown and Newsom for days, but he’s worse.
I wish that were true, but I think at this point it's technically mutable but ossified, much like the Bitcoin genesis block. You could change it, but you'd have to do a lot of work. So much work that it's just not gonna happen.
They're all hypocrites. But the final hurdle of ratifying an amendment requires 3/4 of state legislatures to be on board. And while the rural gerrymander projects have been alarmingly successful, that's still pretty far off.
So on the balance, I feel pretty good about this. For at least the next 3 elections. And if Musk keeps following in Ye's footsteps, he'll be a washed-out has-been by then.
Both parties are anti-immigration in practice. The only difference is in their posturing to their respective bases around election time.
Consider that the last major amnesty was under Reagan and the last major tightening of immigration rules was the IIRAIRA under Clinton. The modern deportation machine was really spun up by Obama - he removed more people from the US than any other president, almost 1% of the entire US population was deported by Obama. 50% more than Dubya and more than Trump. [1]
It's been two years under full-on Democratic party rule, the remain-in-Mexico policy is being walked back but still in effect. [2] Children are still being separated from their parents at the border. [3] [edit] The public charge rule still exists, but was returned to the classical definition. [4] Indian-born folks are still in 50+ year queues to get green cards subject to deportation at the whims of their employers. Consulates abroad still have year-long backlogs for appointments to get visa foils so people here, legally, in the US, cannot leave the US as they wouldn't be able to get back in without a new foil. I have friends who haven't left the US in years to see their families.
More of the US-Mexico border wall was built under Obama/Biden than it was under Trump, and Obama was behind the implementation of the biometric exit control program.
I would definitely say that the progressive caucus inside the Democratic party is pro-immigration. If it were not for the two party system, this would be its own party. Regrettably this sub-group does not have a ton of influence on their party’s policies, but their influence has been growing for sure since 2018, getting almost a 100 seats in this years mid-term election. Not all districts have the option of voting a progressive (which most likely happens in a democratic primary vote), and quite a lot of times a progressive actually looses to a moderate (or even a conservative in the case of Cisneros vs. Cuellar in TX-28). But my feeling is that the progressive caucus has not stopped growing, my hope is that this will result in a significant reform in the kind of immigration policy the democratic party endorses.
I'd lean that vs the reast of the world, both US parties are very pro immigrant
For example, neither party has revoked all visas and sent everyone home, and both parties have presided over plenty of immigrants both entering the country and becoming citizens.
The long queues and things are that the US is immigrant friendly, but with rate limits. It's one thing to leave the rate limits alone, another to reduce them, and another to increase them
It may seem that this is relative (and from a humanitarian perspective, it may very well be), but from a marxist perspective this is not a relative issue. While the owning class can have free flow of capital, any restriction on the freedom of movement is bad, as it creates low-cost-labor zones which the workers are unable to migrate from and can be exploited by capitalist enterprises. Advocating for free-movement of people is pro-immigration, advocating against it is anti-immigration. And advocating for forced removal of people (i.e. deportation) is both anti-immigration and anti-human-rights.
"Both parties are anti-immigration in practice. The only difference is in their posturing to their respective bases around election time."
Looking at the vast share of immigrant population in the US, "anti-immigration" means something very different from what I would expect.
Orbán's government in Hungary is anti-immigration in the classical sense. Last year, they received 40 asylum requests - out of more than half a million total in the entire EU.
The exact definition of natural-born citizen has never been tested. This is literally the only part of the constitution which uses that term, and it isn’t defined. Some interpret it to mean born of US parents, regardless of actual birthplace.
Regardless, we can be confident that a naturalized citizen like Musk doesn’t meet the requirement.
With the recent exception of COVID, there has not been a significant reduction of even legal immigration during the periods when the supposedly "anti-immigration" party was in power.
Welcome to the new Twitter, just like the old Twitter.
At least now everyone understands the value of a neutral free speech town square and can see that "it's a company, they can do what they want" was always a disingenuous argument. It was never principled, it was always predicated on bias alignment. It's the same with those who are happy about these journalists being banned. Blatant bias and hypocrisy on both sides.
> At least now everyone understands the value of a neutral free speech town square
Nope. People still very much don't want that.
> and can see that "it's a company, they can do what they want" was always a disingenuous argument.
There's no conflict between saying that and also saying that chanting 'free speech' over and over while banning people for what they say about you just makes you a liar.
> However, on 26 October the Metropolitan Police dropped the charges, revealing that they had discontinued their criminal case against Mustafa because there was "not enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction".[25][26][24] Under the Victim's Right to Review Scheme, one of the complainants in the case then requested that the Crown Prosecution Service review their decision to terminate criminal proceedings.
#killallmen is not meant as a serious threat against any one person, or even a group of people. It is meant as an—albeit radical—battle-cry to topple the patriarchy. At least that is how most courts and most moderators see it, so censoring it like if it were a serous death threat would always be rather silly.
Most of HN completely miss the intent of conventional doxxing rules and widely accepted privacy laws in most countries.
- Public figures, like politicians, top businessmen, and so on don't get the same amount of privacy and protection as regular Joe. You can follow them and track them. If you have power and influence, you don't enjoy the same privacy protections as others. That's a really good principle to have.
- Elon Musk himself is know for punching down that violates this principle. His M.O is to point his crazy followers against regular Joes and then playing innocent. "It was not me".
It's funny how this debate has shifted. Now that Elon owns twitter, it's Elon haters bringing up the law whereas before they were talking about how twitter can do what they want as a private company.
For my money, there's absolutely nothing wrong with twitter disallowing "person trackers". Legality aside, whether it's Elon Musk or Nancy Pelosi, the subtext of these trackers is creepy and threatening and banning them from some platform is fine.
Twitter and Elon don’t care about “person trackers”. Elon cares about personally not being tracked. You think if someone launches a Chuck Schumer tracker that Elon is going to care about Twitter banning it? He will probably want it to stay up to troll the moderates while pretending they are on the left.
> before they were talking about how twitter can do what they want as a private company.
Who are this group of “Elon haters” who are being so inconsistent? Sure a lot of Democrats are in the hands of capital and are complete moderates. Same with many Republicans. Most people are on the side of capital the majority of the time. To blanket group everyone who is against current Twitter as Elon haters in one block is weird. Do you think leftists who despise Elon were sitting around saying they want Twitter to do whatever they want? Even progressives have been consistently against big business power. Twitter is a big business.
The debate hasn't shifted. Everyone is pointing out his blatant hypocrisy and lies since taking ownership. He's allowed to do whatever he wants with Twitter. And the rest of the world is allowed to call out his hypocrisy every time we see it.
They were defending Twitter's biased nontransparent censorship before only because it aligned with their bias. Now that it doesn't match their bias, they see the problem.
I'm always surprised when a commenter is blinded to seemingly obvious differences.
Nobody else has joined the "absolute free speech but only until it targets me specifically" club. They're still pointing at it as a bad thing.
People are rightly pointing out that literally just a few days ago Elon's entire mantra, the story for why he paid tens of Billions of dollars to buy twitter, was him moaning about bans and loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen that he wouldn't do bans because "free speech".
And yet all of a sudden, when that absolute free speech is directed at himself, his narrative flips on its head and ban ban ban ban ban.
Well, the consequence of free speech absolutism is that people will broadcast your location. Gosh. Who ever could have predicted that.
There's a general segment of the population who are incapable of understanding or caring about obvious consequences for anything that doesn't happen to them personally.
The inability to understand or care about obvious consequences until they happen to oneself is a normal characteristic of young children, still mentally undeveloped and shielded by the adults around them, but it's weird, unbecoming, and sad for a grown adult to still have this problem.
Who is they? Not every one who is against current Twitter and Elon are hypocritical. Leftists in particular were against Twitter’s non transparency and in general are non-hypocritically against big tech.
The right in general on the other hand. They are on the side of business and capital but when big tech happens to ban and annoy both the left and right, the right whines about how bad big tech is and how it needs to be reigned in. Not all business of course, only which businesses they are against and consider “woke”.
That information wasn't "already available" - ElonJet was purposely and knowingly working around privacy protections, and they didn't hide it either. That's like guessing your password, getting into your emails and arguing "this information was already publicly available". Or installing a wiretap on your phone and saying "well, that information is publicly available".
No, if you take specific action to override explicit privacy protections, it's not "publicly available".
And the story didn't end with this information being just "available". It continued to a masked black bloc wearing person stalking his car and blocking it and climbing on it. Nobody was hurt, so far - but it's not just "information being available" anymore.
I've known Musk was crazy ever since he baselessly called Vern Unsworth (the diver who rescued the children trapped in a cave in Thailand) a "pedophile".
But there was a reason he invented this new rule, and I think it's unwise and unfair to dismiss a stalker attack as "being tagged on the playground".
This purported stalking happened to a car, miles away from any airport, on a day when his plane hadn't flown and therefore its location hadn't been updated.
Most of those banned have nothing at all to do with providing updates from the public database of jet flight plans.
The only common thread is that they report in Elon Musk. They have nothing to do with the stalking incident, just with annoying Musk by doing other journalism.
Further, if he was doing what you were saying, that's not a new rule. The new rule that Musk made as to bring back doxxers and targeted harassers like LibsOfTikTok, that had been putting innocent people at great bodily risk by inflaming people with falsehoods and then sending them after people in real life. Yet LibsOfTikTok is still on Twitter!!
> The only common thread is that they report in Elon Musk. They have nothing to do with the stalking incident
According to Reuters (not linked because paywall), Ella Irwin (Twitter's head of trust and safety) said all accounts that linked to ElonJet were reviewed. Most of the suspended accounts probably did that; I've seen screenshots of such links from a couple of them.
I don't know anything about LibsOfTikTok, but I took a quick look at their Twitter feed and didn't see any real-time location information. Perhaps you could point it out?
> It was unclear if all the journalists whose accounts were suspended had commented on or shared news about @elonjet.
Also, I have never encountered a paywalled Reuters article, and didn't know that could exist! Could you link it? Also no reason not to link to paywalled material, paywalls hit the top of the front page all the time at HN.
Libs of TikTok literally reposts content made public by the author. LoTT does not create the videos, they do not tell the video creators what to say. LoTT just gives those individuals more of the attention they seek which is the goal of posting said content. If anything LoTT helps normalize the behavior from these creators and gives them a larger bullhorn. LoTT gives publicity to those that are a significant minority.
LoTT sends armies of goons at specific times and locations to harass and threaten people. What LoTT does is 100 times worse than ElonJet. If you can't see the difference between actual threats on lives against Elon's faux threat then I can't help you.
If Chaya was only reposting w/o commentary, you might have a point. But she isn't. She's claiming that those people are "groomers", or "pedos", or whatever slur bigots are using now.
Could you provide a link to a single tweet that gave instructions, times or locations to harass people?
Or
Did LoTT share PUBLIC information about PUBLIC events? Fuck... in the last 24 hours people have lost their fucking minds over Elon's stalking ban and claim it's public information.
Ya can't have it both ways. I know folxs want to but it's not possible.
Blocking those who want to give the general public up to-the-minute location information on him and his family is "silencing his critics?"
Nothing could be further from the truth.
You have no fundamental right to track Elon Musk, just like I would have no fundamental right to track the whereabouts of you and your family. Disagree? When do you let us attach a tracking device to your conveyance?
Few, if any, would be comfortable having their family movements tracked by the public.
Also, journalist is a bit of a stretch. Journalism died a long time ago. Corporate script-readers at best, and state-run media parrots at worst. Either would be a better description than "journalist."
I remember when that "journalist" from WashPost published the home address of a woman she didn't like. Everyone was all for that...
Now it seems the shoe is on the other foot and the hypocrites don't like it.
> You have no fundamental right to track Elon Musk, just like I would have no fundamental right to track the whereabouts of you and your family. Disagree? When do you let us attach a tracking device to your conveyance?
Nobody's tracking Musk, they're tracking his plane. Further, "they" aren't tracking it, the gov is, and publishing it, as public information.
Everyone lets the same tracker be attached to their conveyance ... WHEN THEY OWN A JET.
Let me fix your reasoning. Pro government journalists suspended after trying to intimidate a powerful critic by doxxing his location. FBI likely involved.
Saying something is false doesn't make it so. Granted , political truths can be somewhat subjective.
My conclusions flow from;
Elon being directly intimidated by a stalker. The politically motivated violence in the last few years, makes it completely reasonable for Elon to feel threatened to have his location released.
Keith Olbermann being a very pro government journalist, along the other journalist is true. And the FBI now having a documented history of interfering in what media companies publish ( by Twitter's own records, and Mark Zuckerberg public statements). Provides FBI motive to try to intimidate the man that help to exposed them.
There's little value in journalists carrying about releasing Elon Musks location... especially given all the journalistic principles these same "journalists" previously did not care about.
> It's interesting that many are debating the value of this 'rule', when this action is blatant abuse of his powers to silence his critics.
I think it’s you that’s missing the point here. It’s only abuse of power if the rule against doxxing is invalid. So it does come down to the rule and whether or not doxxing is acceptable. If we decide that doxxing is acceptable and posting anybody’s real-time location data is acceptable (without their consent), then he is abusing powers. If that is your conclusion, then you don’t have the right to complain should it happen to you. If you believe the opposite, that doxxing is unacceptable, then the rule should apply equally to everybody. Critics and journalists do not get a free pass to break the rules.
> If we decide that doxxing is acceptable and posting anybody’s real-time location data is acceptable (without their consent), then he is abusing powers. If that is your conclusion, then you don’t have the right to complain should it happen to you.
This really does not follow. We already have plenty of exceptions for what is appropriate when reporting on public versus private figures in other aspects of life. As Musk himself has demonstrated, "absolutism" of any sort is a difficult view to hold when one's feet are put to the fire, and nuance is actually important.
Even if you think that reporting on Elon's plane (or in the case here, the "reporting on the reporting" on Elon's plane) should be forbidden, I would suggest that this development is still difficult to defend. This is a reversal in policy that Elon made because it was about him personally.
Are you sure Elon will continue to agree with you on who/what to censor in the future?
> Are you sure Elon will continue to agree with you on who/what to censor in the future?
I am 100% sure that I WON’T agree and that Twitter is inherently flawed pre-Elon and post-Elon.
The only point I was making is that within the context of this flawed system, given a rule is broken, it should not matter who the rule breaker is. “Silence opponents” narrative is only true if the people being silenced are being treated unequally. If they are, then the narrative is true.
Nobody is posting his whereabouts; someone wrote a bot which grabs public API data which was pulled from ADS-B (which you can receive with a 20 EUR DVB-T receiver) which includes his private jet. His private jet may or may not contain him, and his whereabouts after he left his plane are not included. F.e. if he used a public transport, nobody would post his whereabouts automatically on Twitter.
Someone posted yesterday that the beginning of Musk's Twitter buy happened shortly after elonjet refused his $5000 offer to buy the account. The rational part of me says he surely couldn't have spent $45 billion dollars to shut the account down, but it's kinda feeling more and more true as the story continues.
It's like this is the 21st century version of the San Francisco story where Yung refused to sell their house to the robber baron Cocker, leading Cocker to build an expensive three story tall fence around the house forcing Yung to move.
> The rational part of me says he surely couldn't have spent $45 billion dollars to shut the account down, but it's kinda feeling more and more true as the story continues.
He could have banned the account on day 1, but he tweeted in defense of it. I don’t buy the theory that he had to wait to save face, he seems perfectly content to change his mind and make new rules on the spot without worrying about the backlash.
It seems more likely that he had idealistic reasons for buying the site and is becoming less idealistic as time goes on. Every worldview is flawed, you just don’t know it until you try to implement it. I think he’s moving past any initial altruistic aspirations and is now treating Twitter more like a tool that can be customized to achieve certain goals. I’m sure he thinks the goals are good for everyone, including himself, but from the outside it’s not mirroring the “public square”, “absolute free speech” mantras pre-acquisition.
> I’m sure he thinks the goals are good for everyone, including himself
This is exactly why democracy is so important. Humans are fallible. Power eventually corrupts everyone. Power should be distributed. I am not happy about de facto town squares being owned by powerful people. For this exact reason. Democrats were very happy with the status quo when their opponents were being censored. "It's a private business." I wonder if they will remain so idealistic.
I feel like you don't understand how exoduses work. It's not an "all at once from one day to the next" thing. The scales we're talking about cover hundreds of millions of people; it's nearly impossible for it to all be the same month, let alone the same day.
For example: Despite wanting to, it took me a month and half to migrate to Mastodon, for a variety of personal, irrelevant reasons. And I'm a techie. But now I'm there, I've unfollowed large amounts of people on Twitter, and am phasing it down entirely.
In the mean time, Mastodon gained magnitudes of users. Servers previously running fine are now overloaded. Services are shutting down to new signups left and right because they're overwhelmed.
When this happens, people notice. You should know: you're in a community composed of the kind of people who make their millions noticing trends like these and quickly jumping on them. This means more resources go into these trends, and it becomes like a wave: Every few weeks, there's a new large influx of people.
Every new "round" of this exodus, servers will be more ready, there will be more services, the social graph will be larger, and more people will be convinced.
Will Mastodon ever be larger than Twitter? No idea. It's definitely possible, but knowing in advance is not.
I can say one thing: I'm glad people are taking notice of the importance of decentralized social graphs again. It's nice to see, for once, an open source protocol growing organically and winning hearts and minds.
> The scales we're talking about cover hundreds of millions of people; it's nearly impossible for it to all be the same month, let alone the same day.
I fully agree. However given the number of triggering events, I'm yet to see and numbers that would indicate a strong trend in that direction.
> I can say one thing: I'm glad people are taking notice of the importance of decentralized social graphs again. It's nice to see, for once, an open source protocol growing organically and winning hearts and minds.
I disagree with your conclusion of likely continued growth - peopel are comfort driven and unless things directly affect them, they won't move or will move back.
However I fully agree with this point. I've been a big supporter of fediverse things for a long time and I hope the positive outcome here is more broad support for open source and decentralisation.
Could have offered the guy $5 million with a non-disclosure cemented. Musk would have tens of billions more right now, especially with the now crashing Tesla stock. Penny wise and pound foolish.
> Someone posted yesterday that the beginning of Musk's Twitter buy happened shortly after elonjet refused his $5000 offer to buy the account. The rational part of me says he surely couldn't have spent $45 billion dollars to shut the account down, but it's kinda feeling more and more true as the story continues.
Difficult not to see this as anything other petulance. It's Musk's site and he's free to do whatever he wants with it, but this seems squarely against "any legal speech will be allowed"
Not that this is a good defense, but I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility. Especially if he (rightly or wrongly, no comment there) thinks someone threatened his child... well, protecting your children is one of the more powerful instincts humans have, one of the handful powerful enough to outweigh an ego like Elon's. Plus he has to be at least a little frazzled by Twitter having no credible plan for being financially solvent after scaring off all the advertisers, so I'm guessing he's not doing cold, rational threat assessments of anything. Maybe that interaction of fear and irrationality does start overlapping with petulance too, I don't know.
I think people should take into account that something deep inside Elon knows he's in deep shit, and is probably contributing to him taking rash actions and generally lashing out. He was never a wise man, but I still suspect we're seeing him at a low ebb of rationality. Again, no sort of defense: this is a problem entirely of his own making.
It seems more likely the story about his kid is just another lie to try win the moment. The LAPD statement is careful not to state that no crime has been reported or under investigation, but to leave that interpretation open. They are “aware of the tweet.”
Definitely a solid possibility. Also a possibility he's just drinking his own koolaid, fully "believing" whatever is convenient. But honestly, the dude has probably been getting death threats for years already, in which case he already had reasons to be a little afraid. It's easy for me to imagine that fear cropping up here as being just one of the more prominent ways he's coming unglued under stress.
> The LAPD statement is careful not to state that no crime has been reported
"LAPD's Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet." (emphasis mine)
> Musk tweeted, "My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame."
> Soon, Elon's ex-wife Justine Musk revealed the real story and stated that it wasn't the techie but she was holding the child. She wrote, "A SIDS-related incident that put him on life support. He was declared brain-dead. And not that it matters to anyone except me, because it is one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him."
If Musk wants to turn over a new leaf and decide free speech is secondary to protecting children, he should consider banning the accounts that have whipped up bomb threats against childrens' hospitals of late.
>That's some psychopathic level lack of empathy for someone who's child died.
You can simultaneously have empathy for someone for the simple fact that their child died, and also think they're lying about the details for their own personal gain. The two are not mutually exclusive.
He cares so much about his children that one have gone a long way to have nothing to do with him [1]. His personal life is a mess, really a mess [2]. Like many billioners entrepreneurs I think he is just an absent father who only cares about him self.
For better or worse, that has very little to do with the kind of emotions I'm talking about. They seem (to me anyway) to start just north of the so-called lizard brain.
my opinion is you're lying, so right truthful doesn't apply. since we just get to follow your example and make everything potential bad faith, we can't trust you to tell the truth about anything.
Remember Elon joking about pronouns earlier? It's hard for me to read that as anything other than spiting his transgender daughter. Between that and his "can't win em all " statement, I don't think Elon cares all that much for his kids.
But I certainly agree that he's going through a crapton of stress right now, and that can't be helping. I hope he finds a feeling of safety, but I also hope that his daughter also finds the peace she needs...
Statistics. He has apparently 10 kids with however many women while being a workaholic and a tweetaholic. How much time could he possibly spend with them?
> I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility.
I think he's scared for his own safety. In fact he has basically said as much. As rich as he is, he still owes a lot of money and favors to a lot of people. Some of them are quite powerful and ruthless. They're likely displeased at how he's pissing away the value of an asset in which they have an interest. Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get him. If I had the kinds of friends or enemies that he has, and particularly if I had been busy converting the first into the second, I'd be worried too.
That's as good of an explanation as I've seen so far. The only problem is that nothing that he has done so far would reduce that exposure, in fact plenty of his actions increased it.
Right, that would be the "rash actions and lashing out" part. Decisions made in fear are pretty well known for making things worse, not better, even directly with respect to the reason for said fear.
That is approximately what I was getting at, so thank you. The guy's obviously operating in a fog of fear. This is probably exacerbated (if not caused by) his notoriously bad sleep habits, and/or whatever chemical help he uses to sleep at all. What's amazing is that so many people don't seem to recognize. I guess they just never lived in environments where you learn to recognize the signs.
When you're in a persistent fear state, rational decisions become almost impossible and actions directly contrary to one's own interest become commonplace. It's like the skier who's trying to avoid a rock, but keeps staring at it and naturally starts turning toward it instead. Sometimes it's better to look away, even literally, toward the path you should take instead. Unfortunately for us all, Musk so far seems unable to do that.
Those numbers are swelling steadily. And with every sale that Musk does he is adding to that pile. You have to wonder what makes him believe that Tesla stock is overvalued.
This is indistinguishable from
psychotherapy nonsense, palm-reading, soothsaying, entrail evaluation. There is zero factual basis for this “assessment,” and if you believe there is and buy into this, then you are only fooling yourself.
Yes, he's previously complained that marxism turned his child transgender
> In a new interview with Financial Times, the Tesla CEO, 51, said he believes his daughter — who legally changed her last name in June from Musk to Wilson — no longer wants to be associated with him because of the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists.
> "It's full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil," said Musk, who is a dad of 10. "It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can't win them all."
> Musk's comments come six months after Vivian filed a petition to legally change her name and gender.
I defended Elon many times on HN but this is straight up incompetence. Even if they violated some silly location sharing rule they invented yesterday, there's no good excuse.
The saddest thing is this only adds fuel to the pro-censorship crowd.
Which is exactly the position that Musk is supposedly fighting against -- it's almost like he has no actual principles and is at best no different than the people he's replacing
Did you watch the same video I did? It's easy to see this as something other than petulance. It's not complicated. Elon is scared for his family. That's a very human thing. In his place I'd do everything I could to protect them. The elonjet account was a security risk to a public figure in the same way that publishing the home address of Supreme Court Justices is a legitimate security risk -- and in the same way that it led to an attempted assassination of Judge Kavanaugh.
Not at all a fan of his actions on this, and I don't think publishing public information in the way elonjet did should be banned from any platform. BUT, it's a very bad faith argument to not correlate a mobile conveyance, like a private jet or personal car, to the individual who actively uses it the vast major of the time. It wouldn't be called "ElonJet" if it wasn't meant to track Elon, and it's highly unlikely ElonJet would continue to track that specific tail number if Elon traded it for another jet or sold it.
I think the distinction between tracking a private jet and tracking a private car is fairly clear cut. The point isn't to actually show where Musk is at any one point (who cares?), but I think the intent of the account is to show the intense disconnect between him and normal (non-private-jet-owning folks).
Unless I'm misremembering, the ElonJet account listed the cost and the amount of fuel consumed for every flight right? His willingness to burn 10 tonnes of jet fuel on a whim definitely doesn't mesh well with his brand as "The EV-guy".
In most American jurisdictions, yes, that's legal. The California stalking statute for example (Penal Code 646.9(a)) only applies if the person who's following you intends to make you afraid for yourself or your family. This why stalking victims so often struggle to do anything about it.
If they don't share the conformist, leftist authoritarian views of the HN crowd, then it is legal to do anything to them and they're probably transphobic.
Posting a link to a web page that publishes the public tracking information without even mentioning any person’s name almost certainly does not constitute doxing.
That seems pretty narrowly scoped to protecting witnesses, jurors, informants, public servants, and their immediate family members. The personal information it covers is also limited to SSN, home address, phone numbers, and personal email.
Starting to think there might be some national security issues with one guy being the nominal linchpin of the US space program, satellite internet, and global public messaging infrastructure.
But aren't the coordinates of his plane public anyways? And wouldn't shutting down ElonJet account be enough, why all these journalists' accounts as well?
Yeah, it was public ADS-B data. A lot of the suspended journalists never even posted his location, they just posted about the situation or the supposed stalker incident.
I believe that ADS-B Exhange (like the suspended journalists) linked to ElonJet's Mastodon account. This is consistent with the policy - even if that policy isn't agreeable - and doesn't seem to indicate that publishing public radio data is banned.
Is there any evidence/source that shows the suspended journalists actually linked ElonJet's Mastodon account? I thought they only mentioned ElonJet's Twitter handle.
Also I get journalists are feeling threatened, but it's a shame to see such a clear emotionally charged article from TC, I used to trust them for unbiased tech reporting.
I'm curious, can you point me to a sentence that you find "emotionally charged"? I went over every sentence and every one just states some facts. I'm not seeing the emotionally charged part.
The article confirms that Elon suspends link to Mastodons, but doesn't say anything about the journalists posting links to the Mastodon account for ElonJen.
Apologies, the TC article states why the JoinMastodon account was suspended:
> Twitter apparently suspended its open source competitor Mastodon from the service on Thursday afternoon. Just prior to its suspension, Mastodon (@joinmastodon) tweeted a link to the jet tracking account on its own service, according to archives.
"publishing public radio data" could mean just about anything. Your phone constantly broadcasts it's serial number and location to everyone near you, would you therefore consider your location to be public information whenever you move around with your phone?
Some people still use unencrypted wifi networks, is their traffic "public"?
What about baby monitors? Do you think that unencrypted baby monitor traffic is "public" in any reasonable sense of the term?
If your baby monitor signals go into my home and I am able to demodulate them into a clear signal then why shouldn't I be able to?
With wifi, an unencrypted network is an open invitation to connect to it, as this is the way to connect through portals which transfer to encrypted tunnels. Intercepting other traffic on the network is not OK since you would be violating hacking laws since it isn't your network.
Same thing with cell networks. Your phone broadcasts its data, which is perfectly legal to pick up, but if you have to use any network resources which aren't yours then it's a no-go.
Overall, if it is being broadcast into my house I can capture it, but I can't send things back to the source and try and get it to do things.
>If your baby monitor signals go into my home and I am able to demodulate them into a clear signal then why shouldn't I be able to?
Do you genuinely believe that you being allowed to spy on to your neighbours unencrypted baby monitor is a good thing that's helpful for society at large?
For example, in Finland this is legislated as follows:
Section 37 – Confidentiality of radiocommunications
(1) Radiocommunication is confidential and may be received only by those for whom it is intended. (46/2005)
(2) Whoever receives or otherwise has information on a confidential radio transmission not intended for him/her must not wrongfully disclose it or make use of the knowledge of the contents or existence of the transmission.
(3) The following are not considered to be confidential radiocommunications:
...1) initial transmissions of television and radio programmes;
...2) emergency calls;
...3) radiocommunications conducted using a public calling channel;
...4) the amateur service;
...5) shortwave radiocommunications in the 27 MHz frequency band; or any other radiocommunication intended for general reception. (46/2005)
The penalty for violating this law is a court-determined fine.
Do you think that this law is overall a net-positive or a net-negative for society? What good things come from you being able to listen to arbitrary transmissions intended for someone else?
> Do you genuinely believe that you being allowed to spy on to your neighbours unencrypted baby monitor is a good thing that's helpful for society at large?
It has everything to do with assessing what the desirable state of things would be.
It makes perfect sense to examine the positives and negatives, in this case I'd suggest that the negatives of allowing anyone to observe unencrypted radio transmissions far exceed the positives. Do you not think so? If yes, why?
This isn't really a hypothetical question, there are actually places which do allow this and places which do not.
> What about baby monitors? Do you think that unencrypted baby monitor traffic is "public" in any reasonable sense of the term?
Pushing unencrypted radio waves into a public space makes them public. Seems pretty cut and dry to me. If I plug an FM modulator onto my phone output and you tune to an FM station and hear my audio diary, that is my fault, not yours. Same as if I dropped a page of writing on the sidewalk. At that point, it is public.
Do you believe that it is a net-positive for society to see things this way?
If so, can you put in the least bit of effort to explain as to why?
You seem to be expressing an ideological belief that you have some god-given right to listen to any and all radio waves that you might be able to receive, but that doesn't in any way explain why you think the society at large should see things your way.
Radio and light are both electromagnetic waves. A radio is just a way of deciphering those waves into something else like a digital signal or an audio signal. To put it another way, if someone were pointing a video projector of their video baby monitor out of a window and it shown on your wall, do you think it should be criminal to look at it?
>Why are you using such extreme language? Is it possible to converse in a way without over-the-top adjectives like 'god-given right'?
Because of how you seem to be approaching this, you've made no effort to explain why things should be the way you want them to be. You appear to simply treat it as axiomatic, i.e. a god-given right.
> should it be a criminal act to listen to radio waves that are in public? What would define 'private' and 'public' radio waves if that were the case?
An earlier comment in this thread addressed this in it's entirety by citing an example of real legislation which gracefully handles this.
> What would define 'private' and 'public' radio waves if that were the case?
There are radio waves which the transmitter intends you to receive, and radio waves which the transmitter does not intend you to receive. Generally you'd be fully aware if a transmission is meant for you or not, but the legislation referred to earlier would not impose any penalties on you for accidentally listening to transmissions not intended for you.
> if someone were pointing a video projector of their video baby monitor out of a window and it shown on your wall, do you think it should be criminal to look at it?
That would likely be an deliberate act by the transmitter, whereas the RF-based baby monitor example would not.
On the other hand, setting up cameras to look through someone's windows would certainly be a criminal act in many places (as IMO it should).
-
-
What exactly do you think is wrong with this law?
> (2) Whoever receives or otherwise has information on a confidential radio transmission not intended for him/her must not wrongfully disclose it or make use of the knowledge of the contents or existence of the transmission.
The law essentially just mandates you to stop listening as soon as you realise the transmission is not meant for you. Only deliberate violations are penalized.
> Because of how you seem to be approaching this, you've made no effort to explain why things should be the way you want them to be. You appear to simply treat it as axiomatic, i.e. a god-given right.
You are approaching this as if you broadcast something into the common airwaves it is yours and your secret, while I maintain it is no different than yelling that thing out your open windows and then claiming no one can listen to you. Just because it requires a trivial bit of technology to 'listen' to a radio broadcast doesn't make it any different than blasting sound or light waves. This is your issue -- you think that radio waves are somehow distinct from sound or light, when it is just another version of such things.
You have simply disregarded everything that has been said so far and returned to merely repeating the "god-given right"-opinion.
> Just because it requires a trivial bit of technology to 'listen' to a radio broadcast doesn't make it any different than blasting sound or light waves
In many cases it would be illegal to use a fancy (or not fancy) microphone to listen to your neighbours through a wall, and why should it not be?
It's one thing to accidentally overhear something, and another to deliberately go out of your way to spy on others. Even most(?) US states have wiretapping laws which prohibit such activities.
This is not at all like setting up a special microphone to eavesdrop on someone. A person with a baby monitor would be broadcasting a signal onto public airspace with an amplified radio transmitter. If it comes into my airspace why can I not receive it using the same technology? Why does one person get to use publicly allocated radio frequencies and other does not? Is this fair? If the baby monitor broadcast on non-public frequencies it would be doing something much more illegal than me receiving them.
You are criminalizing receiving but not transmitting. I contend this is no different to yelling out of your window and criminalizing people hearing you. if you cannot come up with something other than 'it is wiretapping and private' to argue against broadcasting unencrypted radio into public airspace with a radio transmitter being by definition a public broadcast then I ask you not to respond because there is no answer to something like that, just as there is no answer to someone contending that listening to something people yell out of windows is a violation of privacy.
>I contend this is no different to yelling out of your window and criminalizing people hearing you.
You are deeply wrong. Humans can not listen to radio transmissions without special equipment.
Listening to your neighbours baby monitor generally requires specific efforts on your part. Same is obviously not true of your completely ridiculous example.
A direct comparison would be listening to your neighbour using some special long range directional mic or a thru-wall mic.
>just as there is no answer to someone contending that listening to something people yell out of windows is a violation of privacy.
You are being deliberately dishonest at this point.
Humans also cannot transmit radio signals without special equipment either, so your point means nothing. Anyway, you start calling names means you are out of ideas.
You can call me wrong all you want, but these are public airwaves, and the laws disagree with you. That Finnish law you quoted makes exceptions for public channels, so you are wrong about that as well. You can stand on your misguided principles and technological fetishism thinking that radio receivers mean that the airwaves are somehow different than those same exact airwaves with a different spectrum of EMF.
This claim keeps being made, but Musk’s aircraft is fully visible in the FAA registry data and doesn’t have an obfuscated ICAO hex code. It wasn’t part of the PIA programme, which is also not something endorsed by the ICAO but only used by the FAA within US borders. When flying abroad an aircraft must use its static ICAO address.
Even if it was there’s still nothing wrong with tracking the aircraft and nothing illegal about people matching the rolling ICAO hex codes to the real aircraft.
It frustrates me that we’ve allowed Musk to completely redefine the conversation around something that was already settled and accepted:
1. Flight tracking data, collected from ADS-B, is legal and publicly available. Aircraft ownership data is public too.
2. Nobody has a right to keeping their aircraft movements private, and aircraft movements != personal movements.
3. After much lobbying the FAA introduced LADD & PIA, but they say outright that it’s not a guarantee of confidentiality and just makes it slightly harder to track an aircraft.
4. PIA temporary ICAO codes can only be rotated every 60 days (going down to 20) and it’s pitifully easy for any aircraft spotter, as have hung around airports for decades, to match a new one to an aircraft registration.
It's the general data privacy regulation, it applies generally, to everything. It treats planes, cars and phones in exactly the same way (in that it never specifically mentions any of them).
The GDPR even covers you just writing notes into your diary about what your neighbours have been up to.
If you're going to argue (like _djo_) that this is not a precedent because it concerns a different type of a vehicle, you're entering into some rather absurd territory.
We have a clear example showing that simply storing pictures of car license plates by a toll road operator was a GDPR violation. Aircraft tail numbers are functionally exactly the same as car license plates.
The GDPR does not at any point discuss vehicles, from a GDPR perspective it makes no difference if the vehicle is a car, bicycle or your personal submarine. Or if there's a vehicle at all! GDPR concerns all PII for an extremely broad definition of PII.
Tracking locations of personal aircraft without consent is a GDPR violation, there really couldn't be a more obvious example of one.
PS. GDPR places the onus on the data controller to prove what they're doing is legal, not the other way around. You are guilty unless proven innocent. The reasonable question is to ask "Is there a precedent for this being legal?".
The answer to that is probably not, because the European flightradar24.com does have a privacy policy anywhere. This alone is blatantly illegal, but the reason they don't have one is almost certainly that their business is fundamentally not legal in Europe.
If what flighradar24.com and adsbexchange.com are doing was legal, they would have a privacy policy explaining the legal basis for their data collection. It's fundamentally impossible for their business to be GDPR compliant without one.
If Musk dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow it wouldn't meaningfully affect operations at SpaceX. If anything it would probably increase productivity there.
Honestly this is scary. Someone with a lot of power and sway over speech and other things getting paranoid that people are after him, and lashing out at any perceived threat is scary.
It would be scary if he didn't have half the power he currently holds.
Would be scarier if we hadn’t just endured 4 years of the exact same thing with Trump. Scarier thing to me now is that people somehow still can’t see guys like Musk and Trump (malignant narcissists both) coming from a mile away.
> Starting to think there might be some national security issues with one guy being the nominal linchpin of the US space program, satellite internet, and global public messaging infrastructure.
Which is why there are rumors and calls floating around that the US government should seize control over Starlink and SpaceX, e.g. [1], for national security issues.
The entire debate perfectly shows why neither complete government control over such programs nor complete private control is good - Boeing/ULA were milking the government for cash and acted as pork distributers for decades while showing not much progress, and Starlink's actions in Ukraine show the dangers that independent actors can wield over US foreign policy.
Now that the location of the supposed "attack by stalker" has been geolocated by someone affiliated to Bellingcat[1] and obviously that (if ever happened) had nothing to do with services or bots that share aviation public data; can we move past the, arguably naively made, smokescreen and ask what this supposed to disorient us from?
I mean, the hypocrisy of using a jet plane instead of driving for 40 minutes in your "environmental green" car is a thing[2], but shouldn't be enough to randomly ban journalists.
Musk joined a Twitter Spaces discussion about the bans and was mocked after he left [1]. Notably, suspended accounts were on stage with Elon during the discussion [2].
The space was ended abruptly 30 minutes later and it appears it was killed on Twitter’s side given that the usual metadata does not match what a closed Space has. This Space was being recorded and the replay is not available [3].
Musk now claims that they are fixing a “legacy bug” [4] and this is why Spaces has been disabled. In my opinion, Musk is behaving like a petulant child and his group of cheerleaders look more ridiculous and without backbone each day.
I think calling anyone defending Musk at any level a “cheerleader” isn’t a helpful framing of the debate.
It’s important not to make any issue an “I align with X so you’re against me” conflict.
Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact.
Musk is also behaving erratically, inconsistently, and seemingly also unethically over Twitter. And has done so in the past, eg in the dispute with the diver or against short sellers.
One aspect of Elon’s actions does not cancel the other out. We should celebrate the good and debate the bad.
I feel like this melodrama is driven by Musk’s detractors ready to pounce and dismiss, say, the development of reusable rockets, by Musk being petulant. That is not an argument that makes any sense.
And the same goes for any fans who think Musk’s incredible achievements give him permission to ban and censor those who annoy him.
> I think calling anyone defending Musk at any level a “cheerleader” isn’t a helpful framing of the debate.
What would be? When I see replies on Twitter that say things like “why are you arguing with literally the smartest person in the world?” in reference to someone challenging or critiquing Musk and other such hyperbolic comments coming out of nowhere, what do you call this other than cheerleading?
> Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact.
That is more than disputable. What great things has he done?
Musk has acted like a child and bully his entire career. People like me have called this out to downvotes, criticism, and almost ostracization and finally others are becoming aware of it. The sort of outpouring of hate of Musk is coming from this because people are more than weary of putting up with cult of personality and unbridled and misplaced worship of Musk.
> > calling anyone defending Musk at any level a “cheerleader” isn’t a helpful framing of the debate.
> I see replies on Twitter that say things like “why are you arguing with literally the smartest person in the world?” in reference to someone challenging or critiquing Musk
Musk has a disproportionate amount of nuts in his corner. That’s why they’re brought up in discussions about him. It’s not so much nutpicking as it is getting hit over the head with nuts.
If one defends a person who is effectively a cult leader and their maniacal actions, they shouldn’t be surprised to often get lumped into the more fanatic followers as a sort of social collateral damage. Very little about Musk’s behavior is defendable, and he also has a huge amount of unwavering followers. So defense of his behavior are questionable from the start.
> One aspect of Elon’s actions does not cancel the other out. We should celebrate the good and debate the bad.
However, I find it incredibly telling that every time Musk is criticized about his behavior over Twitter, some people cannot but bring up Tesla and SpaceX. Why is that? Do we have to put a disclaimer with every potentially good thing someone has done every time we criticize someone?
Well, this is somewhat circular but I think you’re making a genuine point that doesn’t apply in my case.
I was following the other way around… people are dismissing Musk as a whole and turning this into a binary debate, so I felt the need to point out that Musk’s achievements aren’t really disputable, so it’s silly to treat this as a binary debate.
It can be “yeah musk has done stupid things and brilliant things” but not “musk has done stupid things and anyone who defends him is a fanboy and what he has achieved positively is now moot.” And the post I was replying to, and indeed much of the debate, takes that form.
And y’know personally that really bothers me. Casting people as goodies or baddies just really gets to me for some reason. I don’t know why, it’s just really irrational behaviour that I can’t tolerate very well.
>And y’know personally that really bothers me. Casting people as goodies or baddies just really gets to me for some reason. I don’t know why, it’s just really irrational behaviour that I can’t tolerate very well.
Casting people as “goodies” and “baddies” might be rational. Suppose humans have a need (or desire) to predict another’s actions, or consequences of another’s actions.
Humans do not have all the time and resources in the world to evaluate each individual they interact with, directly or indirectly, so they may choose to use prior probabilities to model their world, as a shortcut.
It seems plausible that if this model of the world developed by shortcut is sufficiently accurate, then it would be rational to use this approach because the time and resources conserved can be better directed elsewhere (for the individual’s benefit).
Of course, erroneous or excessive use of prior probabilities may lead to negative effects for societies (possibly visible only in the long term).
> so I felt the need to point out that Musk’s achievements aren’t really disputable
Why? What do the previous achievements matter in a discussion about a self described “free speech absolutist” suddenly banning accounts without any transparency
All I care as a Twitter user is if the accounts I follow will be there tomorrow- if not my experience is diminished
I mean you could preface what you want to say with Musk is great, but (MIGB) - just like Mike Judge taught us.
MIGB, what makes musk think he can behave like a spoiled brat and people still keep liking him? He’s had his day in the sun and now he’s just a rich annoying brat.
Will you mention all the bad about Elon in a post about SpaceX achivements? I guess not, from your post. So no need to mention the merits of the companies he owns in a post about his absurd behavior.
Though in my opinion you assign way too much credit to a CEO of three companies that apparently spends most of his time on social media and being offended.
Founder, CEO, controller of the board. I can't think of a single person who has all of these titles at another company that people think deserve no credit.
> Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact.
> We should celebrate the good and debate the bad.
This is the kind of statements that are not a helpful framing of the debate.
Musk alone hasn't "has achieved great, incredible things", I can try and dispute this.
Why celebrate the good while debating the bad. Instead we should question the good and verify the bad. It should the expected behavior towards anyone in a position of power. Musk being in one of the highest positions of power in the world does not make him more vulnerable...
>I think calling anyone defending Musk at any level a “cheerleader” isn’t a helpful framing of the debate.
I generally agree with you POV (people are complicated). I don't think the parent was calling people people cheerleaders merely for defending him on any level.
But to add to your comment. I never understand why people are surprised that a person driven, opinionated and cutthroat enough to be a successful business person is a bit of an arsehole in person. It kind of goes with the territory.
> I don't think the parent was calling people people cheerleaders merely for defending him on any level.
Ah, I definitely read it that way. The use of “cheerleaders” leaves little room for ambiguity, I think.
I was watching a brilliant talk from someone quite famous in the nerd world and he was talking about Steve Jobs and the two things he brought to business… paraphrasing, one about being a visionary, and the other about… let’s say “strong management”. I do wonder if you’re right, I hope it’s possible to be nice and great though. Maybe it’s just harder.
I read 'cheerleaders' as musk fanbois. Or at the least we should be charitable in interpreting it as that.
Yes well unreasonable men change the world and all that. I don't think it's impossible to not be an arse hole and successful in business, but the 2 tend to go together, and even after you tend to get surrounded by yes men so even if you weren't an arse hole to start with, the situation runs the risk of turning you into one.
Incidentally, one of my heuristics to avoid this: if your team are not contradicting you on a regular basis, you are probably not a good manager. They should feel free to float opposing viewpoints.
People at Tesla and SpaceX have achieved great things, not Musk.
All he's demonstrating is that CEO pay and comp should never have got as high as it has and taxes on rich people needs to go way higher, they are just going to waste it any way.
Both tesla and spaceX are famously structured internally specifically to handle musk and his ideas, in the sense that they will have a team dedicated to listening to him then basically doing the minimum viable thing to make him think his ideas have been implemented. When management has an adversarial relationship with the CEO, it's hard to see what contributions musk could have made to the products directly. I will however concede that he has been a valuable viral marketing tool, but obviously that is changing rapidly.
The reason the twitter fiasco is happening is that twitter doesn't have such a team dedicated to cushioning musk, and so he goes around dictating whatever thoughts he has on an already major platform, even if these thoughts are directly contradictory with earlier ones, as was visible publicly on twitter.
Other than PR, which he is becoming worthless for (unless you count appealing to the historically not-believing-in-climate-change right as good PR for an EV company), i don't think musk has achieved much personally beyond having capital (with questionable legitimacy re its acquisition).
SpaceX was founded by Musk, he is the CEO, CTO, chairman of the board, owns 47% of the stock and has voting control of the board.
You seriously believe he allows a team of people to act as an intermediary between him and the company, yesman and nod to him, then go and do their own thing?
Step back for a second and consider how incredibly unlikely this scenario is. Try and put another successful billionaire and the company they founded into a hypothetical, and tell me it's realistic.
Well if they exist it’s unlikely he would allow them, which makes it somewhat plausible (idk) and it’s certainly not generally unheard of.
Another scenario to think about here is how does he spend any amount of quality time focusing on SpaceX or SpaceX projects when he’s running day-to-day ops at Twitter for sure and supposedly Tesla too. Something has to give.
If he’s mostly spending his time on Twitter I don’t see how it’s all that implausible that for SpaceX he does randomly show up and toss around ideas and people tell him yes so he goes away and they can go back to their normal ops. I don’t know either way, but I wouldn’t really dismiss it so offhandedly.
It's a good question, and I suspect he doesn't spend as much time on SpaceX as he used to.
However, he did found SpaceX 20 years ago in 2002. And their first successful launch was in 2008, 14 years ago.
It's entirely likely he puts less effort and impact into the daily running of SpaceX now, however I don't believe his last 6 months running Twitter invalidate his last 20 years running SpaceX.
I don't think it invalidates it, but it's impossible to run 3 companies the size of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter so I'm sympathetic to the idea that he might drop by one day to a Tesla and they give him high-fives and tell him what he wants to hear and then once he leaves they get back to whatever they were doing.
Have to imagine investors in Tesla are not happy right now with such divisive activities from Elon Musk in the public sphere and the lack of focus on the company (yes I can say factually he is not focusing enough on Tesla).
Given the number of news stories I’ve read like that, from a range of news outlets, and given that Musk is also CEO of Tesla, I’ve decided that I find these stories plausible.
What makes you believe he effectively does not run the company, despite his entitlements? There appears to be strongly evidence for him running it (his entitlements primarily) and no evidence I've seen against it.
You have certainly never worked with someone like this, or you’d know that this is almost 100% how it works. You are being naive in your assumption Elon does shit all, but run his mouth.
I’m not sure why you’re so obsessed with a fantasy version of a man.
I'm unsure where I indicated any obsession? Before replying I didn't actually know all of his roles there, I looked them up.
No, I have never worked with a billionaire CEO, founder and chairman of a space company. I have however worked with many founders and CEOs, and the ones who are dead weight quickly get moved on.
Why you do believe it's likely for this one to hold all the decision making power in a successful company with effectively no input?
Surely the default assumption is the founder/CEO of a successful company plays a part in it? So what do you have to indicate this is untrue, aside from your obvious dislike of a person you don't know.
> Both tesla and spaceX are famously structured internally specifically to handle musk and his ideas, in the sense that they will have a team dedicated to listening to him then basically doing the minimum viable thing to make him think his ideas have been implemented.
Elon didn't design Starship – SpaceX engineering teams did. Why don't ULA's engineers do something like Starship, is it because they aren't capable? I don't think that's fair; I think many engineers at ULA would love to do something like Starship, but Tory Bruno won't let them. And why is that? Well, I think Tory would love it if ULA could do something like Starship too, but he only has as much money as Boeing and Lockheed Martin are willing to give him, and he can only spend it on what they feel comfortable spending it on. And as far as Boeing and Lockmart go, why risk billions on some high-risk commercial space venture, when there are plenty of far safer big juicy defense contracts to chase instead?
That's the thing that Elon brings to SpaceX – expansive requirements, but also a willingness to risk billions in pursuing them. Gwynne Shotwell and Elon Musk make a good team, because she balances that out with pragmatism, organisation, management efficiency, customer focus. But, imagine if Elon had died suddenly 10 years ago – would Starship still be where it is today? As excellent an executive as Gwynne is, if it was all up to her, she might not have been wiling to make as big and risky bets as Elon has.
So I think this idea that all that Elon brings to the table is capital and PR is very mistaken. The other thing he takes to the table, is a willingness to take big risks which few others would, and the direction he gives to his teams to chase the limits of what is currently possible rather than settling for what is more obviously feasible. Sometimes, it all blows up in his face; other times, it has been a recipe for immense success. But, in that regard, both the success and the failure are coming from the same place.
I think looking at Blue Origin and comparing the achievements since founding is a clear difference in the leading between both? Bezos has not less capital or PR. But Blue Origin is almost forgetten to irrelevance at this point.
Not deserving any credit and not giving him more than is actually due are two different things.
Musk is not talentless. His abilities allowed him to make the best of his opportunities of the time and his own circumstances. But this is a story of a fortunate business person, not some inspiring role model in any professional field or just as a person.
On the whole he isn't even unique, just very public and the richest one.
>It’s important not to make any issue an “I align with X so you’re against me” conflict.
Ethics aren't some opinion you may or should just keep to yourself while lack of reason in public discourse does not need to be tolerated either.
Of course, that applies to the rest of us as well. There is definitely a subconscious wish within the hivemind of the public to see a bad guy fail, so a lot of people are willing stretch the truth a little bit.
I think that position confuses ethics with condemnation of an individual.
You can be ethically against stealing, but still see the positive elements in the life of a thief.
It is absolutely not necessary to turn the discussion around Musk into a trial. It is possible he is neither guilty or innocent, but rather a mixture of good and bad - like everyone on here, even those condemning him as a terrible human.
>You can be ethically against stealing, but still see the positive elements in the life of a thief.
Translated: You can use ethics to judge an action or just look at its risk/reward ratio? Yeah, that's what Musk does but that's also why plenty of people consider him a (near) sociopath.
And he never did anything at all, because these people saying that where part of every meeting and decision happening at his companies. It's mindblowing
There are people on all sides openly lying to make a point and when those lies are pointed out you are either insulted or blocked. It's really a strange world.
> Musk has achieved great, incredible things. That’s just indisputable fact.
But I dispute that.
> the development of reusable rockets
Reusable rockets existed for almost exactly 25 years before the first SpaceX flight.
-----
A sense of perspective is always valuable in avoiding hyperbole.
Pasteur's invention of vaccination was a great thing. Walking on the Moon was an incredible thing.
Musk is some industrialist with a bunch of _promising_ projects, many of which are in trouble right about now.
Buying a car company and convincing rich people to buy shoddy electric cars, in part by lying about their capabilities, does not make you a Darwin or an Einstein. It doesn't even make you a Jimmy Carter (an underrated President in my opinion).
Once all the dust has settled, I expect Musk's story to be a cautionary tale and not an inspiration.
The buyers of Tesla are, by and large, rich liberals who care about the climate. Musk proceeds to position himself as a QAnon hack. Owning a Tesla was a source of pride and is now a mark of shame and mockery.
The only people who actually do care about Twitter are journalists. Musk proceeds to ban some prominent ones from Twitter, for utterly frivolous reasons, which makes them realize that 1/ they're not immune to this and 2/ one of their main work tool is brittle, and will make them actively search for another, if they weren't already.
This behavior is strange. Either Musk is engaging in self-harm, for some reason, or he's testing how much he can get away with.
> Owning a Tesla was a source of pride and is now a mark of shame and mockery.
This is so true. Why sabotage your main user base? Owning Tesla is similar to staying in trump tower. I am really waiting for tesla sales numbers in liberal states like California and NY.
Have your seen interest rates? Everyone's numbers are going to be out of whack, trying to read what liberals think about buying Teslas from that is some fine tea leaf reading.
> This behavior is strange. Either Musk is engaging in self-harm, for some reason, or he's testing how much he can get away with.
There are other options as well for why he wants to take apart Twitter:
- revenge Peter Thiel-style against "librul" ideas that "made" his daughter trans (or his ex-wife Grimes date Chelsea Manning). Twitter is the biggest forum there is for left-wing and progressive people, and it was/is in financial duress, which made it a perfect target.
- the Saudis, who are the main financial backers of the deal (and even the dozens of billions they paid are petty cash!), want him to destroy Twitter, which has been an incredibly useful tool to organize protest and spread information about government violence
- Musk, like other SV billionaires, thinks they are the best that God has sent to Earth and what they do and want is best for everyone. Unfortunately, as a result he doesn't realize that large markets like Europe see it precisely the other way around.
- Musk, again like other SV billionaires, sees technology as the one and all solution hammer against society's problems. Hate speech? Have algorithms "moderate" the platform, instead of booting out abusers and putting those who cross legal lines behind bars. Fossil fuels? Invest in electric cars (and sooner or later, nuclear fusion vaporware, mark my words), instead of investing in renewable energies and public transport. And again, he doesn't realize that wide parts of the planet do not follow their idea(l)s.
Not one person I know with a Tesla has a strong passion or care for climate change or would meet the American definition for "liberal". I've also never heard any express pride or shame based on the CEOs actions.
One of the hypothesis Matt Levine posits in Money Stuff today [1] is that Tesla is branded as liberal tech, and Elon is engaging in Q-foolery to bring in more right leaning people: "the only car free from the woke mind virus". I don't know how much I believe this theory, but definitely interesting.
But why? I am under the impression the Q crowd doesn't tend to be the wealthiest bunch. Tesla was also already selling every car they could make, with like a 6 month backorder. Expanding, or switching, your target market makes no sense if they cannot afford your product, and you have no inventory to sell them anyways.
Other companies seem to have success with being as ambivalent and silent as possible (with careful PR) while Elon seems to believe his hold on existing customers is strong enough so he can somewhat alienate them without loosing them.
Sounds to me more like Musk is trying to fill in the void left by Trump by creating 24/7 headlines to get people onto the platform.
I'd be willing to bet that the Qanon crowd is also the last set of people who still reliably click on ads and fall for vitality pill scams, so Musk pandering to them makes financial sense.
> The buyers of Tesla are, by and large, rich liberals who care about the climate.
Or at least, want to pretend that they care, considering Tesla makes most of its money selling carbon credits to other companies so that they can pollute more. Buying a Tesla doesn't cause less emissions.
what are you basing this off of? Are you specifically saying buying doesn’t cause less emissions (ie manufacturing) or overall compared to a generic ICE car that a Tesla generates more emissions?
If you buy a Tesla,here are the emissions that are directly correlated to it:
* Manufacturing. This includes not just the factory, but also the mining of lithium and other metals that is an environmental disaster.
* Electricity emissions through its lifetime: if you're in a country that uses primarily natural gas for its electricity production (like the US does), you might as well keep running an ICE instead, it'll be just as bad.
* Carbon credits granted, that will lead to the construction of one more ICE from another manufacturer.
Buying new cars will not solve problems. No matter if it's an EV or an ICE.
> Buying new cars will not solve problems. No matter if it's an EV or an ICE.
Believe me I agree. Check my post history. :)
> Electricity emissions through its lifetime: if you're in a country that uses primarily natural gas for its electricity production (like the US does), you might as well keep running an ICE instead, it'll be just as bad.
Uses primarily now doesn't have to mean uses primarily for all time. I'm also not sure how to compare here because you have a limited number of natural gas plants, coal plants, etc. and maybe you can reduce that actual output of c02 into the atmosphere. Can't really do that with an ICE. It'll be very difficult as well to really capture the systematic emissions. How do you account, for example, for the US military and required spending to maintain global oil supply? Should we account for it? Idk.
I agree that you raise valid points here in comparing carbon emissions, but these ideas don't translate into facts or "proof", which is what I originally asked for.
Let’s be honest he was mocked after pointing out journalists would no longer have special privileges on the platform and if they dox people they will be banned.
Still convinced all this is really about is anger at the destruction of the class system that existed on Twitter.
If only we could get some transparency about the decisions to censor users on Twitter. It could be released as a set of files, a little at a time, to a prominent syncoph- I mean independent journalist. That way we can really dominate the news cycle for a week or so and get some attention on this thing.
The only problem is what to call it. Twitter Periodic Information Bulletin? No doubt accurate, but a little on the nose and we're already cutting too deep into our precious 280 characters.
TwitterGate? The Twitter Papers? TwitterLeaks? In all seriousness though the real Twitter Files will be about Musk running the company into the ground not this slow drip of right wing garbage.
That sounds like the kind of thing that would be worth discussing on HN! Someone should submit it here if it happens, I can't imagine this site would bury it.
> Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.
... is that it could still be true that the platform is institutionally biased in one direction. Both sides could think it, but one could be right and the other could be wrong.
Of course, if I try to stick up for one side then I'm playing into Yishan's hand. He's rigged the game so that if you try to argue back then he can just say you're proving his point: "no, you just think it's biased against you, but other side thinks that too! See what I mean?" But considering the revelations we've seen in the recent leaks, the "both sides" rhetoric now rings pretty damn hollow.
I think this is a pretty significant misreading. The basic argument of Yishan's thread (external to the 'all tech companies want to do is tech, not politics' angle which is honestly kinda tangential) is that social media is hard because it's social, not because it's media. The part you're pointing to is meant to develop this because it's a fundamentally social effect which causes both sides of the aisle to feel marginalized by the institution - something I think we can agree is pretty empirically true. All that's needed for the (increasingly accurate) predictions of Musk's difficulties piloting the ship to stick is the intractability of _calm social discourse_ in what Yishan is calling the new 'culture'. I don't think Twitter having a political bias is relevant there.
Thanks for sharing this. First time I read it, and the accuracy of Yishan's predictions, made back in April, are incredibly spot on. Phenomenal analysis as well on the difference between censoring ideas versus censoring behaviours. Great read.
One thing you can take away is the resilience of a network effect. Twitter as an application is laughably easy to build. But it's very hard to kill thanks to the massive audience and the individual connections.
The only way Twitter will die is if the network effect is killed, or somehow used against Twitter to create a competing platform.
> Twitter as an application is laughably easy to build.
I think parts of Twitter may be easy to build in isolation, but the entire platform as a whole is certainly not easy by any means and would be very expensive to construct.
The wave of bans from the muskjet thing has been quite dramatic.
It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
The people who cheered Musk for his "pro free speech" attitude don't actually believe or want free speech. They want free speech for themselves and censorship for people they don't like.
I don't know why it's so impossible to believe there are people who truly do want free speech.
I wasn't sure if Musk was going to deliver it, but I tried to remain open-minded. I did think previous Twitter management leaned left with some admittedly difficult moderation decisions, but obviously I'm finding out that Musk is even less supportive of true free speech.
Ironically this banning of Mastodon links is the #1 thing pushing me to start exploring Mastodon or other platforms.
It's impossible to believe because we know people who say that, and we know that their fundamental belief is that rules exist in two ways: 1) to protect and serve a certain class, without binding them, and 2) to bind the other class, without protecting the other class.
This is not a new phenomenon, the only thing that changes is the terms used to signal the meaning.
Let me know when you find them. So far, every “free-speech“ platform has been a dumpster fire full of instant bans for anyone the user base does not agree with.
4chan is interesting because it feels like a holdover from the "old" internet. Less a "platform" and more an unruly forum with its own distinct culture.
If 4chan had anywhere near the size/reach of Twitter or Facebook, I think it would either be more toxic or more restrictive in its moderation.
>don't know why it's so impossible to believe there are people who truly do want free speech.
Because everybody has a point where they don't want free speech anymore. If I gathered your home address and told everyone you were a pedophile that needed to be killed, you'd probably be less stoked about free speech.
> I don't know why it's so impossible to believe there are people who truly do want free speech.
Anyone intelligent enough to think it through knows it's a paradox, so anyone who truly does want free speech clearly hasn't actually thought it through. They exist, but nobody should take them seriously.
Sure. Speech can, itself, restrict speech. "I have a gun in my pocket and I will shoot anyone who disagrees with me." It's just speech, but it restricts others' willingness to speak. If you allow all speech, some speakers will use that tool to restrict others' speech, which means not all speech is actually allowed. "Free speech" is a paradox.
It's not just speech - it's speech with an intention to do harm. That's like saying going into a bank and saying "my partner there has a gun and he will start shooting unless you give me money" is also abusing free speech - it's not about speech, it's about actions in the real world.
> If you allow all speech, some speakers will use that tool to restrict others' speech, which means not all speech is actually allowed
Nobody uses speech on its own to restrict others' speech.
Right, so now we've moved from "free speech" to "free speech unless it has an intention to do harm" which means you agree that some speech ought to be restricted. Suddenly things get really complicated (how do you define "harm" and "intention" and even "has"?), and now you're on the same page as the rest of us who understand that "free speech" is a paradox.
> Right, so now we've moved from "free speech" to "free speech unless it has an intention to do harm"
We haven't moved anywhere, because it's not speech that's illegal, it's the intention to do harm. You could perfectly well communicate your intentions to do harm with no speech at all, e.g. by pointing a gun to a bank teller without saying a word. If you use speech to offer to sell drugs to somebody, and a cop arrests you for it, that's not an issue of free speech, that's an issue of drug dealing.
The fact that you aren't allowed to commit crimes by using your speech doesn't make free speech itself a paradox - otherwise any use of the word "free" in the context of humans in society might as well be paradoxical. "We're not free to commit a murder, therefore individual freedom is a paradox" - that'd be quite a naive take on the matter.
You're losing track of the conversation. I'm not talking about laws or society or legality. I'm explaining how one person can use their speech to cause another person to choose not to speak, in other words, suppress that second person's speech. This is why it's a paradox: enabling free speech can itself suppress speech.
I'm not losing track of the conversation - free speech is a legal concept, and you haven't written that you're talking about the ideal of free speech. Please do not mistake your inability to express yourself with my ability to follow a conversation.
In case of free speech as an ideal, it's still a bullshit argument. You cannot suppress speech with speech alone. Go on any anonymous internet forum and try to suppress someone's speech by e.g. threatening to doxx/harm them - you will be laughed at, because on the internet there is no real threat of harm. It's always the threat of harm that actually suppresses speech, not speech itself.
That fact that you use speech to deliver the threat doesn't in itself create a paradox.
In context of freedom of movement, that argument would be akin to "free movement is a paradox because you can suppress someone's movement by holding them down". Yes, you use free movement to walk up to a person, but it's not your movement that holds them down.
Free speech is not a legal concept. The most cited example of speech being used to harm others is shouting "Fire" in crowded theatre and people dying in the stampede to leave. There is no legal protection for doing so. Speech has consequences, sometimes benign, sometimes not.
I want free speech, hence I think Elon is a tremendous hypocrite for enacting this policy. Once you start deciding whether or not things are 'safe' to say you will end up in the exact situation Jack, et al. were in when they were censoring just with different biases. He doesn't seem to understand that and is doomed to repeat their mistakes.
There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.
> There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.
No, the irony is not that the site under both owners is trying to remove bad/harmful content (just defining it differently).
The irony is that Musk thought he wasn’t going to have to do it at all: “absolute free speech”, “public square”, “comedy is legal”, etc.
One of the banned journalists went on Mastodon and said (paraphrasing): “It’s his site and he can ban whoever he wants”
And to be fair, under both owners, accounts were banned for violating ToS policies. The policies are just different, but they’re still the rules you agree to when you use the site.
I just don’t think anyone thought “free speech” meant no parodying, no republishing public FAA info, etc.
Many journalists are singularly obsessed with the eradication of 'harmful' or 'unsafe' accounts from Twitter. They are particularly concerned about doxxing when it happens to political figures they're sympathetic to or journalists. Technically all home addresses are public information, just as FAA data is. Yet people get rather nervous when their home address ends up on the internet and rightly so.
Their entire argument is about the prevention of the exact sort of thing that Musk alleges happened to a car carrying his child - real world harm from online activity. So why exactly are they upset about this change in policy that while clearly motivated by self-interest rather than any principle, technically aligns with some of their goals? It's because they want to be able to doxx people they think deserve it. Because when they doxx it's journalism, but when their enemies doxx it's stochastic terrorism.
> They want free speech for themselves and censorship for people they don't like.
This is probably true, but it also describes Twitter prior to the takeover.
If anything is clear to me, it's that it seems impossible to have a completely neutral/fair public forum. Or perhaps it is possible, but people dislike the opposition so much they aren't interested in using it.
Musk's definition of free speech in the past included calling his critics pedophiles and making false statements about his company's stock. Now it doesn't include publicly available information about the location of a vehicle he owns?
The mental gymnastics that folks go to excuse Musk's behavior will get ever more absurd.
Musk will continue to censor speech he doesn't like arbitrarily and use Twitter to promote right-wing extremists who will then hurt real people in the real world.
Musk has in the past and very recently supported conspiracy theories. Dr. Fauci, one of the greatest public servants we've had in this country, was accused by Musk of 'killing millions'.
Musk is a right-wing extremist who will protect his own.
Clearly nothing is stopping someone from doing that anyway, but also nobody ever knows if Elon is actually on any of the three planes tracked (unless he posts about where he's going or where he is). They're not even his personal planes, they're owned by his companies and used by other people. If he's that worried about a stalker he should just charter a jet instead of flying on jets associated with him or his companies, then nobody would know.
It’s worth noting that the tracker doesn’t post destinations until, of course, the plane actually lands. You cannot use the data provided to determine where to meet him.
As one of those people: yeah, this is pretty terrible. I don't think being allowed to share the exact location of individual private jets is nearly as important for the public discourse as some of the other stories Twitter has censored in the past (pre-Elon), but this still represents a significant departure from what Musk was promising before the buyout (that basically anything legal to say would be allowed). I'd much rather he have erred on that side of things.
Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.
The consolidation of media, ongoing for decades, has created concentrations of power that leave the entire media system vulnerable to people like Elon Musk. Twitter and Facebook are two particularly dense concentrations of power, but the general problem goes back a century at least and it's a problem with media generally, not specific to technology. Sinclair Broadcast Group (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE) and William Randolph Hearst come to mind particularly.
1. A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.
2. There are nearly no legal restrictions on how they're allowed to exercise that control.
I'm not sure precisely what the solution to that should be, but the problem only exists as long as both 1 and 2 remain true, so you could theoretically approach the problem from either of those angles, or both.
These companies have less power than a small amount of media companies had in the past, if anything. Where were you going to go for TV news in 1950 outside of the major networks? And unless Chrome/Safari/etc build content-based blocking "allowed to see" is an ENORMOUS stretch. "A small number of publishers have large reach and exercise certain controls over their media" is more accurate.
As for whether or not their should be legal restrictions on what publishers can publish... take your best shot at suggesting some legal rules. I think there would be holes that you could drive a truck through that would upset you regardless of your own views.
Not everyone needs a global megaphone. And nobody intrinisicly deserves one.
Go back even further and you’d have real media power — the newspapers of the 1890s. The time of Hearst vs Pulitzer was quite a time for newspapers and showed the power of publishers.
That may have been poorly phrased on my part. My intent was to put the focus on the listener rather than the speaker, since Google search (for example) doesn't control what people say, but it can control what people see. Censorship at that level is just as much of an issue as it is at the level of social media. "Freedom of speech" and "freedom to listen" are really the same thing. I prefer the term "the free exchange of ideas" since that includes both speech and listening, is agnostic to the medium (listening, reading etc.), and conveniently excludes things like CSAM and spam, since those aren't ideas.
I'd also argue you can't "just go somewhere else" to find content you aren't even aware exists in the first place, so I think the phrasing "allowed to see" makes more sense than you give it credit for once you consider the chilling effect of widespread censorship.
That last sentence startles me. Are you proposing some people or companies have a legal obligation to make you aware of the existence of content you aren't aware of?
That sounds like a big jump even beyond "they shouldn't be able to control what they publish." Are we now going to require Twitter actively promote everything too?
How many obligations would you impose on everyone else in service of this hypothetical listener who demands to be spoon fed all points of view in the world without effort? Is a library allowed to have a collection if they don't fully advertise it's breadth? Is a bookstore allowed to choose what to and to not put on their shelves? Am I allowed to tell you what I think without telling you how many possible other views there are? Any of those are just as "chilling" as "twitter.com" not having all the content that "elonsjet.com" or "jacobin.com" or "foxnews.com" would...
Twitter/FB/etc are HARDLY important enough, and way less powerful than past media, to start telling people they have to amplify what other people say.
> A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.
Hmm, yes, that's why nobody can go to InfoWars anymore, right? They're banned from Facebook and YouTube, so I guess it's impossible to hear anything they have to say.
What's this? infowars.com still loads? It has videos on it? Impossible, the leftist lizard demons banned it
Wake me up when port 443 requires written consent from Zucc to operate.
Just because those few large companies only control what ~95% of people see instead of ~100%, that doesn't mean everything's fine. Or are you arguing Musk's censorship of Twitter here isn't a problem because people can just go to InfoWars to find out where Elon's jet is?
I agree it doesn't really matter that these accounts are banned. The only thing worth pointing out is literally this exact account was something Elon pointed to as an account he would protect on Twitter as an example of his support of free speech.
He can ban away, but he's just proving his free speech stance is meaningless. He'll just ban whatever he doesn't like regardless of if it's legal or not. Which is fine, but don't hold him up as some defender of free speech.
> Hmm, yes, that's why nobody can go to InfoWars anymore, right? They're banned from Facebook and YouTube, so I guess it's impossible to hear anything they have to say.
The thing is, deplatforming works. Banning far-right actors has drastically reduced the reach of their messages [1]. Personally, I see this as a Good Thing, simply because of the potential that spreading hate has to escalate to actual, real-world violence, from murders like in Charlottesville to an outright attempt at instigating a coup.
At every sudo prompt, we get the warning "With great power comes great responsibility" - for good reasons. It's the same with running a social network connecting literally billions of people... those operating them have great power by the sheer market size of their platforms, and a huge responsibility for just how much of the bad side of humanity can be empowered by them. Whatsapp, for example, was directly linked to dozens of murders and severe injuries after lies and propaganda led to lynch mobs [2][3][4].
If the data were gathered from already public information, I wouldn't have a problem with it. How is synthesizing data that's already public (indeed, required by law to be public) a problem?
Anyone that actually wanted to use this data to harm Musk would have no trouble simply using the exact same original data.
Based on the evidence (safety claim by Elon, death of Diana) it appears that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences. I presume this is also why marketing works on a platform that enhances the reach and distribution of a particular piece of information.
Anecdotally, I did see the @ElonJet account, and have still never seen the source of the data.
> Based on the evidence (safety claim by Elon, death of Diana) it appears that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences.
Wow, you have to reach back 25 years, and it's an absolutely terrible example because it has nothing to do with a constant publication of location to the general public. Instead paparazzi used their own private communications (paparazzi who saw her board in Sardinia told other paparazzi in France). And her death wasn't caused by someone who found out her location and wanted to do her harm.
"Safety claim by Elon" is also completely meaningless since he's literally the person who wanted this shut down.
So two really bad examples over 25 years is not evidence for your claim.
Finally, using public information to say the state or country Elon has recently flown to is a far cry from actually giving away his current location.
> that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences.
So you'd be okay with banning misinformation about COVID and the COVID vaccine? Misinformation and agitprop had very real consequences in the real world.
The test of the truth of a live location is trivial. The test of truth of COVID information is not. In the case are spreading something that is provably untrue eg. 1 + 1 = 3, even in that case, you should just rebut and explain why it is untrue.
Nice strawman!
It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
>The test of the truth of a live location is trivial. The test of truth of COVID information is not.
The assertion that posting a 'live location' create dangerous real world consequences is completely absurd. We know plenty about the dead humans COVID misinformation left in its wake.
You are okay with censorship here because you agree with it. Full stop.
>It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
Yeah, misinformation and agitprop have very real consequences, but Twitter still shouldn't ban, e.g., Anthony Fauci (if he had an account) or CNN, no matter how much misinformation or agitprop they spread. That stuff should be addressed with replies, community notes, and other commentary.
Again, the account didn't post passenger manifests. It posted publicly available ADS-B data, automatically. You can review the source, if you like: https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify
I was excited to see his pro free speech approach and this ban wave disappoints me.
I'm actually okay with bans, suspensions and all the rest. But only if there is the following
- A redemptive path back
- Due process
- Transparency
- Fair application of the rules.
These recent bans have had none of that. The rule change should have been announced before the bans. There should have been warnings to remove the tweets before instant bans. The accounts should be given the opportunity to comply with the rules and come back.
While I'm sad Elon has taken this turn I still don't think Twitter is any worse off. They did this before just to a different group.
At least they appear to be making progress on removing child exploitation.
I don't know if the platform can survive the disruption and unpredictably that Musk has introduced but from a moral standing, removing child exploitation wins a lot of points with me.
Everyone wants that but there is no feasible way to do this economically - there are too many people and too many bad actors ready to go if they even were to try to do this. Twitter is worse off - it wasn't perfect before, faltered and everyone who clamored for what you are asking for just never considered the true costs of the alternative.
He’s not done anything except fire the team responsible for monitoring it working collaboratively with other groups on tools. Oh, and and talking loudly. Are you always this easily fooled?
I agreed with most of what he's done up to the point where he banned ElonJet, and now these journalists. It's so dumb to ban an account that was simply sharing already public ADS-B data, it's completely legal, my guess is that he had a bunch of other rich friends that were calling for him to remove these accounts. As for journalists, I guess we'll need to wait, early guess is that Twitter has probably found some dirt involving them with old-Twitter board.
I'm willing to believe him that there was some kind of scary encounter for his driver and son last night. This would match his other stated exception to his free speech platform desire. That being refusing to reinstate Alex Jones, who he, as a father who lost a child, finds personally repugnant.
Anything he dislikes, if he filters through the lens of his children, he's willing to ban, apparently.
I think that ElonJet shouldn't have been banned and that Elon is behaving like a pathetic, petulant child, but if the recent bans bother you more than the fact that Twitter worked with the US security state to suppress a truthful and politically salient story (HB's laptop) in the run-up to an election, then you and I have very different priorities.
That is normally not how cults work—and yes, I am claiming elon is a cult.
When a cult leader fails to deliver, or otherwise issues a prediction that never materializes, the cult member usually grow stronger in the cult’s convictions. This is kind of a counterintuitive psychological phenomena but it has been demonstrated quite a few times. There may be something of a cognitive dissonance driving this. It is that after you see your cult leader fail, you can either dismiss all your prior believes, or change your version of reality to match the cult’s altered dogma. It seems as if doing the latter is easier for most people, so this is in turn what most people do.
I would be interested in seeing some citations to back up that claim. The famous Jonestown incident was a case of people having left everything they knew, relocated to an isolated place in a different country, etc. And even then, some members of the cult were forced to drink the poisoned kool-aid and some drank it not knowing it was poisoned.
Residents of the commune later committed suicide by drinking a flavored beverage laced with potassium cyanide; some were forced to drink it, some (such as small children) drank it unknowingly.
I have a longstanding interest in social psychology and the way a cult generally arranges to control people is to cut them off financially, socially, etc. This is the same way that abusive husbands typically treat their abused wives. One study sought to identify character traits that made abused women more likely to kill their abusive husband and could not do so. Instead, they found that the women who murdered their abusive husbands were the most isolated, the most abused, the most painted into a corner. In short, they were women who found themselves with no other way out.
I suppose if you work for the man or are enthralled by his billions or some such, that's going to hold sway for some people. But I have trouble comparing his Twitter debacle to what cults do.
Anyway, just rambling on. Not actually interested in discussing this Twitter mess that I am mostly trying to avoid discussing in spite of the entire world seeming to discuss nothing else.
But if you have some citations to back up your social psychology related statement, I would be interested in seeing those as it's an area of interest of mine.
You may have already seen it, but one of the most famous cases of religious failure leading to deepened faith in some of the adherents is the Great Disappointment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment
One of the groups that formed out of it is still active today more than 150 years later.
Many followers had given up their possessions in expectation of Christ's return...
There were also the instances of violence: a Millerite church was burned in Ithaca, New York, and two were vandalized in Dansville and Scottsville. In Loraine, Illinois, a mob attacked the Millerite congregation with clubs and knives, while a group in Toronto was tarred and feathered. Shots were fired at another Canadian group meeting in a private house.
Perhaps we shouldn't give people so much hell for simply being wrong?
I bet at least some of the vandalism of Millerite churches was carried out by recently made ex-Millerites who were mad about being duped. Of anybody around, they had the most reason to be upset. Some of those people gave up all their belongings because of the cult, and subsequently had nothing to lose when their belief system crumbled.
There's one source that usually comes up in such discussions, When Prophecy Fails (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails). It's difficult to respect it completely as a controlled act of science, like much social psych from that era (and an ongoing battle for the discipline, to be sure), but it's definitely far from an unworthy read.
This fits with my general knowledge of how such things work. TLDR: Those with the most skin in the game were the most likely to try to save face and double-down on their stated beliefs. Those who had lost less had an easier time going "Whoops! I was wrong!" and getting on with their lives:
Some of the believers took significant actions that indicated a high degree of commitment to the prophecy. Some left or lost their jobs, neglected or ended their studies, ended relationships and friendships with non-believers, gave away money and / or disposed of possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer, which they believed would rescue them and others in advance of the flood.
As anticipated by the research team, the prophesied date passed with no sign of the predicted flood, causing a dissonance between the group's commitment to the prophecy and the unfolding reality. Different members of the group reacted in different ways. Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalisations for the absence of the flood. Some others, with less prior conviction and commitment, and / or less access to ongoing group support, were less able to sustain or increase their previous levels of belief and involvement, and several left the group.
This is not inconsistent with what we know about the process by which people are radicalized and become members of extremist political groups and the like. Part of the process is that it becomes increasingly difficult to get respect, make meaningful social contacts etc with people outside the group. Once you pass some point of extremism, outsiders become openly hostile and their reactions give you no good path back from your position.
Being seen as "crazy" or "wrong" or "stupid" is too much to bear. Better to reject the entire world -- knowing it won't be nice to you at this point -- than to admit "Okay, maybe that wasn't the most rational thing to do."
> I would be interested in seeing some citations to back up that claim.
Not exactly a citation, but none of the predictions or claims of the original QAnon poster have come true or been proven. Yet the Q movement is still around, and for some of them their beliefs are getting stranger.
No, cults cut you off from the outside world first, not because you "criticized the current #thing". They create an atmosphere of fear where most people won't want to speak up, knowing their lives are now controlled by these people.
I doubt it. As your sibling points out, the Jonestown massacre had its member much more psychologically manipulated then Elon could even dream of. While I still stand by me calling Elon a cult, there is definitely a huge difference between him and Jim Jones, and how much manipulation members of each cult have endured.
Or they are quiet, as they are getting the results that they've wanted and that the time of propping up ridiculous Free Speech Absolutism arguments has passed.
Doxxing is a common attack on people who are guilty of wrongspeak.
I have no strong opinion about how doxxing relates to free speech, but desire to hide your private life is understandable, and I don't see any benefit for the society from realtime doxxing.
I think it should be obvious by this point that in the minds of today's "free speech" advocates, the term means "I get to make political statements and nobody can criticize me for them" and not anything like it was understood in the recent past.
I knew he'd gone mad when he tweeted the Nancy Pelosi's husband conspiracy theory, but I was cautiously optimistic about Twitter up until ElonJet.
Our company had already stopped spending on Twitter ads back when the first (possibly false) reports about increased hatespeech on Twitter came out, where I was one of a few protesting the decision, since it seemed like giving in to the hysteria and just trying not to become the target of activist journalists. But now it's clear even to me that staying on Twitter is a brand safety issue.
We don't do ads on twitter (politics). but no brand I know would want to be associated with the crazy-ness and tons of negative press.
Maybe good opportunity for click arbitragers and bottom barrel DTC though! low competition!
twitter is already showing me taboola level ads lmfao
I just can't with hn anymore. came back to specifically read this thread.
at least reddit is fun and has shit posting.
a significant chunk of active commenters on hn have gone off the deep end. a stew of insane, mean, and flat out wrong comments that have nothing to do with tech or cool nerd stuff. and everything to do with mean-spirited (often right wing) politics
There are nuances. It's obviously less okay to effectively ban public (edit: and even public health expert) criticism of public health policy than it is to ban sharing the live location of other people.
Oh, just like when pre-Musk Twitter banned NY Post/journalists over a true story about Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't see how an anti-doxxing rule banning people tracking Elon Musk's whereabouts is worse.
Pre-Musk Twitter didn't specifically try to present itself as a bastion of free speech.
On top of that, in case of this particular account, Musk specifically said that it would be allowed on the platform per his understanding of free speech.
For a day, for something that was nominally outside their TOS, which lead to strong internal tensions and in the end also was a complete nothingburger that didn’t matter at all.
This, to me, clearly seems to be a small mistake with no material negative impact on the world. Shit happens.
Elon is consistently and repeatedly making far worse mistakes.
I thought the Post journalists on that story didn't want it to run in the first place and weren't banned?
(Edit: may have been just the original author and at least one other:
> The New York Post published images and PDF copies of the alleged emails, but their authenticity and origin have not been determined.[23] According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.[24] In its opening sentence, the New York Post story misleadingly asserted "the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" Burisma, despite the fact that Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder.
)
> Oh, just like when pre-Musk Twitter banned NY Post/journalists over a true story about Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't see how an anti-doxxing rule banning people tracking Elon Musk's whereabouts is worse.
Calling it "Hunter Biden's laptop" ignores the fact that it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election. That is not comparable to sharing publicly available information about aircraft movements.
That being said, I also think the extent to which they went to bury and remove the real photos and videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack was a huge overreach. They tried to paint it as a conspiracy theory that had no factual basis — that's biased censorship.
> it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"
Under Twitter's definition[1] the repair shop accessing the contents and sharing them would be considered "hacked".
During the NY Post story, on Twitter you weren't allowed to link to "hacked" material (though this was probably not well enforced).[2]
Twitter changed that policy and reverted the account freezes[3] so that it was fine to link to "hacked" material as long as you weren't directly affiliated with the entity that produced the "hacked" material. [4]
You're right, Rudy Giuliani is clearly a credible figure and his account of how he happened to come across Hunter Biden's laptop is sensible and not-suspicous in the least.
Hey, quick question completely unrelated to this, was Trump pro or anti Putin? Did Julian Assange leak information in good faith or did he co-ordinate with Republicans to release only information that made Democrats look bad, in the 2016 election? Who provided Assange that information?
I never mentioned Rudy Guiliani? The story you linked is about a completely separate and unrelated story. WikiLeaks and Assange were not involved with Hunter Biden's laptop. As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop, voluntarily and on its own initiative, gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
> The story you linked is about a completely separate and unrelated story. WikiLeaks and Assange were not involved here.
I am aware. My point is that there is a precedent for this behaviour and neither Trump nor Republicans are credible.
> As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt in the veracity of any of the information or materials leaked. I distinctly recall seeing posts on /pol/ containing videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging hookers (that have since been scrubbed from the Internet), and people allegedly attempting to hack his iCloud account.
However, the I do not find the story and chain-of-custody of his laptop credible. I have been looking further since your prior comment and I cannot find anything that unambiguously confirms its provenance.
On the flip side, I also do not find a lack of official condemnation or attribution to Russia to be sufficient in disproving it. Joe Biden and the Democrats were clearly trying to kill the story and scrub any mention of it, so acknowledging it only gives it legitimacy.
Happy to ammend my comment if you can point me to something that proves otherwise, though. Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in part because a woman stumbled across his black book on the sidewalk — sometimes unlikely coincidences happen.
~~Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.~~ (edit: my bad) "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
> Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.
Do you really believe that Rudy Guiliani, a man acting as Trump's lackey for numerous things, received bombshell information and publicized it without Trump having any knowledge or involvement?
Michael Cohen testified under oauth that Trump knew about leaked DNC emails in advance of the 2016 election. Fast-forward to ~2019 and Trump had already personally tried to pressure Ukraine into providing damaging information about Joe Biden. There is very little plausible deniability here.
> "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
I am obviously not referring to a collective conspiracy of between hundreds of millions of American citizens. I meant the Republican Party.
> My mistake, I had forgotten about Rudy Giuliani's involvement.
That's okay, I had to go back and re-check the details of the story multiple times.
Based on your other comments, I think we're probably share a similar view about it. All I'm saying is that, while the validity of the content itself unimpeachable, the story about how it was uncovered is highly suspicious.
> Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
Of course, but they demonstrably put up a rather unified front against the Democrats; Catholics and Protestants hated each other, yet put aside their differences to vote for common interests.
Aren't the GOP currently spearheading an investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop?
I don't think it's suspicious. If the Russians (or whoever) had stolen the personal labtop of a close Biden family member, it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public. Joe Biden would not cover up a foreign adversary's crimes when both political and financial incentives run the other way.
> it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public
It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.
For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.
Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.
I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop. The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
> I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop.
Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.
The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.
> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.
There is not proof it was by a foreign government afaik. Though from the reporting I've read it does seem to be murky at a minimum, and not proven to be as clear as top comment-or said. Doesn't matter though.
That specific context you mention is VERY important:
Russia already did this.
The FBI specifically warned to TW that a leak like this had high chance of happening just at the time it did.
Twitter was right to be cautious.
Maybe didn't do everything consistently or perfectly, but I would far prefer them limiting the reach of Hunter dick pics and crack photos than letting a foreign government do so much damage again.
I think their main error was being slow as more background & info was uncovered.
The computer store owner in the USA is not a foreign adversary. The content is real and criminal. Ties to foreign adversary China and Russia too.
Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
If I collate publicy available information and publish it continuously on any person, you are OK with that? If it happens to you?
> The computer store owner in the USA is not a foreign adversary.
Sure, if you presuppose that the people responsible for disclosing it are credible and honest.
I personally have some questions why a computer store owner would, faced with an abandoned laptop from a customer, decided to snoop through its contents and give it to Rudy Giuliani, of all people.
If you take the story at face value it's still a massive breach of privacy. You have to go out of your way to find this stuff; an ethical repair shop would go out of their way to avoid accidentally stumping across private information.
Even still, if you assume that he stumbled across extremely concerning information in a manner no fault of his own, why did he feel it necessary to leak videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex? Imagine how creepy it would be if a woman dropped her laptop off at a repair shop and the owner leaked her nudes?
The most charitable interpretation is that Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at a computer repair shop, and the owner decided to snoop for compromising information and give it to his father's political rival, presumably for politically-motivated reasons.
> Be honest, and ask yourself if that had been Trump's son's laptop would Twitter, The Washington Post, and the others have done the same? I don't think so.
I think he was legit shaken by the incident with the kook stalker and his son. Which is certainly understandable. People need to dial the hate way down. Way, way down.
And the rule change was quite clear that linking to the jet tracking was prohibited.
That all said, he's gone too far here. And it's an unwinnable fight anyway.
So what would banning a jet tracking account have to do with a stalker (for which no police report was filed)? And why ban journalists? In addition, the rule change was just to enable the banning of the jet tracking, not because it was it came from some higher sense of duty.
> So what would banning a jet tracking account have to do with a stalker
From what I can gather and infer, a couple of days ago Musk's son got off the jet and into a car, then that car was attacked by a stalker looking for Musk himself. Musk believes that the stalker got the information from the ElonJet Twitter account.
> And again, no police report filed. You were dooped.
I see a video of the supposed stalker in a balaclava. I do think Musk took the opportunity to get rid of something he already disliked, but I don't yet believe he faked the attack if that's what you're implying.
I believe the car was followed from the jet (possibly after the car dropped off Musk, or collected Musk's son from Musk), which was at Los Angeles International Airport earlier that day.
The car itself doesn't have a live tracker, so it seems less likely that someone dressed up in all black balaclava/gloves would find it otherwise - if it's even a known car at all.
> days after
Days after what?
> that’s the price you pay for a private jet using public air space.
A stalker attacking the car containing your 2-year-old son is NOT just a price to pay.
You’re missing that the incident in question was days after the jet landed at the airport. DAYS. There was no following from earlier that day.
My statement of price to pay was public jet location information using public airspace. This is the case for everyone. It was done for years and there’s no evidence it was a factor in the incident here despite many trying to find an excuse after the fact.
> You’re missing that the incident in question was days after the jet landed at the airport. DAYS. There was no following from earlier that day.
I could be making a mistake but I don't believe this is true. Are we looking at the same plane (N628TS)? It seems to have been at Los Angeles International Airport the same day.
It's also not particularly public information (https://archive.vn/cB7Lh). Would you defend doxxing sites like Kiwi Farms, on the basis that they're correlating/archiving public information?
Has LAPD commented on these accusations? Has a complaint been filed? Usually I’m a believer in people that claim to be victims of violence but in the case of Elon, I’m gonna wait until I hear from the appropriate authorities before I believe this story.
He actively promoted a conspiracy that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute. (While Pelosi was still in the hospital recovering from serious injuries.) Why should he expect sympathy now?
I think you have to give sympathy in similar situations to expect sympathy in return in that same situation. As mentioned, the Pelosi incident comes to mind.
Doxxing adds nothing to the conversation. It’s not an opinion, an argument, or an artful expression — forms that free speech laws are designed to protect. Rather, doxxing is merely harassment and adds nothing substantive. Same argument can be made for racial slurs and the like. Anyone pretending otherwise is being disingenuous.
You don't have right to privacy when you fly your jet in public airspace. Elon has a choice, he can take commercial. Just like you don't the right privacy when people take pictures of your house as proven with the famous Streisand case. Do you think Streisand case should have went the other way?
It seems most people aren't arguing Musk doesn't have the right to ban this, they're just pointing out that literally a couple of weeks ago Musk said this exact account was an example of free speech he would protect.
If Musk hadn't been making a big deal about supporting free speech for the last several months there wouldn't be a problem with him banning all these accounts. It's his platform he can do what he wants. dang can ban me at any time here, it's kind of his party in many ways. But dang isn't running around claiming to support all forms of legal speech, he's made a point he's trying to enforce his and the team's ideas of community guidelines.
He also has no problems violating his on rules and is asking his followers to doxx someone. Appropriate solution is file a police report which he didn't do.
That’s obviously not the motivation of ElonJet. Again, disingenuous.
If there was anything substantive about ElonJet, it would have been the statistics on jet fuel consumption, because that makes a statement about hypocrisy. They could have posted that without revealing locations, which crosses the line to singling out an individual for the purpose of harassment.
The degree to which Musk is upset by this makes me wonder if there isn't something more to it than just 'personal safety' concerns fed by paranoia. It may well be that the location of his plane tells a story that he does not want exposed. Because frankly the amount of goodwill that he's burning over this makes no sense at all.
For me the simpler explanation is that he had a legitimately scary experience involving his child. Combine that with the (self-inflicted) stress of his last few months, his thin-skinned nature, and him firing anybody at Twitter with a backbone and it seems very plausible to me that he's lashing out and thinking he's doing great.
Somebody described his Twitter purchase as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I think he has wedged himself into a situation that his ego makes both intolerable and inescapable. If he had somebody in his life to talk sense into him ("honey, put down your phone and come to bed"), I'd expect him to walk away and consider it rationally. But here I could imagine him continuing to spiral for quite a while.
To me, it's tragic in the way that Rudy Giuliani or Kanye West is: too much success can create the conditions for a long, lonely downward slide.
Trump, and most right wingers were all banned from TOS violations and harassment and doxxing. Look up LibsofTikTok and what they did too. Suddenly you change your tube on “free speech absolutely” back to something even more obscured. Good job.
>Trump, and most right wingers were all banned from TOS violations and harassment and doxxing.
This is directly contrary to the reporting in Twitter Files by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger whose journalistic integrity and credentials exceed yours and mine combined by orders of magnitude:
"On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
- create justifications to ban Trump
- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban"
And the only doxxing related to LibsOfTikTok was Taylor Lorenz doxxing LibsOfTikTok, to the point that Lorenz showed up at LibsOfTikTok's house in person herself. She didn't just doxx her, she went to her house in person. There are pictures.
edit: Rate limited for telling a truth that HN dislikes again...
Here's my reply to the below:
>If they then publish your home address? Sure.
She did publish her home address, after showing up there. Some tweets containing it are apparently still up, as she complained about it to Musk in a thread about the journalists being suspended (for 7 days it turns out).
… okay, a journalist showing up at your house is not doxxing. If they then publish your home address? Sure. But a journalist knocking on your door to get your side of the story is not and has never been doxing.
And I’m saying this as someone who thinks the decision to publish LOTT’s real name was borderline, despite the fact that LOTT decided to use her real name for her domain registration.
Is the claim that Twitter changed their ToS in order to justify banning Trump? If so, can you share the before and after texts? I assume the Internet Archive would have snapshots.
Or is the point, literally, that people at Twitter discussed whether a change of policy was a good idea in the context of the Jan 6 insurrection? In which case, like...wouldn't you sort of expect them to have conversations about the fitness of the ToS to an unprecedented situation? That sounds like doing their jobs competently, no?
Are you being ironic? I'm genuinely not sure if I understand what you're saying. You know the Twitter files have been released, right? Or has HN really done that good a job of burying discussion on them?
Trump has numerous examples of TOS violations and was even suspended at first for them. He was treated very differently from everyone else. THATS WHAT THEY SEEKED TO CHANGE.
You conveniently misinterpreted or even left our crucial pieces of the so called “twitter files” including that the policies of shadow banning and such were already mentioned and known.
Some of the employees were literally asking for reasons to KEEP certain right wing accounts on twitter.
They listened to violations of revenge porn AND TOS violations of Hunter Biden’s dick. The right wing really seems obsessed with seeing it because the links that were all mentioned in the docs were all of his dick LOL
LibsofTikTok causing harassment to children’s hospitals and they still weren’t even banned. No they weren’t promoted in the algorithm but there’s no right to be amplified.
> the policies of shadow banning and such were already mentioned and known.
They were "known" in the same sense that everybody already "knew" that the US government spies on us before Snowden leaked the details.
Twitter claimed that they didn't shadowban - in fact there's a tweet out there somewhere (I think I saw it shared in one of the Twitter Files threads itself) in which Jack Dorsey himself explicitly denies that Twitter shadowbans. To claim that the Files didn't reveal any new information is utterly disingenuous.
What they reviewed is a normal process of a moderation group. There’s nothing explosive in them.
Interesting how you moved on from “government involvement” when everyone realizes Biden campaign wasn’t the government and it was dick picks they were trying to remove.
Musk has a long history of attacking journalists who write stories critical about him or his company, and he famously called a guy who helped save a bunch of kids a pedophile for criticizing his ill-advised efforts to help out. When he was a kid, he was pushed down a flight of stairs for making fun of a fellow student's father's suicide, and Musk's father was not on his son's side.
Elon did everything in his power to ruin the life of a whistle-blower. After they were able to identify the source of the leak, Martin Tripp, someone who had a personal vendetta against Tripp called in a false police report that he was planning a mass shooting. I cannot say who that someone was, but both Tesla and Musk himself were spreading rhetoric that Tripp was a dangerous individual.
If you are anything like me, you were fooled for a long time because of SpaceX.
It's become clearer and clearer however that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. There are all sorts of reports around now that SpaceX management is very effective at building a firewall around Elon to stop him doing a lot of damage.
But his politics, narcissism, deception, misrepresentation and incompetence actually aren't new. Lying about his education, his role in Paypal, founding tesla and so on. It goes back decades.
Personally I'm not surprised at Elon's temper tantrum and banning people who are mean to him on Twitter. What saddens me however is how many stans and apologists ("dick riders" if you will) Elon still has. Elon does not care about you. You will never be Elon. For the record, this is a general "you", not who I'm replying to specifically.
A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.
It's a pretty obvious midlife crisis. Dude's baby mama left him for a trans woman. His own gender-reaffirming hair implants turned out all wrong. Tough time to be Elon.
> Sweeney said he hasn't received any notification of legal action, and the last time his bot tweeted anything was Dec. 12, "which is not last night, so I don’t get how that’s connected.”
Oh, that may be why Musk is so anti trans all of a sudden, first his child disowns him and now he loses his lover to a trans person. Taking Musk's ego into account some kind of response is inevitable.
Hmm..
- not the world's largest auto company by a long shot. not even in the top 10.
- had to borrow billions (at least 13B) from banks to buy twitter (banks that now want out)
- twitter not remotely the biggest social media company in the world. again.. likely not even in the top 10.
We've changed the URL from https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603593201683599360?s=46..., which doesn't have much information, to an article that has more information (the most out of the half a dozen I looked at). If there's a better article, we can change it again.
Why though? What public interest does this serve? I'm a veteran. I support your right to post links to the location of Elon's jet, or links you can follow to find same, in the same way I'd die to protect some shitbird's right to burn a US flag or kneel during the anthem, but what are you trying to accomplish? Other than to make yourself look like a jerk?
He says that journalists were doxxing him? Where's the proof? Where are the Elon fans with a counter argument? Or are we all in agreement at this point that Elon "free speech absolutist" Musk is a fucking idiot who has no business running a social network?
Weird how Kanye, Trump, and Elon are all simultaneously going even deeper off the deep end. I feel like I'm watching the Gadarene swine story play out in real time
The underlying issue: Musk's incentives don't give him much reason to care if Twitter goes under. Musk likely feels he might as well push for any changes he likes, and gain whether Twitter survives or not.
What was Musk's biggest bugbear about 'old' Twitter? The moderation system. If Twitter goes under, the only practical alternative at the moment is Mastodon, and Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway. He doesn't have much to lose in this scenario: Financially, he'd remain a very rich person. One can argue he'd be better off without Twitter anyway.
Why wouldn’t he care if Twitter goes under? It would be a double digit % decrease of his net worth if Twitter halves in value. It would also be a public embarrassment, and a wasted opportunity to have spent more time at his other companies.
He also leveraged a bunch of his tesla holdings to make the purchase. As his actions repeatedly make the TLSA price fall, there is risk of a margin call and him having to forfeit his collateralized shares.
Will be pretty funny if he loses control of Tesla.
Doesn't that depend on the instance (with some not being as strict)? Regardless, such people could always decamp to their own servers - an option that was not available with Twitter. Also, volunteer instance admins will never have the resources Twitter has had to combat abuse.
"Their own servers" has always existed, just look at Truth Social. And in the same way you don't have to go to that site, Mastodon supports blocking entire instances.
Lots of instances also screen signups. There's no requirement for them to accept everyone. The server that Marcan (M1 Linux) and Alyssa Rosenzweig (Linux GPU drivers) are on claim a total of 700 active users for example. You'll still get new content as your users can boost (retweet) from other servers, while they act as gatekeepers by not boosting others.
Tumblr announced they would join the Fediverse. That would be interesting. Of course nothing stops Twitter from joining either.
> If Twitter goes under, the only practical alternative at the moment is Mastodon
WeChat: "am I a joke to you?"
Seriously, Zuck wishes he had the kind of daily center-stage that WeChat has in their customers' lives. Totally guarantee that if Twitter officially folded they'd at least make a play and they might well come out on top.
WeChat is absolutely the #1 beneficiary of any Twitter collapse scenario - which is one of China's reasons for lending Musk all that money. It's win-win, either they own musk and twitter (they've already got him banning chinese journalists and pushing the state position), or twitter collapses and they get a play at WeChat 2.0 for the western market.
Russia is the other big player in Musk's loans... not sure if there's an immediate benefit to them from collapse, but, if it succeeds they'll have a similar venue for psyops and misinformation campaigns at a minimum, plus potentially some direct leverage just like china.
> Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway.
Oh, not only does Mastodon have moderation but it's worse than that: mastodon is effectively community moderation. The problem of edgelord shit (literally edge, finding the exact boundary of the law/written policy/etc and dancing around it) is that everyone knows it when they see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy. But if you're an edgelord nazi or kf'er you'll just get banned from pods, or pods will refuse to federate with you at all. People have no obligation to play the tap-dance with you around what the exact boundary is, if you wanna be an edgelord fuck then get banned. Hell you'll get put into banlists (like ublock lists) that servers will subscribe to and block you everywhere.
This is not government censorship after all, just good old fashioned O(1) moderation. I'm sure you know what would happen if you posted nazi shit in your local discord. What the fuck bro *kick*. And if the "nazi pod" forms, that will get filtered out of everyone's peering.
Social media always adapts whenever the social norms or group expectations (for a particular community) are too at-odds with the moderation policy. When someone turns into a badmin and violates community norms, as musk is doing by inviting nazis and shit back onto the platform, the community will melt away and re-form somewhere else that aligns with the social norms. And the thing is, now that you've moved away from centralized moderation, there is no one single finely detailed moderation policy for you to play games with, it's just what the hachyderm admin or whoever wants to set as their policy, it's different on a per-pod basis, and a lot of those people aren't going to be inclined to play footsie with nazis or KF'ers. It's transgressive/edgelord content precisely because most people don't like it, after all.
WeChat is way beyond Twitter. It's nigh an alt-OS. Doesn't really follow (any) Store policy, but allowed due to CCP influence. If it becomes popular in West, West will very likely ban it, maybe based on store policy. If TikTok is problematic, no way WeChat will be allowed.
>mastodon is effectively community moderation.
>it's different on a per-pod basis
Exactly. It's not a free-for-all, but being able to operate their own pods and infiltrate others is a preferable state for 'transgressives' than 'old' Twitter. Decentralization is still worth it, but the end result would inevitably allow them some freedom to do shit.
>there is no one single finely detailed moderation policy for you to play games with
Moderation policy was result of Twitter becoming gigantic. I suspect any huge enough instance will have to adopt a policy and reach same impass.
This is what I was thinking of. China was suppressing information about the protests online by having Twitter ban activists, arresting (and beating) journalists, and running a spam campaign at the same time to push the results out of the feed.
At this point it looks like Musk is somewhat paranoid about his life, which reminds me of dictators being paranoid about their life. That's not very surprising given that Musk is far from being honest to consumers. For instance, Tesla was found to be deactivating the autopilot mode at the second before a crash [1], to make their system look safer than it is in reality.
I think that's a weird bar to set, especially for one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet. Sorry I don't have any urinalysis results to cite, if I did I would!
When the king goes mad from drinking too much lead, the right response isn't for the populace to finger wag people suggesting it might be lead poisoning.
This is a whole new level of mental gymnastics to somehow shoe-horn your PDF into a conversation about Twitter.
1. You have no idea what the intention is behind an alleged disabling. There are a thousand perfectly rational reasons why you'd want to turn off self driving when automated emergency braking has been enabled. Autopilot in general is designed around the premise of disabling during non-normal events. A pending crash is definitely one of these.
2. There is pretty extensive rebuttals so the most notable example used in your PDF, including that the car in question didn't even have have FSD purchased and that even if autopiloted was purchased, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have.
A father had the vehicle his child was in attacked. He's upset and afraid of the welfare of his family, and you decide to compare this behavior to that of a dictator? Cool
> 2. There is pretty extensive rebuttals so the most notable example used in your PDF, including that the car in question didn't even have have FSD purchased and that even if autopiloted was purchased, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have.
I mean the PDF is about a series of cars. I'm guessing you didn't read the 4 pages.
Given that Tesla is not anywhere close to level 5 self driving it's definitely expected for the self driving features to disable themselves prior to a crash as Human intervention was required (this is by definition, a crash occurred).
> A father had the vehicle his child was in attacked. He's upset and afraid of the welfare of his family, and you decide to compare this behavior to that of a dictator? Cool
Penalty should fit the crime. If you jaywalk across the street I shouldn't be able to arrest a random person because of it. Similarly, if somebody attacks a vehicle located away from an airport on a day that a twitter account doesn't post a message you shouldn't claim that twitter account's (lack of) posting is responsible.
Definitely. Now I have a simple question to you -- do you honestly think they counted these crashes as Autopilot's fault in their publicly released statistics?
> There is pretty extensive rebuttals so the most notable example used in your PDF, including that the car in question didn't even have have FSD purchased and that even if autopiloted was purchased, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have.
Congratulations. I know firsthand how buggy software can be, so I don't trust this explanation, even if Tesla is honest here, but let's assume you explained 1 out of the 16 reported incidents. Would you mind explaining the remaining 15 incidents that were reported and investigated here?
Jul 2021 San Diego CA
May 2021 Miami FL
Mar 2021 Lansing MI
Feb 2021 Montgomery County TX
Aug 2020 Charlotte NC
Jul 2020 Cochise County AZ
Jan 2020 West Bridgewater MA
Dec 2019 Cloverdale IN
Dec 2019 Norwalk CT
Jan 2018 Culver City CA
Date City/County State
Jan 2022 Desert Center CA
Sep 2021 Petaluma CA
Aug 2021 Orlando FL
Apr 2021 Belmont CA
Jan 2021 Mount Pleasant SC
Nov 2020 Houston TX
What about all the crashes that weren't reported and investigated of Autopilot turning off right before the crash? Oh, it's a made up story, right? Twitter will decide the truth? Oh, wait...
> A father had the vehicle his child was in attacked.
Would you mind providing us some details about the "attack"? His airplane position is publicly available and is not the position of his car. Finally, we are not talking here about banning the account of the person who posted Mr. Musk's airplane positions, but accounts of journalists. If we want to have a constructive discussion, then it's not helpful to simplify all this into one heavily judgemental sentence.
Has anyone seen that Simpsons episode where they sing a song along the lines of “just dont look, just dont look”.
They do this and then the advertisements that are taking over Springfield all die and go away.
We need to do this with Elon. Just stop watching/reporting on his nonsense because 90% of it is just a form of disruptive marketing that people cant look away from.
I don't like seeing anyone banned by any social media company. This is a fail by Elon considering his previous absolutist stance. I'd rather shine the light on both stupid and brilliant and let people decide on their own what they'd like to consume in terms of information and entertainment.
The VC Elite should raise a fund, hire former Twitter employees, and mount a competitive alternative. They could "Build a better Twitter". Call it "Bitter" if you will... <smirk>
I believe https://post.news/ is the attempt to do this (though mostly not with past Twitter employees). Basically the same as Twitter but with a little more emphasis on publishers. Seems fine, though occasionally it gets a little sluggish, and the content skews towards general popular interest without a big tech community yet.
Do they have an ActivityPub interface? If not, how does post.news convince their users that the time spent on establishing their social network isn't wasted when the company is sold to yet another abusive investor somewhere in the future?
I’ve seen some members of the science twitter community set up accounts over there too, though most seem to be hedging their bets with mastodon accounts as well. Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
I mean, apparently it's all about ElonJet based on the story, so "without explanation" doesn't make since here, since they're going by a pre-existing policy about real-time tweeting of one's current physical location to enable harassment.
No, you can find it on the Wayback machine from a year ago. They only added a new sentence to it clarifying that they're worried about things that threaten someone's safety.
> Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to the Mastodon page of @ElonJet, a student-made bot that tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.
Yeah, no. They've also blocked anyone from posting links to major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social or mas.to, and if you try to click any existing links to those sites on Twitter, you'll get a scary warning that it's a malicious site.
One thing that bugs me about the commentary here is that absolutely everything comes down to whether someone is mean or nice. It doesn't matter what they're saying, it's the TONE. Like we could all die fighting over the last gallon of gas in some burnt out hell world and it would be fine as long as everyone was nice to each other. It's like there is no past, there is no future, there is only the every present now and everybody's feelings and that's the only thing that exists.
Except tone is a function of the observer. It's purely subjective and thus one can make absolutely anything offensive by complaining about the tone.
Watch: I don't like the tone of your comment. Now prove to me that you're not saying something in a tone that's not offensive to me. You can't. My feelings are authoritative "lived experience."
I think tone affects whether one wants to engage in disagreement. If I disagree with someone but they have an incredibly incendiary tone, I want nothing to do with a discourse.
If someone disagrees but has a rational tone, I am more willing to voice my disagreements.
For me, tone effects my engagement with opposition, not whether or not I oppose something.
I would argue that without the "mean" tone, people might stick around twitter and have a discourse about their disagreements, and with the "mean" tone people are more likely to just bail and complain outside the platform.
Obviously we don't have a control group, so we have nothing to compare what twitter is doing right now against something else directly.
Yup. Fundamentally Elon's "free speech" thing was about anti-trans hate. And you can find the same hate here on HN, and it's fine as long as you weird it politely and ignore that those are real people we're talking about.
It is ironic that only a week or so after the Twitter Papers were released (where a primary focus was suppressing stories and accounts with little justification and hastily written new rules), Musk is now doing the exact same thing.
So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.
Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame.
I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all).
Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not good to see.
I feel this comment. I wasn't always a 'fan' per-se of Elon, but I was definitely able to appreciate what his associated companies had put forth. Anymore, I can't stomach the continuous news stream of awful behavior, treatment of others displayed, etc. I cannot support a person like him or what he stands for/represents at this time (or in the foreseeable future).
This seems like the right place for me to speculate idly: I've often wondered about sufficient margins for social engagement on these sorts of things.
For example: how would you or I behave if, no matter what we did, over 50,000 people immediately reaffirmed us online? Would it take 50,000, or would 10,000 be enough? 5,000, 1,000?
This isn't mean to exculpate Musk: he's encouraged this behavior for years, and his own behavior long predates mega-engagement by his fans on social media. And still I can't help but wonder how many of us would be able to similarly contort ourselves, if so much affirmation was on the line.
"To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and remain absolutely sober". -Logan Pearsall Smith
I feel like the fact that he is evidently posting without a filter and probably reading the endless streams of meaningless confirmation is extra damaging.
We all sometimes ridicule the stilted corporate speech of some rich people and their reluctance to appear in public, but increasingly I feel like some of them do it to not fall into the social media trap.
Having a public team write your statements and asking them to provide a weekly/monthly report on the good and the bad seems like a working strategy.
Those people are doing their job and you can even employ different teams to get a more nuanced view while you yourself can be more distanced and collected.
Of course Elon Musk specifically is s social media addict who seems to enjoy being praised by sycophants no matter what he does. He chooses this.
Yes, I wasn't a "fan" but in general I found Tesla and SpaceX to be really cool companies doing things I didn't think I'd see in my life time. When he was a goofball or a little unprofessional it didn't bug me too much, sometimes it was even a little funny, but it got more and more troll-ish and pandering to a mean spirited crowd. Now he's just obnoxious and I wish he'd go away.
It doesn't need to be as conspiratorial as Musk being a foreign asset.
If Twitter took loans from interests either connected to or sympathetic to foreign governments e.g. Saudi Arabia, Russia then simply trying to keep them onboard could be enough to influence his decisions.
Right... or those are both ludicrous rationalisations for someone who was always a gaping asshole. Many of us managed to never have been fooled by him.
If anything turned him into who he is, it would be his childhood. When he writes the xmas card to his half sister / niece, it must be difficult deciding how to fill out the card.
I think this is maybe in reference to LBJ's lifelong biographer Robert Caro where he states that "power does not corrupt, power reveals". In it he asserts that what one does with power after obtaining it reveals what the person is. It was there all along, power simply makes it show up prominently.
Yes I understand but I am challenging that with my question (besides "power" in the abstract is very different vs "being constantly recognized/followed"). Certainly being followed, attacked and assaulted in public constantly for being famous can bring trauma, and trauma can change a person, usually for the worse.
Well, there are multiple facets to it. Suddenly having money and having random relatives and old acquaintances show up in your life asking for it might make someone disillusioned about what they thought about the people.
But it won't make genuinely nice person into an asshole that kicks kittens, the money just acts as enabler for stuff they might've been afraid to do before coz of consequences. Like for example pretending to be nice to get promotion at work vs unleashing assholery once there is nobody there to kick you down for your behaviour
Nearly all of the value of his companies comes form government grants and loans. He also has large security state contracts with SpaceX and Starlink. He's a US govt asset, which is worse, imo.
I guess a definition of "value" as "the intangibles that allow it to keep functioning" would make your statement correct, but a definition that relies on "how it generates revenue" would probably not.
5% of Tesla 2021 Q1 revenue was generated from selling emission credits, 1% from trading Bitcoin, for a total of 6% generated from not selling cars / energy products / etc.
So yes, the vast majority of revenue generators (and therefore value generators) for Tesla (at least in Q1 2021, as per the article you linked) are the things I listed in my first comment.
You were seemingly thinking about what was generating profit, which is generally not how value is calculated, otherwise my (profitable) two-man company would be more valuable than Twitter. But given that you explicitly said "how it generates revenue" at the end of your comment I'm actually a bit confused as to your position.
> Emissions credits accounted for $518 million in revenue in a quarter that saw a pretax income of $533 million and a net income of $438 million on a GAAP basis. Needless to say, the credits account for almost the entirety of Tesla's profit for this quarter
518/533 ~= 97%, not 5%. I must be misunderstanding something somewhere. Explicitly, I'm saying that (per my understanding of that article) Tesla derived more income from selling emissions credits than from selling cars in that particular quarter (and, I think it's reasonable to assume, other quarters, given how overwhelmingly that seems to be their business model).
You are conflating "net income" (profit) with revenue. I do not disagree that the vast majority of profit was generated by selling credits, but revenue is how most people measure value for corps (this is how Amazon could be an amazingly valuable company while not turning a profit for years). Re-read the last para in my other comment for another example of why you don't use profit to benchmark "value".
Even the emission credits being "pure profit" is misleading, given that the only reason Tesla can sell those is because of the cars/batteries/etc they are producing, so realistically the cost of producing those things should be deducted against the revenue generated by selling the credits.
Most of the value comes from the ponzi scheme that is their stock. Nothing they have in assets, physical or otherwise, ever justified the price of the stock even at half of what it is today.
Tesla got carried over the chasm by hundreds of millions of dollars in DOE-backed loans, their product is subsidized by state and federal price supports, and all of their profits are due to air pollution swaps, another government subsidy. Good for Tesla for being aligned with the government, I guess.
This is to say nothing of Elon's small-potatoes stealing from local governments via Boring.
Ok, but the vast majority of revenue was not generated from selling credits over the entire lifetime of the company, which is what matters when we are talking about Tesla's present-day value (and therefore the source of Musk's wealth).
The Saudis are major shareholders in Twitter, although personally I doubt they're telling Musk what to do so much as being content to let him run it into the ground; it's a win for them whether Twitter under Musk succeeds or fails.
I don't actually even remotely believe that he is a foreign government asset, but I don't think that's a good argument: giving Starlink to Ukraine is exactly one of the things that a Russian asset would do.
Well, it is one thing when we hear about someone who is a douchebag but we have no proof. Another entirely different thing is to witness this kind of behavior up close. This is what EM is providing everyone since the last few months.
Same. I knew he was arrogant etc., but some degree of that almost comes with the territory. And he is prone to intense idiosyncratic interpretations that lead to unusual behaviour. But I also got suckered into thinking the man had some sort of primarily altruistic drive. Maybe he once did. Celebrity tends to ruin even good men.
Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius.
Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money.
Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle unless you are a hardcore musk stan.
I read the other day that Hughes suffered pretty severely de-habilitating mental illness, and that it isn’t fair to him to compare his decline to Elon. He had severe OCD, allodynia, and other things driving his increasingly erratic behavior.
Additionally there is fairly good evidence he screwed up his lower back in early plane crashes and took an increasingly assorted and unusual series of addictive pain medication after age 40+. The 1930s through 1960s were not exactly a golden age of harmless non-addictive pharmaceuticals.
From that article, it certainly appears true that his dad once held shares in an emerald mine. ("This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.")
I mean, 1980 Zambia is literally apartheid era. That's a statement of fact.
You don't like the associations that "apartheid" evokes? And yet, for an emerald mine in Zambia, apartheid was certainly a big factor in the working conditions there. The mines in Zambia (mostly copper) benefited the most by apartheid, where white workers were paid over ten times what black workers were paid. Even during the 80s, when supposedly the color bar had been dismantled, mines got around that be defining all black labor as "local" (even if the workers were immigrants) and white workers as "skilled expats" (even if the whites were born next door). [1]
Mining, indeed, was heavily tied to the apartheid from the very start. [2]
So it's very relevant that it's an "apartheid era." You could not invest in a mine in Zambia or South Africa without knowing that you were investing into a apartheid system, and hoping to make money off the backs of the apartheid abuses.
> imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
Yes, I agreed that that wasn't backed by known evidence in my statement above.
Using my numbered list above (arrow is chain of relevance):
2 -> 1 -> 3 -> 4
If you’re getting tripped up about apartheid and the mine being separated, just combine them.
1+2 -> 3 -> 4
In GPs post, 2 is not relevant to 4 unless you establish 3. Unless GP is trying to make an unfounded claim that “Elon’s current state is associated with the crimes of apartheid” (where associated means having a not insignificant impact on that state), including 1+2 isn’t relevant. It’s irrelevant that it’s an apartheid era mine because it’s irrelevant that it’s a mine. 4 is not associated with 2 by way of 1+3 like, IIUC, GP implied.
Hughes as a company did a lot of cool stuff way after the ww2 era, in fact Boeing's satellite business for large and serious commercial and military geostationary satellites is what used to be Hughes in El Segundo CA, acquired about 20 years ago.
The trouble is that all the cool stuff was also the stuff that Hughes Jr never really cared for. Lasers, Radar, electronics escaped his interest. Hughes wanted you to build world class airframes and sadly this is the one thing Hughes Aircraft never really did well.
Hughes (now Boeing via McDonnell Douglas) helicopters are quite something. The 500 is generally regarded as quite the hot rod (especially compared to the 206/407). You can even get one in single rotor configuration (NOTAR). Hughes left quite a legacy beyond the Spruce Goose and hopefully El Muskrat will too. It'd be a damn shame if he succeeds in completely destroying Tesla and Space-X.
Oakland PD has a couple of 500s which is neat, but what always brings a chuckle is the tale of how New Zealand farmers went all in on the 500 because nothing else could touch the performance for… hunting deer.
>Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle
Unless you do it to the outgroup. Then it's fine! Laudable even!
Same as shutting down journalists and other accounts. It was nothing to fret about when the opposite side used to do it, "they were misinforming or borderline bad anyway, and they could always start their own blog or something, so it wasn't censorship" and so on.
The Twitter of yore shutting down conservatives and other such "controversial" opinions. I don't care much for bipartisan politics, but the partisan bias in all this is palpable, as is a "the tables have turned and we don't like it so we revert to general principles we pissed on before" vibe ...
It's also comic: pundits pissing on free speech (tons of cheering when people were cancelled before, and lots of articles on how it's justified and free speech is not the be all end-all) making a u-turn to call for free speech and condemn Musk's account shutdowns now, while Musk and co that was defending free-speech before is now censoring accounts, while the "free speech" proponents in the previous round are now cheering him for it...
Think about a wedding. Think about a bride and groom happily dancing, looking forward to their life together. And what does Elon say at this moment? "As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, 'I am the alpha in this relationship.'"
No thanks. Sounds like you're trying to pile rubbish on someone's name by promoting personal hit piece articles from their ex-partners. That's low quality.
Interview anyone's ex and you'll find grubby things to hold up in the light, if that's your agenda.
If you look for dirt, and want dirt, you'll find dirt.
"Hey everyone, read what his ex wife said"... is nothing but encouraging others to look for dirt as you have done. Nothing to do with the current topic about twitter bans. Similar to what cheap tabloid reporting does.
The EV industry is a distraction to prevent us from doing what is needed to save the environment: ie. minimise the use of cars. It (much like the hyperloop scam it necessitated) is simply an attack on car-free living and public transport.
No, that's dumb. These are largely orthogonal problems.
Not having EV's wouldn't have made everyone suddenly switch to public transit and bikes, as cool as that might be. They'd just keep driving gas and diesel vehicles.
And realistically, you can't get rid of cars and trucks entirely. Even super dense areas with strong public transit still use plenty of cars and trucks, because they're useful. You think Singapore and Tokyo and Seoul could run on no cars or trucks whatsoever?
Car-free living doesn't imply the total eradication of all cars. It just means reducing dependency on them to a bare minimum: ie. those uses which cannot possibly be replaced. The former is something that literally nobody has ever proposed. The latter is something which is a serious policy option.
Also you are making a logical fallacy by assuming I am saying that -EV's- (sorry: "EV industry", different thing) are singularly responsible for the lack of decent climate policies. I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many.
FYI: I live in Seoul and there's certainly a lot that could be done to reduce the insane amount of cars from current nightmare levels. Korea has a very powerful auto industry, one thing they could do is stop subsidizing it. Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
It's not an "attack". You can have good public transport and cars live in harmony if you design cities properly. Hell, in fact it synergises well, the more people opt in for public transport the less cars on the roads there are.
It's just abhorrent design of cities, that is the problem, especially in US.
I agree. This slide into barefaced shittiness hurts all the more because, at first, he felt like the hero we needed.
EDIT: "barefaced" intentional because there's significant evidence to claim that these character traits were always present (see - the famous essay by his ex-wife), just less noticed.
>Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did.
Same. It's one thing to use a slur like that in some personal dispute; but this was against a hero who had saved children, and on a public forum. I've lied to myself that this was a minor dispute. And it would be that if he'd apologized. But the lack of apology is a very serious red flag of character. Impulsive unkind and unfair behavior is something we all are guilty of some time. But to not acknowledge it and make amends? That's wrong. Because the easy thing was the apology, sincere or not. Musk must have pushed back against his people to not apologize. Musk wanted to hurt that man, and he still wants to hurt him, would hurt him again if given the chance, worse if it was legal. And for what? Publicly criticizing Musk's (frankly hair-brained) idea to save those kids. (Honestly, I don't remember the details.) He reacted very badly to a fair criticism, with personal malice and rage, and he believes these reactions to be appropriate and, if anything, displaying admirable restraint.
I can't help but see echos of that lack of empathy, that meanness, as he takes his various actions now with Twitter - firing large swaths of staff, sending demanding emails to the remaining staff on very short term. We are all capitalists and so give a proven leader like Musk enormous leeway in this position. But his behavior has been absolutely rotten. Even layoffs can be delivered with more grace! His words and actions, apart from layoffs, feel like angry, vengeful behavior rather than "effective leader" behavior - all echoes of the "pedo guy" incident.
To give this more context, Vern Unsworth was mocking Elon Musks attempts to help on request of the lead diver, after providing many batteries and engineers time to work on a solution. Vern himself was not an actual diver in the rescue.
He wasn't a rescue diver, he was the local expert, having mapped the cave and knowing more about its structure than anybody else in the world. he was truly qualified to say that Elon's attempt wasn't going to work and was hogging to much attention.
But he initiated being derisive and mocking of another person whom was personally invited to help by the dive team. Contributed time and resources to the effort as per the instruction of the lead diver. Doesn't sound particularly heroic. People love to leave this out of the story that Vern Unsworth brought it on himself by initiating the negativity, wasn't a diver, and ultimately lost his case.
Yes, I agree he (vern) did "initiate it being derisive". It was a poor choice made by a person who was currently working in an active emergency that was being seen by the whole world. And I do know that he lost his case- a real shame in my mind.
He was a diver- just not a rescue diver in this case.
Unsworth had a bunch of lives to save and his response to Musk was - given the circumstances - a lot more courteous than I would have been in the same situation.
That still doesn't excuse Elon though. If you respond to this comment by mocking me for being clueless does that give me the right to call you a pedo? It shouldn't.
> "the lack of apology is a very serious red flag"
Sounds like something a bot would write.
Musk's Twitter apology to the 'pedo guy' at the time made headlines. A simple google will sort out your confusion. He also apologized in court, and repeatedly stated how it was the stupidest thing he's done.
> "We are all capitalists..."
Again, sounds like something a chat bot would write.
I'm curious, what is the simple google search that will find this apology? And what's with accusing me of being a bot? That seems strange and off topic, and not a little unkind.
The simple google search might be "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment".
It's strange you doubled-down on Musk not apologizing, when it was headline news at the time about his multiple apologies and statements of regret over the incident.
You stated: "honestly, I don't remember the details" yet proceeded at length with your analysis and judgement.
People have been using the new chat AI tools to post comments. Your comment was strangely drawn out, laboring on disjointed ideas, pressing inaccuracies like how the new bots do it.
I didn't double down. I asked. And yes, Musk apologized during the defamation trial. That's better than nothing, but not by much- he was under $150M of duress at that point. The vibe I got was distinctive, and softened, but not invalidated by this new information.
Yeah I think he's lost it - all that money seems to really have gone to his head. Really he should be doing one thing well (pick cars or rockets) and enjoying life - spending hours a day personally banning people he doesn't like on twitter can't be good for his mental health - frankly the emperor has no clothes
I've seen enough behind closed doors to believe wealthy+successful+powerful people are given every opportunity to go down dark paths of personal "development" and that statistically some are likely to turn out "bad" while protected by many layers of power and appearance and prestige.
I recall having conversations with some people, who seemed to follow the "scene" more than I, telling me that his image was relatively well curated and managed by PR people in and around his companies, and that his "quirkiness" was allowed out in managed quantities so as to maximise interest and attractiveness without being off-putting.
I never looked into it because I didn't care much. The rockets stuff is cool but also profitable so good for him and capitalism. But I found it highly believable and never really understood the cultism around him. I wouldn't have predicted this twitter or doucheness, but I certainly don't find it surprising.
I feel like this was something that he was turned into. Things like the pedo guy comments and the Covid skepticism and a bunch more are genuine criticisms, but for every story of substance there has been a deluge of pure character assassination. Between the years of long work hours and a stream of hot or cold praise or condemnation I think it's quite easy to lose your moral compass.
I think a lot of my friends think I'm a die hard Musk fan when I say a criticism is unfair. I actually just think he's a human being under a microscope coping poorly. I'll support the criticism when I think it's warranted. The is a culture of everything is bad because bad man is bad, that unsettles me.
As for this particular story on HN, I really don't know. Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
>Twitter is a chaos box at the moment, It's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved. These actions (or any actions really) might be policy, edicts from the top, officious middle employees or just plain screw ups.
This is an issue that allegedly involves Musk's family. He's tweeted about it directly multiple times stretching back to his initial offer of cash for @elonjet to go away, and has directly discussed this policy change in his own tweets over the past 24 hours, including tweeting about this round of bans.
Are you actually saying "it's hard to tell whether Musk is directly involved" in this specific issue, or...?
In that respect I was talking about the journalist bans rather than the elonjet bans. Now that I see he has weighed in on this issue it does seem to be that he was involved in the policy. The policy itself seems at odds with his previous statements but the no doxxing rule does seem to be arguably a reasonable thing to have.
Whether those banned were actually in violation of those rules I don't know. I would have said remains to be seen, but I fear such details will be lost in the news churn.
I believe the person you replied to was saying that was an example of a legitimate issue with Elon's behavior, as compared to the "pure character assassination."
He apologised more than once. Including on Twitter and again in court where he looked the guy directly in the face and apologised.
I mean, it was widely reported but somehow you missed the headlines at the time such as Washington Post's "Elon Musk apologizes for ‘pedo guy’ comment: ‘The fault is mine and mine alone’"!
You're right, I did miss it. But it looks he followed up with this (after the apology) so the point stands:
He blasted: "He's an old, single white guy from England who's been travelling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.
"There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach. It isn't where you go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else.
"Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex-trafficking."
But you wrote the statement "he never did", as if you'd done your homework and had concrete facts. And others have replied to your comment saying "yeh he never apologised" etc. Note the virality of wrong information when you're on an attack path.
Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
Musk's sub wasn't used for the cave rescue, but was kept by the Thai Navy who said they could use it for future rescues. The navy were trained in how to use it.
The diver guy was wrong to attack Musk. So the sub couldn't be used in the cave, so what? It was help, undeserving of scorn. I'm not excusing Musk's reactionary comments, but I'm glad the diver lost the court case. The diver wanted 160 million dollars and was awarded zero by the jury.
And speaking of apologies, the diver never apologised or backed away from accusing Musk of a stunt and telling him to stick his sub up his rear end. A sub that a team of people worked on, not just Musk.
> Here's some facts... The diver guy launched a public attack on Musk at a time when kids needed help. Everyone was focused on helping the kids, but this diver decided to get some attention by insulting Musk out of the blue, in a CNN interview.
My guess is that both the diver and Musk desperately wanted to help the kids. The divers attack on musk (I believe attack is too strong a word, but sticking with your terminology) was likely motivated by the view that Musk was making things worse, not better, with impractical ideas. From what I've read of the case, musk's submarine was indeed not practical - for this requirement.
However, whatever the divers motivation, responding by falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is vicious, uncalled for and indicative of being a giant douche. Apologizing and then unapologising - and doubling down on the false smears of someone way below him on the ladder - is more of the same.
You're claiming to know the motivations of others, but your record of accuracy is not great in this thread.
Building and delivering a sub with the intention to help, is never going to "make things worse" even if the sub isn't used.
If my colleague writes a program that ends up not fitting the application, I would never tell them to shove their code up their arse. Who would do that other than a giant douche?
Both the Diver and Musk engaged in a squabble in public, started by the diver, escalated by Musk. You're focusing too much on the contents of the insults, and deciding Musk's was not only the greater crime, but the only crime. You've pardoned the diver of any fault, and invented a squeaky-clean backstory to explain his remarks.
Not to mention, hiring a PI to dig up dirt on the guy to try and defame the diver further. It's one thing to hurtle insults around on Twitter, is another thing entirely to mess with people's actual lives.
Why twitter though, it's quite small and not very influent except maybe in some countries like the US, could have bought Weibo and reached a huge market for potential clients and way more ways to make money.
America is probably saturated, it's not even like it wants to buy Musk products, and Musk feels so much more like a Chinese boss than the head of an american social platform having to navigate impossible compromises :D
The strategy to act like a republican douche courting Trump to try to maybe make them like barely finished EVs might pay off, but it's such a risky bet. I d pay good money to witness one day american conservatives "owning the libs" through buying his electric cars.
Twitter itself will never yield him 44bn, so there s no economic rationality for the buyout: it can only be now a derivative gain.
It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.
I agree the first bit is true; I just don't think it guarantees future success. Looking at the top 25 vehicles in 2021, Tesla only has one on the list, and that's way down at #17. They have a lot of climbing to do to get to #1. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g36005989/best-selling-car...
The latter argument is addressed in the article: "Tesla's value is down more than 52% since the Twitter buyout was approved on April 25, while the S&P 500 is only off 5.5%. And Tesla stock is off 29% since the deal closed on Oct. 27, much worse than the S&P 500's 6.6% gain in that time."
> I agree the first bit is true; I just don't think it guarantees future success. Looking at the top 25 vehicles in 2021, Tesla only has one on the list, and that's way down at #17. They have a lot of climbing to do to get to #1.
That's true, however the majority of people still purchase non EVs, which is not the market Tesla is in. As multiple parts of the world are moving to ban sales of new petrol cars (UK 2040, EU 2035, Chili 2035, Hong Kong 2035, India 2040, etc), there will be an interesting point where most new cars purchased worldwide are EVs.
I don't believe Tesla are the ones who need to catch up to the petrol manufacturer market - the opposite is true. The traditional manufacturers have about 10 years to catch up or start bleeding, as laws will force purchasers to buy an EV.
RE the value loss argument, it is certain that the overvalued Tesla stock is dropping, however that 52% is during a period that tech stocks (which I would argue Tesla is one of) have been dropping like crazy. The NASDAQ is down almost 30% from the start of the years, mostly pulled downwards by tech stocks:
I don't think they're in a worse position than any other tech stock, especially with global legislation effectively guranteeing them a long term pay off.
Your theory appears to be that with the shift to EVs over the next 15-20 years, most people will shift manufacturers to an EV-specific one, specifically Tesla.
But it's at least as reasonable to think that people will keep buying EV versions of their favorite cars. Not only is there significant brand loyalty in the car markets, but there's no particular reason to think that Telsa can be all things to all people. Tesla only has 3 models total; Toyota alone has 5 models on the top-25 list. The current Tesla model lineup appeals to a pretty specific demographic, and I don't see much sign Telsa can expand beyond that.
There's plenty of sign that other manufacturers will catch up. Consumer Reports has studied 20 EVs. They recommend 5. Tesla only has one model they recommend, and it's in the middle the scores for those 5. The Kia EV 6 gets a 91 and the Genesis GV60 gets an 84. The Tesla Model 3 gets a 78.
That's all before we get to Musk. Tesla got gobs of free publicity and cheap capital because of his PR savvy. But that has now gone into reverse, with no sign that Musk even thinks that's a problem: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4562466-can-tesla-survive-w...
And personally, I think "Tesla is a tech stock" and "Tesla will become the dominant car manufacturer" are theses that are at odds. Tech stocks are high margin businesses. Niche luxury cars, as Tesla has been to this point, can be high-margin efforts. But the mainstream market won't be.
Apple is extremely good at being a late mover in key markets. Few even remember MP3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. Or look at how the smartwatch market changed after the Apple Watch was introduced.
They also have one of the world's strongest brands, with a lot of dedicated customers. They don't have to compete on price, so despite having 13% of the global phone market, they are making 75% of all smartphone profits: https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-desp...
I am not an Apple fan and own none of their gear, but even I can recognize how Apple would be a formidable player.
> Few even remember MP3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. Or look at how the smartwatch market changed after the Apple Watch was introduced.
You say your not an Apple fan, but really sounds like you've been hanging out the Apple Store a bit too much lately.
Those are all cold business fact. At the various times, I owned an Archos Jukebox, a series of Palm devices, and a Pebble, so I was paying attention to all of those markets as Apple swept in. I have never owned an Apple device, as I dislike their sealed-box, consumerist nature, and I thought Jobs was a gaping asshole. But despite my personal dislike, I can recognize that there are reasons they are the world's most valuable company (4x Tesla's value): https://companiesmarketcap.com/
Latest rumor is that they pushed it from 2025 to 2026.
By 2026 it'll be next to impossible to make any serious impact in EV market, certainly not serious enough to affect Tesla.
In 2026 Tesla will be at run rate of 5+ millions cars.
There's no magic in this business.
Even if Apple has a car with that kind of demand, it takes 1 year to build a factory and 3 years to ramp it to 1 million cars a year. This is what Giga Shanghai did and that's faster than anyone ever done it.
So we're talking 2030 for 1 million cars, if somehow Apple can build it's first factory at the same scale and speed as Tesla it's second factory, after lots of painful learning scaling Fremont production.
Plus, without robotaxi what's the point? Luxury brands like BMW / Audi / Mercedes top out at ~2.5 million a year. That's a business, but it's not a Tesla destroying business.
It might have lost short-term gamblers a lot of money, yes. But if you lose money through gambling, the only person you should blame is yourself.
If you’re an investor who’s in it for the long run, I don’t see what today’s stock price has to do with anything though. You can’t use the current stock price as an answer to what the stock is worth.
> Capital that is going going to be harder to raise
Tesla has over $10 billions in cash and adding few billions every quarter. They don't need to raise ever again.
> They had early-adopter success
Yes. Also, they became the largest EV company in the world with 2x margin of other car companies.
> when they had the field to themselves
Nissan Leaf and Bolt EV launched before Model 3.
Jaguar i-Pace, Audi eTron, BMW i5, VW ID.3 and ID.4, few models from Hyundai and quite a few more.
Model 3 and Model Y had plenty of competition for several years.
That competition didn't sell many cars and Tesla did.
> But now every major car company ... are coming for them
More like desperately trying to catch up. Tesla is still ahead of everyone in things that matter, like securing raw materials for batteries, building battery cells, securing battery cells from suppliers, manufacturing (gigacasting, spending less time and money to build a car), building more factories (ramping up 2, soon announcing 2 or more), Tesla Semi with best specs by far, still the best motors, the most efficient cars, the safest cars, building insurance business, shipping more software updates than anyone. This is not a complete list.
The question for the future is not: will Toyota or Honda kill Tesla.
It's: will Toyota and Honda keep up enough to not go bankrupt.
As to the future, we'll see, but it's perfectly possible that Tesla will end up in the bucket with Groupon: promising early start, but in retrospect only of historical interest.
Staying in the car business during a time of transition is an expensive game. Tesla may well need to raise money again and the way their stockprice has been going as of late isn't going to help them with that.
He has lost 40% of his net worth (over $110 billion) so far this year largely because of this one deal. Truly one of the most disastrous business decisions of all time.
PG has been a Musk fanboy defending his every crazy action on Twitter. Even now his first instinct was to assume that there was some foul play. Anyway he saying it’s bad is a change for sure.
He's confidently stating now that there was a "coordinated campaign" to continue posting the jet tracker link (e.g. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af). From the chrysalis emerges the caterpillar.
I read it that way at first too, but I think he’s saying that’s why he originally suspected the bans were due to an algorithm gone awry. And that’s a reasonable worry — it was possible that a particular url was causing the accounts to be banned, e.g. if Musk added ElonJet to some kind of internal ban list, that’d do it.
No, he's claiming the journalists "coordinated" a campaign to share external links to the jet tracker. Some of them admit that they did (not "coordinated" -- alternate sites of this public data has been very widely shared), but others are at a loss and claim they did no such thing. One had reported on an LAPD statement -- that despite the imminent harm Elon claimed, they hadn't gotten a crime report and actually had to reach out to Elon's people -- and shortly after got suspended.
Elon is constantly leveraging the "for the children" cover for his petulance.
Exactly! I couldn't help but think of Hughes recently with his crazy choices. He hasn't got the injury from a plane accident to attribute his awfulness to though.
Because he's not a business genius, he's just a guy who has made a few big bets and they've happened to work out (specifically PayPal and Tesla, and maybe SpaceX eventually). After that, he thought he had a magic touch and started putting money into companies that caught his fancy because it worked for him in the past. Before twitter it was the Boring Company.
The Boring Company is absolutely a success and imo it's the best example of Elon's tried and true strategy: convince government officials of some idea only the government could buy. Boring Company is a money making machine just like SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX even though not a single one of those companies could be profitable without the heavy subsidization they receive.
Good Jobs First track how much subsidies are given out to specific companies. Tesla's racked up $2.5 billion from states and the federal government and another half billion in loans/bailouts[^0] (for comparison, Tesla' net income in 2022 was $11.19B). SpaceX is all government contracts where NASA basically pays a private company to do the things they could and want to do but can't because of political impediments. We're still the ones funding it, we're just paying more and letting a private company take credit. Starlink's subsidized by the FCC, SolarCity's subsidized by a number of states as well as the federal gov'ts subsidization through tax credits for 30% of the cost of solar panels, etc.
And people aren't dumb. He's been sued in a number of countries for subsidy fraud already. Remember when Tesla pretended to have rapid battery exchange ready to go and announced it was live? That was purely to take advantage of a poorly written subsidy package in CA that didn't actually stipulate they had to give people access to it. Tesla won that lawsuit too iirc.
Elon Musk became the richest man on earth without ever running a profitable company. In fact, I'd say it's precisely by NOT running profitable companies that he got to where he is today
A disastrous failure worth $6b! That's my point. Neurolink and SolarCity are also disastrous failures. But Boring Company has gotten contract in Las Vegas, Chicago, LA, and more. And despite all these failures Miami, amongst a few other FL and CA cities, is still in talks about a contract.
That's the business. Continue selling a dream. Talk to any actual engineer with relevant knowledge and they'd likely tell you it was a terribly thought out idea from the start. But those engineers aren't the ones signing gov't contracts
Wow. Thank you for explaining so thoughtfully. Would you get banned if you say this in Twitter. Why no journalist asks these questions and make people realize it's their money in someone else's pocket.
As best I’ve been able to discern it, Musk said he was going to buy Twitter for a way overvalued sum ($44bn) as a troll? But ended up getting in so deep that he found himself with a legal obligation to buy the thing for an absurd price.
It’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me: obscenely rich man is very used to doing whatever the hell he wants with no repercussions, particularly when shitposting on Twitter (see: SEC) and there was no-one around to tell him to stop.
And even worse than that, he would have had to have been deposed before paying for it. A bunch of his conversations about the deal were already released in discovery. Twitter lawyers were salivating about catching Elon in a lie at the deposition. It’s notable Musk was willing to deal juuust before the deposition was finally going to happen.
Maybe milking elderly people with robocalls about the "liberal conspiracy" is really that lucrative, and lighting $44B on fire was just an investment to get into that club?
It's a particularly spectacle-heavy fall, but it's actually not that uncommon for social networks to decline quickly. Digg famously had their userbase fall apart near-instantly after their v4 launch.
Underrated take IMO. Something many haven't learned ... these things are ephemeral. In the same way they are made new they are made old.
If you care about your online presence and the branding "value" it has, then work to separate the brand from the platform as much as possible.
If you care about your social connections, find some way to separate them from the platform too: follow them on another platform, learn their general identity so you can find them elsewhere, and maybe we can all try to value having our own personal homes on the web separate from any real platform again.
This is ultimately a long awaited revenge against sour activism taken too far, and exposure of alarming things hidden or ignored for ages — things Twitter and its Big Club have been known for for a long time.
Yup I don't like Elon but I assumed twitter would mostly stay the same with a bit more trumpism. I was fine with that but after the sheer stupidity of the last few weeks I'm going to have to leave.
The silver lining here is that we are quickly learning beyond all shadow of doubt that you would not want to live on Mars in a dome owned by Elon Musk, at the same time the odds of that ever happening are dropping faster than his net worth.
"My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the
account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal
safety risk," he tweeted on Nov. 6.
This seems to be giving him more credit than he deserves. If he's trying to get republicans on board, all he needs to do is keep crowing about free speech and cancel culture. Actually making any changes to twitter isn't required. IMO he banned journalists that criticized him... because they criticized him. occams razor
He has probably actually been radicalized by Twitter though, instead of just pretending to be. I suspect that he is actually emotionally invested in his chosen side in the “culture war” and feels genuinely compelled to “own the libs” and whatnot.
The references support facts that are not in dispute. The only fact in dispute is whether the Twitter purchase was instrumental to this contract, not that Starlink is a military contractor with industry connections.
But I agree that we should be concerned about the military applications of Starlink, and that we should be discussing it more. And I appreciate you highlighting it because I wasn't aware.
Republicans are strongest when they have plenty of liberals to criticize. No liberals on his platform means no ammo for Republicans which means they cannot get votes.
Exactly. Occam's razor needs some sharpening here. Musk is just red pilled. There's no need for a conspiracy theory involving the military industrial complex. It's unfortunate, but hardly unique.
> a massive DoD program, which requires Republicans to fund.
Contrary to the partisan memes, support for military funding is actually bipartisan. Republicans often like to say that Democratic politicians don't support the military, to pander to their base, but this isn't actually true. And Democratic Party sometimes like to play at being peaceniks, again to pander to their base, but this isn't true either.
Look up the composition of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. 50/50 split between parties. You don't get DoD projects funded by sucking up to Republicans, you need to convince politicians on both sides of the aisle.
@georgeg23, comments in this thread are now disabled for new users so I'll reply here. It doesn't matter if SDI was originally Reagan's baby. Reagan is dead and nothing will get funded without approval from both parties. The Republicans can't fund the SDA on their own.
But in this case, the DoD project is decidedly Republican. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a Reagan initiative and an attempt at rebooting it is a hallmark of every Republican administration since.
I have to say this initially rings to me like a conspiracy theory, but there's lots of info you shared that I wasn't aware of and is quite interesting.
I personally would not be against an interest group pushing over their lifetime for a common interest such as space exploration. Although turning this into a "Twitter is a way to curry favours" conclusion is a stretch.
I dunno. Why wouldn't Starlink have gotten that contract anyway...? And why would he threaten to cut off Ukraine if securing this contract were a number one priority for him...? Democrats aren't really less keen on military spending than Republicans, if you want to be a huge military contractor, you'd want the support of both.
I mean this is an intriguing rationalization, but I don’t buy it.
Buying votes simply doesn’t cost this much, by orders of magnitude. Burning your empire to ashes as a loyalty test doesn’t hold water either: It’s politicians that partake in loyalty tests, not donors.
The military wanting to spend money on a starlink like low earth orbit system is nothing new or surprising.
They have been spending vast amounts of money on various types of geostationary based two-way satellite communications technology for 40 years. And they currently do so on some very low term projects and contracts.
Remember that the US DoD is what saved Iridium too.
They are always on the lookout for new or better tech.
Musk entirely aside for the moment, fact is that the starlink Redmond team has been first to market with something that is WAY ahead of kuiper, oneweb, telesat or any other leo satellite network in real world results.
This comment reads like something that is probably true but is hard to prove because it’s a judgment of something that is intangible by nature (motivations) unless its complimented by a bevy of concrete evidence (e.g. emails, testimonies).
I think that you’re tangentially right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk purchased Twitter because he had to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever motivated him to posture toward buying it in the first place was motivated by what you’re explaining.
To people who have seen similar deals in the past like this it was also my conclusion.
It’s like Elon is the modern government agency cut out, but instead of having a handler or agency association - he’s just generally a free agent cut out for anyone who will fund him.
But it’s also the plot of the much maligned movie ‘Aloha’. To the keen eye it is a disturbingly insightful film.
If Musk does end up taking out Twitter, it’ll be up there with electric cars and rebooting the private space travel industry as a service to humanity. Twitter is an awful platform that relies on cognitive hacks to elevate the worst people (across the spectrum) to prominence. Do you remember the last few years? We got to the point where respectable news outlets were reporting on cable news the insane takes that were flitting through Twitter. Nuking Twitter from orbit is a goddamn public service.
Whoa. I didn’t downvote, but that’s a surprising take from you.
One obvious problem with it is that if Twitter dies, some other site will take its place. The idea of tweeting isn’t going anywhere. It’d be a bit like trying to uninvent a bicycle.
More generally, a bunch of thoughtful people use Twitter, and Twitter DMs changed my life. It’s the AOL messenger of the 2020s. A low friction “DMs open” platform is very hard to come by — the closest before the messenger era was email, which usually isn’t a conversation. So there would be a real loss in terms of social value. E.g. TikTok requires both people follow each other before DMing, so there’s not even an option.
You’re not entirely mistaken, but the caveats seem worth calling out. On the whole it seems like more harm than good would come from the implosion.
"In 1918, Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.[76] A year and a half later, Ford began publishing a series of articles in the paper under his own name, claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was affecting America.[77] The series ran in 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide was required carry the paper and distribute it to its customers.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_Th...
I think Musk bought Twitter to serve as his own platform, to spread his ideas and to suppress those of others.
I feel like the media determined they were going to report it as a failure regardless of what the facts are. Remember all the stories about how Twitter was definitely going to fall apart during the world cup?
I think Twitter was long dead. It just had no prospect of making money, but slowly degrade into more “heavy VF” propaganda machine it had been for years, and recent series of events is its heart attack at Leviathan timescale.
I don’t understand why people say this: Twitter wasn’t lucrative in the way that Facebook is, but they made a healthy profit in 2019 and probably would have made a small profit in 2021 had it not made settlement payments. Their revenue per employee was close to $1M, which is about 2/3rds of Google’s.
It’s not clear, either then or now, that Twitter “had no prospect of making money.” By most metrics, it was a potentially (and in actuality) very profitable company with a history of mismanagement.
Twitter was already struggling with right wing nutjobs and banana republics before El Muskrat got into the mix. Beyond that, Twitter was absolutely struggling to monetize eyeballs. While it wasn't about to implode in the short-term I don't think anyone expected Twitter to stick around long-term without significant changes. El Muskrat just doused the whole thing in acetone and dropped a big fat blunt on it.
I agree with this! My point was that Twitter was not destined to fail: it had (has!) hundreds of millions of high-value users who treated (treat!) it as a news and culture feed. They made lots of money off of those users; the fact that they weren't more regularly profitable is an indictment of management rather than the fundamental business model.
This entire thing is an extended farce in two acts: (1) Twitter's leadership's inability to turn a highly addictive social media network into a regular money fountain, and (2) the sale of a potential regular money fountain to the single least qualified person possible.
Twitter was profitable for, what, a single quarter in 2019? That's not sustainable. But yeah we're talking years before a major cash crunch not weeks. Elno accelerated that timeline pretty dramatically.
If pigs had wings they could fly, but they don't so they can't. Almost profitable is not actually profitable, and Twitter was profitable for a brief moment in time with no indication that it was or would be sustainable.
Twitter had reasonably healthy finances and steadily growing revenue. It turned profit in 2018 and 2019 and could have fully recovered from the 2020 slump within a few more quarters.
A change in leadership (never been a fan of Dorsey) and a refocus on core competencies could have given it a big boost - if it was planned and executed competently. But what we got with Musk is the exact opposite of that. The amount of fuckup is truly amazing to watch.
Elon is certainly awful for all that he’s doing, but couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company instead of taking legal action to ensure he did it?
People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.
Twitter did tell him to buzz off at first. That was the point of the poison pill. Then he offered stupid amounts of money at astonishingly good terms. All along the way he took shots at Twitter that reduced its value.
Twitter’s shareholders voted to accept the deal at his offered price. When Musk wanted out the shareholders weren’t interested enough to even vote a second time.
Not really, at least not within a reasonable amount of time to close the deal. Lots of Levine about how Musk couldn't really force the deal with a tender offer, right?
But, I mean, the board did the right thing; their obligation is to the shareholders, and the price Musk offered was absurdly high.
Twitter was an unprofitable laughing stock until 2016, and with Trump gone they were very likely to revert to that whoever was in charge. It's hard to justify not taking twice what you're worth for that. Frankly even for employees, getting cashed out on your RSUs at double value and the option to walk away with 3 months' severance sounds better than staying there while it slowly runs into the ground.
Why is this myth so pervasive. Pre-musk, Twitter was making upwards of $1m per employee. If only we could all “fail” this way… It not being profitable was due to short term capital expenditures.
They've had literally two profitable quarters in their whole corporate history. They went from being considered an equal competitor to Facebook to... not, as Facebook was able to bring in advertising revenue and Twitter wasn't.
Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time and the reason they're not profitable is short term capital expenditures; the proof is in the pudding.
> Every money-losing tech company claims that they could turn the spigot to profitability at any time
A bit of an exaggeration but there is some truth here, tech companies are notorious for feeding all their revenue back into growth. However in Twitter’s case it was absolutely true. It had a solid perch and wasn’t going anywhere… until Elon took over and became Trump 2.0 except “this time, he owns the site!”
This is where the government should’ve protected our “town square” by blocking the deal (Elon has too many government military entanglements to be allowed to own a social media company, too many conflicts of interest, and Elon’s past history of using Twitter to flagrantly violate the law).
Expecting the shareholders not to take the money and run is unreasonable.
> So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day.
He also brought back a ton of banned people … who were similarly banned without explanation.
In this case, he needs to set rules and judges for his kingdom if he wants a certain group to keep using it.
As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
> As an aside, one of the people banned was known to take clips out of context. Add commentary on top, and actively mislead people. Imo these aren’t journalists, they’re activists
All of these things - mischaracterization, commentary, misinformation, activism - fall well within the "free speech" Musk said he'd be protecting, even if your assertions are true.
“A Twitter representative said the action followed the violation of rules prohibiting “operating fake accounts” and attempting to “artificially amplify or disrupt conversations through the use of multiple accounts,” as noted here.”
“Update: The image was in fact redacted, I thought it was done by the person who took the screenshot but the first digits were removed in the original tweet.”
Not sure what indications we have that Twitter is "going out". User numbers are higher than ever.
He unbanned a lot of people that were also banned previously for no reason. I think a lot of the outrage comes from the "unfairness" now being dished out to those people with whom the outraged agree with...
His advertising has plummeted, the service is now in extreme debt and he’s not even paying the bills lol. There’s plenty of evidence if you bother to look.
> not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day
Is Musk making mistakes in his management of Twitter? I'm sure he is.
On the other hand, it is also true that a lot of people now have it in for him, and will amplify any story about such a mistake, regardless of how real it is, simply because it is what they want to hear, it feeds the current narrative, it makes great clickbait.
In terms of how Twitter actually turns out, I think we are really going to have to give it time, including waiting until the media gets bored with it and moves on to some other topic. It is probably going to do worse than Musk hopes, but also not as badly as many of his detractors predict.
Of course, Musk isn't helping things by feeding that media outrage cycle himself. But I can only imagine that behind the scenes, cooler heads – such as Gwynne Shotwell and Robyn Denholm – are urging him to step away from the controversy for a bit, stop feeding it and let it die down. Hurry up and find a new CEO for Twitter, then go spend a few weeks chilling on a tropical island.
> He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
He's always been willing to stake it all on the left field idea. Sometimes that has worked really well for him (Tesla, SpaceX), other times it has gone rather poorly (Twitter). But, you can't really have one without the other – either you take big risks, sometimes strike it lucky and make it big, other times get badly burnt; or else you don't, and you avoid the burns, but you'll never make it as big either. The kind of person who always takes the right big risks and never the wrong ones, is either too lucky or too wise to actually exist.
He made a huge amount of money really fast, and now he's gone back a lot on that. But he's likely got another 20-40 years of life ahead of him, he could easily make it all back and then some.
> I think we are really going to have to give it time
Yes and no. The acquisition is now complete, so we can judge what led up to that. And it was terribly done. The dude made an offer on a lark, thought he could wiggle out, and discovered that, however much he normally can get away with shenanigans, a Delaware chancery judge was not among the people who would let him slide. So he was forced to buy a business he had spent months trashing publicly. He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
We can also start judging the actual takeover. There is absolutely no reasonable business goal that justifies the level of chaos and mismanagement during the takeover. Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done. If someone had wanted to maximize the level of media attention, they could have hardly done better than all the dramatics.
So is it possible that he'll pull Twitter out of a dive and turn it into a functioning business again? Yes. Network-effects businesses are notoriously hard to kill, which is why Twitter survived all these years despite its problems. But it it likely he'll ever turn a profit on it? I doubt it.
But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while, with a lot of people buying his Tony Stark/Edison 2.0 routine. But those days are over. Tech reporters can be pretty credulous, as they are paid to get eyeballs. But business reporters are much less forgiving, as they're paid to be useful to people trying to make money. And now that Musk has made himself look so erratic, there will always be questions about his competence. His media honeymoon is over, and given how much he used his brand to hawk products and get cheap capital, that's going to be a big problem for him going forward.
What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems. Only time will tell the outcome. My colleagues wife’s company was acquired by a huge media company and she and dozens of her colleagues have spent the last 6 months wondering if they are going to have jobs. The stress is palpable every time I see her. That’s not more humane to me than what Musk did (let everyone know within weeks where they stand). It impacts her, it impacts my team lead which impacts me. It’s horrible.
I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.
Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.
The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
> What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems.
Thus far a lack of one is being demonstrated.
> Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1...
When was Musk "liberal public enemy #1"?
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff
My house would hum along for a few months if I died suddenly, but eventually the power would get cut for lack of payment. The impacts of cutting staff dramatically may take time to become evident.
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff.
There is more to the service than just the technical. His decimation of the moderation teams is immensely noticeable.
> The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
When the CEO is spreading outright hate speech, sane people go elsewhere. Brands won't want their image tarnished by looking like they are supporting hate speech.
Right now there isn't a great alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is definitely not it. But once there is, e.g. something like t2.social, my guess is that Twitter will be toast faster than people imagine. I'm sure the hardcore alt-right will hang on, but it will be a shadow of its former self.
Are there value systems by which Musk's bid for Twitter was well done? yes. For one, comedians certainly appreciated it. But by the value system of the Wall Street Journal or the average business school professor, it was terribly done. And that's the one that interests me here.
I agree that the post-purchase stuff is harder to evaluate. But I don't think there's a good case to be made that it was competently done for any set of reasonable business goals. If you'd like to try, feel free. Any value system you like.
> He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.
> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done
I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.
> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while
I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.
How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.
I'm wondering what's going to happen to the massive public record of tweets if Twitter as a company does indeed implode. Thousands of tweets are referenced in news articles and blog posts via links to Twitter. Are all of them going to evaporate from the web at once? It would probably turn out to be the biggest case of link rot in history.
It would also be pretty interesting 10 years from now if we characterized this time to people growing up as "there was once this huge social networking platform called Twitter at one point, but you can't post anything there anymore, only browse through this public-service archive."
"But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts."
It is a bit funny. Just few years ago most people said Twitter is mostly pointless, just a gimmick, and can't really compare to other social networks. It looks it has founds its niche in the end.
This is probably a good thing ... journalists are the people keeping Twitter afloat since they do their own form of toxic amplification by constantly injecting Twitter into other media forms and using it as a medium to post updates. It is better that they understand the deal they are making early and that it is with the devil.
> While we don’t know what’s going on here yet, it’s possible that the suspensions are the result of automated content moderation gone awry. Some of the suspended accounts shared Mastodon and ElonJet’s Twitter handles as well as images of the tweet that appears to have gotten the former account suspended.
Automation gone crazy. I'm likely to believe this explanation rather than Musk personally hitting the "suspend" button on stuff he doesn't like.
> I'm likely to believe this explanation rather than Musk personally hitting the "suspend" button on stuff he doesn't like.
It’s amazing to me that despite despite several data points showing Musk would be capable of doing this, people are still giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Man sits up late every night shitposting and firing people on his new $44B social network, yet no way he’s sitting there banning people because they were mean to him. Utterly inconceivable!
It's not because of branding, it's because he could do it himself. It's just unnecessarily complex. It's annoying to be accused of falling for branding if you do anything but automatically assume the absolute worst at all times. That kind of rhetoric makes any discussions about musk thoroughly annoying
I don't know that it has to be "benefit of the doubt", really. He's fired 2/3 of the company, it's very easy to imagine bugs not being caught before they reach production.
Unfortunately, many people who call themselves "journalists," and especially those who brag about it, deserve the ridicule. Journalism was more honest when it was a lower-status job.
(Ridiculousness does not justify censorship, of course! Elon's actions and hypocrisy are indefensible)
Is it really that much of a spike though? There's always been a bias against "liberal media elite" from conservatives for at least a decade now. It's increased, sure, but I don't think by that much.
If the algorithm is suspending accounts that shared screenshots Elon doesn't like (matching via checksum) then it's banning regardless if the account belongs to a journalist or not.
Interestingly it also explicitly says that you won't get permanently suspended unless your account is dedicated to live updates, or you do it again after being locked out and deleting the content.
Damn, couldn't even follow his own policy for 24 hours since the accounts seemed to have been banned with no warning.
> Sharing private or live location information:
> The first time you violate this policy by sharing private information (such as home address, identity documents etc.), we will require you to remove this content. We will also temporarily lock you out of your account before you can Tweet again. If you violate this policy by posting private information again after your first warning, your account will be permanently suspended.
> If your account is dedicated to sharing someone’s live location, your account will be automatically suspended.
The fact that the ADS-b exchange account got banned too points towards at least some personal suspend button pushing happening on things that don’t suit Musk
One possible effect of his craziness is that the banks that helped finance the buyout, thinking that Musk is driving the value of Twitter down to zero, will agree to sell the loans back to him at a big loss. Better to get 50% of their money back than nothing at all.
Its frustrating because my immediate response to people like Musk in my day to day life is to ignore them at all costs. This is a largely successful strategy in person.
My strategy collapses however when the belligerent is able to buy a whole platform and then become a perpetual victim on that platform.
Worse, mastodon has fallen short for me as an escape hatch. The activity just isn't there.
Fair question, but I'm also unsure how to answer it in a meaningful way. "Regular engagement" both to and from accounts of interest is probably a good start.
This exactly how a dictator behaves - imagined threats from everywhere ordering his minions "lop of their heads".
I wonder how the VC folks and banks who helped fund the takeover feels about the billions they just blew away - twitter is going to be slowly dying as the crazies in the asylum takes over.
'New Elon / New Kanye' I think is disillusioning for a lot of people.
It's one thing to see a random celebrity or business person lose their marbles, but there was (and continues to be) high hopes for Elon at least with Tesla and Space X.
I absolutely understand someone trying to shake things up for PR, but I can't see how he's winning here.
I mean I don't see any difference between kanye 10 years ago and kanye now really. Ego and narcissism are a hell of a thing., and they don't get better when your wife kicks you to the curb .. probably for being the man that we all see today, but quieter in private.
It will make it to Orbit. Despite all of Elons ways, there are good dedicated people working to make it happen. Making it to the Moon, I am doubtful. Making it to Mars... well lets get to he moon first.
starship has nothing to do with Elon. I know some SpaceX employees. They let Elon run around like the child he his pretending to be an engineer while they do the real work (and take his money)
SpaceX pays significantly higher than NASA if you believe levels.fyi, so I think it depends what industry average you are using. If you compare to general software engineering then it certainly pays less, but that is because there are many talented engineers happy to take a pay cut to work on something they find personally motivating (space exploration).
We know he's competent on some level, and a BS-er on some level given his bombastic announcements.
But bombast about literally going to Mars are different than bombast about QAnon in terms of credibility and inspiration.
Trump warned Europeans about Russian encroachment but he's cried wolf so many times he has no credibility.
Elon was nothing without the koolaid - I think he's a bit of an imposter - he's 'Iron Man' because they said that in a movie, and, SpaceX was able to stick the landing which gives him insane cred. He could make a million gallons of free koolaid for his staffers.
Smoking dope on YouTube is fully on brand.
Even calling out people on 'free speech' - fair enough.
But he's crossing a lot of lines and it's going to affect his ability to put people on Mars.
I have never had any aspiration to work for him, because I think he's glib - but - I would probably enjoy a tour at either organization, because hey that'd be fun. But now - I wouldn't really want to spend time there.
The Hero->Super Villain story is starting to become a meme.
Nearly all the dudes in the Valley I used to look up to are starting to act like like are a 2-pack-a-day smoker, 3 days after going 'cold turkey': thin skinned, short sighted, angry, arrogant, crude, conspiratorial, cynical, greedy, needlessly cold.
Some of the things they say make me believe they stopped reading books (other than business books) or travelling at age 19 to focus 100% on 'the game', and it's cost them deeply in terms of personal development and perspective.
They are not making the leap to 'Wise Sage Leaders' very well.
I wonder if regular corporate personal development is a better preparation for leading large, mature organizations.
I don't agree with Tim Cook on a lot of things but he definitely seems a league ahead in terms of social maturity than some of the Alpha Dogs of the Valley. Ditto for so many others.
A law was needed that made sure to personally hold twitter management liable just to make sure that twitter would actually suspend open Nazis (the kind that actually posts swastikas).
For some reason people who say things like this are completely unable to understand the data which supports that conservatives are amplified on social networks far more than liberals are. Conspiracy theorists aren't swayed by little things like data.
> “There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”
He’s just signaling, the same smug snark “everything that entertains me is good” mentality, and people who probably ought to have a sufficiently functioning brain to detect that he isn’t on anyone’s side have decided instead that he is on theirs, and it’s “their turn now”, and basically the middle school cafeteria drama show becomes the story.
It’s truly embarrassing what we’ve become. Or, if you like, what we’ve remained, even though we damned well ought to know better by now.
While I don't agree with the bans, here's a counter argument.
Will it be ok to ban someone if they tailed a car every day and live-posted the driver's location on Twitter? One can argue that someone with has a plane has more resources to protect themselves. At the same time, they face more threats too.
As an early Tesla investor (from early-mid 2010s), I find Elon's behaviour change over last 2-3 years pretty toxic and inhumane. From the days of fighting california for covid lockdowns to now hiding behind "free speech" doing whatever he wants anyways (which is sucking up to republicans and russians and who knows who else).
I want to say this isn't 100% unexpected (some people show true behaviour openly only once they have nothing to lose). However, this does indicate a very deep flaw in our existing society i.e. giving certain individuals too much power; either via their job position or capital. This is why I think we should have higher tax rates and prevent at least an individual just to gain too much control by their capital. I would even be ok with 50%-100% tax rate above 100 million dollars net worth. There needs to be less imbalance in society, not more.
PS: Also I had divested away from individual Tesla stocks a year or so ago.
> I would even be ok with 50%-100% tax rate above 100 million dollars net worth.
What is the rationale behind you think the bureaucrats with no skin-in-the-game would apply the money better than an entrepreneur and with more balance for society?
Well for one, with an entrenched bureaucracy you don’t have to worry about how one man’s emotional state might affect your country’s space programs or satellite internet network.
Those buerocrats weren’t able to construct either on their own, and already ran one space program into the ground. Why do you think they will do better this this time?
Also, what makes you think the buerocrats making up the buericracies are any less emotional when given vast resources? Government is known for wasteful and irrational spending on things such as roads to nowhere
> ... some people show true behaviour openly only once they have nothing to lose
Look at Kanye. He has probably lost more than a billion dollars by openly becoming a (literal) Nazi. That's a significant portion of his wealth. He will probably never recover from that. He's gone from being beloved for his music to being a pariah.
I saw this to illustrate having nothing to lose I don't think is an accurate assessment. As long as you have something, you still have something to lose.
I contend that Elon hasn't really changed over the last few years (just like Kanye). So what's changed?
That's easy: the Overton window has simply moved further and further right where extreme right wing (ie alt-right) views have become mainstream. As such, those who whold those views have simply become more comfortable saying the quiet parts out loud.
You had the former president spouting QAnon conspiracies [1]. Tucker Carlson, the #1 show on America's #1 "news" network, openly pushed the idea of the Great Rplacement Theory [2]. It's truly frightening how normalized and mainstream these extreme right views have become.
> However, this does indicate a very deep flaw in our existing society i.e. giving certain individuals too much power; either via their job position or capital.
> As such, those who whold those views have simply become more comfortable saying the quiet parts out loud.
> You had the former president spouting QAnon conspiracies
I mean, the former president probably didn't buy into any of the shit he was actually saying. He was a registered democrat until 2009. Just look at this recent trading card thing. He's full of it, he knows he's full of it, he knows a bunch of people know he's full of it
> However, this does indicate a very deep flaw in our existing society i.e. giving certain individuals too much power; either via their job position or capital.
This is exactly the conclusion of a conversation I had with a friend a week ago. Individuals should never have more power than a certain fraction of the rest of us. Between Putin, Trump and Musk a lot of good has been destroyed (and many lives as well).
Yikes Musk is quickly burning through a lot of public good will. For me it started with trashing Dr. Fauci a week or two ago which was really dumb for a supposedly smart person. And now these mainstream journalists. As the marketing face of Tesla Musk is doing a lot of damage. No wonder he had to sell TSLA shares today as they were tanking.
Hopefully Tesla will be finally decoupled from electric cars in people's minds.
There's a bunch of people normally on the environmental left that have become reactionary morons on electric cars, fear mongering driverless efforts and conflating all electric cars with the Tesla brand while misrepresenting the extremely rare fire problem as if it's more common than gasoline car fires (it's not by orders of magnitude)
I'm sick of ostensibly progressives demonizing decarbonization efforts because they're too technically ignorant to separate Elon musk and his terrible management, which includes extremely hostile racism, from an underlying technology that every car company is engaged in now.
It's classic FUD tactics that in practice just defends the existing order of the carbon economy, which is the most important problem humanity has ever dealt with and somehow the tech won't save us, verso books, this machine kills, etc crowd is now strongly aligned with what Rush Limbaugh's position used to be.
For me it was calling rescuers in the Thailand cave pedos.
Seriously, I recommend anyone interested in a heartwarming story to read the Wikipedia page on the Thailand cave rescue. Countries all over the world sent teams of experts to save those boys. Hundreds of people helped out.
It just shows how most people in the world are good, but at the same time how the media focuses its coverage on a small, sad little man tweeting from his private jet. Or at least that was my impression.
To be clear: He called one person "pedo guy". That person had been insulting his / SpaceX's attempt to help.
There's plenty to criticize Musk about, but this is clearly a case of "can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen". Don't get into a flame war and cry to the legal system when the other guy is better at it than you. The dude deserves no sympathy.
For additional clarity; The rescue diver, Vernon Unsworth, when asked directly in an interview, minced no words in saying that Musk's plan was bad and that they believed it was a publicity stunt. [1] Their professional opinion about the merits of the plan should be taken as read; they were there, they participated in the rescue, they understood the cave system, and their criticism makes total sense. A monsoon was expected which would flood the cave; there was no time for ad-hoc, experimental technology - they had to act immediately, using tried and true techniques. And I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that publicity was part of what Musk wanted from the situation (though I do believe Musk cares deeply about children and probably was concerned for these kids).
Musk went on to hire a PI to try and find dirt on this person. [2] That sure feels to me like he couldn't stand the heat and wanted to use his money to slander this man.
I think it's courageous to stand up against one of the most powerful men in the world when he randomly decides to abuse you because you spoke the truth. I don't think the fact that he used the court system to do so detracts.
A man named Saman Kunan, 37 years old, gave his life in that rescue effort; he lost consciousness underwater and could not be resuscitated. Another man, Beirut Pakbara, developed an illness during the operation; he spent the next 18 months in and out of the hospital, before succumbing to the illness. I can't find an age, but photos make it apparent he was a young man. All twelve children were saved, along with their soccer coach. [This is mostly a summary of the Wikipedia article.]
With that context, Musk's actions are just so incredibly, unthinkably petty.
Thank you for the correction. I was relying on memory there, which is obviously a dangerous thing to do. After verifying what you said (so as not to make the same mistake twice), I replaced that claim with your correction.
I've given my comment another looking over & I believe it is free of errors; if anyone spots any, please do call them out.
Based entirely on one throw away line in the movie Thirteen Lives that I just got done watching, I think it is possible that Vern is actually a trained cave diver, but the cave in question was way the hell over his head.
It is kind of all over the Internet that he's a cave diver to the point where I started to doubt my memory myself. If I look his name up on DDG it comes up with "Vernon Unsworth is a British rescue worker and cave diver" on the sidebar which appears to be from wikipedia, but that information isn't there.
The worlds richest toddler wants to make everything about him, distracts everyone with a poorly engineered hard case vessel in a cave that the divers had 0 visibility in, had to take tanks off to push through narrow passageways, and on top of it he lashes out with a personal insult. I don’t know what the “insult” was, but it was a terrible design, and a self-proclaimed engineer/inventor genius should have either seen its limitations from miles away or should have been self-aware enough to shut up and learn more about the problem before creating a media circus out of a fragile life-or-death situation.
Listen to yourself... the guy literally risked his life saving children who were trapped in a cave, and you think the mere fact that he criticized Musk means that he deserved to be slandered as a pedophile
Of course he deserves sympathy: he called Elon Musk out and in return got showered with the most disgusting personal attack. That alone should have caused Musk to be booted from Twitter. The fact that he wasn't is an oversight - in my opinion, of course.
Journalists: Are you ready to try ActivityPub yet? You can like, do this today if you wanted to and it could be a part of your content management system. Please look at it.
So much for free speech. I guess we were wasting our time thinking about how the layoffs would affect the site because it’s not going to survive as Parler 2.0.
Amusingly to me, at least, the Twitterfiles and Musk’s behavior have both taught us the same thing —- centralized moderation by humans does not work well.
And in the 3 minute call where he popped onto a Twitter space tonight, he now says doxxing is zero tolerance and journalists aren't above the rules. But the alleged "doxxing" was the journalist doing nothing more than linking to the @elonjet account.
Honestly, I was on the side that expected Twitter to get better (like pg), and have mostly not been against any of what he's done until now, but this seems like a bad decision all around.
I assume he got emotional because his child was involved, then did this in a fit of rage, and is now unable to admit that he was wrong. There is no way you can look at this and say what he did was right, no matter what political stance you have.
A newly created rule, the violation of which isn't clear either.
I suppose this is unavoidable if you give one person complete control over a platform. Perhaps it should be illegal for big social media platforms to have a shareholder with over 50% of the voting power.
He has been shadowbanning all sorts of people. Ukrainian war reporters, financial reporters, all sorts of stuff. This is just an upgrade to actual suspending accounts from what he has been doing the last 10 days.
I thought he went off the rails back when he started banning satire accounts that bought a blue checkmark. That felt like a pretty clear admission that he was wrong about the blue checkmark but didn't want to admit it.
I have no expectations around whether Twitter gets better or worse. The incentives have not changed, and the incentives point in the direction of the likes of the New York Times or Fox News.
But it isn't obvious that this decision is bad. What is quite clear he has changed his mind on pure free speech - which, realistically, was widely predicted. This isn't a political exercise though, he's just booting a few journalists in a hasty, poorly planned but ultimately not unreasonable policy. There is no ideology that requires a geo-fix on Elon's jet.
Although I'll postfix that all with "yet". People were claiming Alex Jones was the end of it relatively recently, and that story ended with the US president being booted off for partisan reasons.
In their original post on his suspension they didn't think they had a good argument for suspending Trump based on the current situation. They had to resort to a hyper-partisan reading of "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." [0] for example, rather than an appeal to something more reasonably interpreted as dangerous.
Then the so-called "Twitter Files" [1] provide confirmation of what we already sort-of knew that the inside of Twitter was a highly partisan environment creating internal pressures to boot Trump for political reasons, looking for excuses and testing attempts blindly. Note that the process outlined to ban him was to keep testing tweets, the policy team returned "no violation", then they tried the next tweet. Then eventually the executive got impatient and seem to have overruled the process to get him kicked off.
Compared to that, what Musk is doing is rather mundane and palatable. It is more or less up front that he doesn't like the journalists targeting his affairs, and isn't politically motivated or likely to be meaningful.
It has been a couple of years now, there was a big investigation that turned up nothing. Trump is running for president again the usual way and just launched an NFT token so it is pretty clear he wasn't seriously plotting a revolution. Their interpretation of Jan 6 was wrong, partisan and material.
I somewhat agree with you, if we're defining 'political reasons' as 'not liking violent interference in presidential elections'.
They did bend their own rules. But not because they are all card carrying Democrats. They did it because they couldn't stand having the person that very obviously instigated Jan 6th on the platform anymore.
It took a mob (following, supporting, assembled, and whipped up by Trump) storming the capital building to get them to boot Trump. I don't see how you get from there to 'political differences'. If that was the case he would have been gone much sooner.
Problem was that he didn't do it (entirely) by tweet. So they found an excuse. That much is true.
Whoa wtf. I don't "wtf" a lot on HN but I had not noticed the whole spaces tab disappeared in the iOS app without an app update. A WTF both on the decision to remove it and that it can be removed without having to update the app.
Ah, I developed an Android app back in 2012 with explicitly no permission to access the internet, so I think my app development experience was quite limited :-) Thanks for the heads up on how that works now.
It's been said many times, but I'll do it again: the information that started all this is already public and freely available. There's even a Supreme Court decision backing up its publication.
Everyone is up in arms because he's gone from 'free speech absolutist' to 'free for me but not for thee' in about a month.
They previously agreed, but of course that was when it was them and not someone they dislike. If it's someone they don't like, then fair game.
"Doxxing, stalking, trying to hurt people's loved ones, threatening them, it's not OK in any situation. People on here who want to constantly stoke these politicized outrage campaigns want to dismiss it, but it shouldn't be dismissed. Has very real consequences." @taylorlorenz
That’s right — all doxxing is always bad. There is no good or evil, except doxxing. I think it was Benjamin Washington Paine who famously said, “Sir, I may not agree with how you keep convincing your followers to call bomb threats into my hospitals + libraries & blow up my town’s electricity substations, simply because they don’t like someone else’s speech, but I will defend to the death your right to do so without anyone ever exposing your identity.”
Publishing personal information should not be covered by "free speech" at all. It provides no value to society and can cause real harm to individuals.
Elon was wrong in that tweet. It would be much better to show zero tolerance to doxxing.
It doesn't matter if the data is already available from public sources - publishing aggregated personal information from public records is dangerous and should be banned.
Yes, thank you for reminding this forum, although I’m sure everyone here remembers or has already been made aware of this contradiction.
Can you argument this point further or is it enough to imagine it with a trollface meme?
Me personally, I argue that it was an exaggerated policy position to take. Under no circumstances should menacing, harassment, threats to personal safety be tolerated.
It’s definitely a good thing that Musk backtracked on this, as the previous policy would have been used to cover some outrageous behavior, such as invading the personal space of LGBTQ accounts, outing them at work, or even menacingly posting selfies in their neighborhood.
There are limits to speech, free speech is meant within the context of public sphere debate and politics.
This tit-for-tat confrontation has to be suppresses, or the verbal rioting that is online trolling will again spillover into IRL.
I posted that deliberately without comment. I think it stands on its own as something people should reflect on when forming their opinion of the current situation, and thought that adding commentary would only muddy the perception of it.
I definitely did not intend it to be imagined with a troll face meme.
But since you asked my opinion, I’ll post it and people can judge it separately to the tweet.
I actually do agree with the idea that you shouldn’t post the whereabouts of people, even celebrities, if they’re not at public events - even if the information is technically public. That seems like a reasonable rule.
It’s the capriciousness and lack of concern for consistency - the seeming knee-jerk, ad hoc decision making - that is so frustrating. (And that many of the people defending it are the same people who perceived old Twitter to be capricious - but that’s another digression.)
I believe that rule-making (and enforcing) for something like Twitter requires more consistency, more deliberation, and more decorum than is currently being presented. I am afraid that this is not in Musk’s nature, and afraid about what the consequences of that will be.
I think the tweet I quoted, combined with knowledge of the current situation, is evidence for all of that.
Thanks. I prefer this comment, where your considerations are reasonably articulated and "on the record" rather than letting the reader project their own assumptions.
I don't think Musk's behavior is capricious, but rather _improvident_. It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the problem domain -- social media -- and functional capacity to process its signals. I'd prefer he turned back to tech, where he undeniably has a much better track record.
Meta, but do any space nerds here now questions Musk's claim to be dedicated to making life multiplanetary? Now that it's clear how 'flexible' his principles are, I'm not so sure he has any intention of sticking with it. Or worse maybe it was all a hustle to get SpaceX employees to work 80 hour weeks.
Do we have evidence of bias here or is this actually as elon claims, rules being applied consistently? Hypocrisy or not, I don't think it's unreasonable to ban realtime doxxers if the rule is applied consistently. His mistake was saying he wouldn't ban the realtime doxxer, not banning the realtime doxxer - imho
For those of us who wondered what form of governance Twitter 2.0 will have, I think it's now safe to say it won't be based on any particular set of rules, principles or ethics. It will be totalitarian -- whatever Elon feels like at any particular moment in time.
A single strong moderator, or even a team of mods and admins with loosely coherent policies, can work fine.
I think the largest community where I've seen this kind of autocracy go well is Fark -- people are generally reasonable, for whatever reason the trolls do not do as much boundary-pushing and rules-lawyering as on other sites, and it's generally a calm and funny place to hang out. Drew Curtis is just, like, a nice normal person.
He’s going to be spending all day every day arguing about controversies like this when he could have been building out much more interesting and significant companies, or simply
enjoying his money.
This seems like a big drama without the complexity that would justify it.
Essentially, Twitter should have a clear and consistent moderation policy. Musk should not be able to arbitrarily change that policy, or certainly not when the situation directly concerns him. So you publish a policy and then it gets regularly reviewed, and that’s it.
Tbf, it seems that pre-Musk Twitter was also fairly arbitrary, it’s just now it’s for his benefit rather than the murky hidden incentives of the previous regime. They do seem to have set precedent by responding to arbitrary pressures.
At the start of this saga, I pointed to Napoleon as an example of what happens when hyper-ambitious and capable people meet an unyielding challenge,
> It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
>
> Right up until the moment you can't.
But never in my wildest dreams I could have imagined this turn of events. Forget Napoleon's retreat from a burning Moscow, this decision is as if Napoleon had decided to light the city on fire himself.
It is unfathomable. What happened?
All he had to do was nothing. One strategy could have been to wait for a few months, kept teams in place, offers assurances of continuity, do an audit of systems, and then swoop in to make changes. Even at $4M/day it would have cost far, far less than this.
-
In my mind, the most valuable thing about these circumstances is that they offer an opportunity for us to learn.
Right now, the burning question I have in my mind is one I asked a few weeks ago, what's the MTBF for such a platform?
There's a pattern of diverging expectations here, one is the non-technical/naïve one,
- Twitter is going to go down tomorrow and it's all over. RIP.
The second is,
- Twitter is going to experience a failure cascade over time.
The third is,
- It's all going to be fine.
I suspect that the real question is, how many individual wires can break before the cable holding the suspended platform snaps?
I am not that good of a developer, but watching Twitter I can't help but be reminded of Arecibo, except at a larger, more abstract scale. There was no single massive event that caused the failure, rather a series of factors and events, tiny cables breaking that eventually leads to a failure cascade that then causes the suspended platform to crash.
From what I can tell, in the past week or so, [note: this was written 3 weeks ago]
- Twitter's copyright system failed
- Two Factor Authentication broke down (it seems to be back up?)
- (anecdata) Tweets have been loading sporadically for me and other people, sometimes we try to open a tweet and it says that it doesn't exist. Happens more frequently with new/recent tweets.
- (unconfirmed) Twitter's managed account backend is behaving "strangely." For e.g., "One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated." from https://www.teamblind.com/post/i-told-my-team-to-pause-our-750kmonth-twitter-ads-budget-last-week-4dnbo1Ft ———— Friends have told me other similar stories
Are these failures symptomatic of a larger problem, or are they well-isolated parts misbehaving? Can Twitter even experience a failure cascade like Arecibo? Can that be paused/stopped?
I am asking this question because I don't know. And I'd like to develop a better mental model to understand what happens next.
That doesn’t make sense, there are legit reasons to report location, there cannot be a blanket policy like this. It needs to be handled on a case by case basis if it gets reported. Problem is, musk is figuring out how to create and run a social media company on the fly and in full public view. He need not have stopped to this but his ego and seemingly infantile need for attention has blinded his judgement. He is still good enough and Twitter still really strong as a brand to survive this all.
I was one of few people who were calling out his bullshit for a decade around. People didn't like us and called loosers. It turned out we were right all along.
Wait a minute, so did they dox him or not? One side says yes, the other says no, but no one produces the actual tweets.
I find it hard to believe a tech journalist would waste his time to report on Elon's whereabouts on twitter. His pals at the newspaper claim "he was reporting on the story". So perhaps he attached a screenshot of the doxing tweet? Seriously, this whole story is worthless without seeing the relevant tweets.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable rule. Most of the reporting on where people go will not suffer from having a next-day delay on social media.
Journalists who cover Bezos / Zuck / Elon full time can always constantly refresh ADS-B tracking websites, but that doesn't mean they have to be able to post live location tracking on Twitter.
How about we put our effort behind campaign finance reform instead of complaining about Twitter?
I'd like to start by proposing that a law be written to declare corporations to be non-persons, get them out of our elections and to allow only citizens (and not corporations) to contribute money and spam to elections.
Collectively, I wonder how many tens or hundreds of millions of hours are burned, scrutinizing Musk, Twitter, Tesla, and every move Musk makes. Don’t like Twitter? Don’t use it. It’s like a Twitter/Musk addiction. I don’t care for for social media or Musk. Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.
>Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.
It is fascinating to watch a slow motion disaster. The man is burning billions for seemingly no logical reason. That's gonna draw my eyeballs just due to the absurdity.
I really want to encourage people to recognize, as I did just as strongly when Musk didn't own Twitter, that it isn't by itself "the public square". The site is designed to make you feel like you have to be on Twitter, that no other site could replace them in your daily life, that you'd better go check your feed right this second or you might miss out on some major world event. But none of that is true! It's an illusion they've constructed in order to keep your engagement metric high.
If there's a Twitter exodus, the public square will survive it, just as well as we survived the Myspace and Digg and Tumblr and Friendster and Livejournal exodii. Hopefully most communities will relocate to sites with healthier engagement models.
Twitter is where the world goes today to talk about things that matter (and obviously a lot of things that don’t). There may be something else that takes its place in the future but today it matters what happens to it.
It might be because most of the social platforms on that list don’t really fit the mould of a town square in my eyes. WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat, FB, FB messenger and others I recognise aren’t shaped in ways that look like public debate and are generally more siloed or are creator platforms.
Twitter seems to me more like an open free-for-all where any text can get amplified and publicly interacted with and very little is behind private accounts/groups/silos and anyone can easily contribute.
People talk about things that matter in a wide variety of places. Twitter matters to the people and communities who are on it, of course, and it's a trendy software company which faces a lot of interesting and newsworthy challenges. But it's hard for me to see a story where some terrible Twitter policy change directly affects the lives of those of us who aren't on it.
All links to certain prominent Mastodon instances are being automatically blocked by Twitter right now. If I try to link to anything on my Mastodon I get this:
"We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more."
And why them being journalists make them any different? Does journalists deserve any better protection?
Or if we think sensibly shouldn't they be held to highest possible standards. Like single mistake and they get a strike and with like two or three strike they are permanently out.
In the article update, it says that Elon commented on suspensions and it looks like the suspensions are for doxxing. If that's the case, it makes perfect sense to me. The doxxing has been rampant of Twitter, including by many of the journalists.
PR-wise, this might actually be a pretty clever (partial) recovery from banning and threatening to sue Jack Sweeney. The world's second richest man legally going after a pimply college kid, after bragging about how he won't even ban his account due to his love of free speech is and looks just pathetic.
Baiting the establishment press like this and making the plebs vote on their fate is actually a pretty good distraction move and gives him an opportunity to climb down in a somewhat face-saving fashion (I'm doubtful he's crazy enough to go through with suing Jack Sweeney, but we'll see).
Of course this doesn't change the fact that Musk is an unprincipled and pampered hypocrite and could have handled this much better. A no-live-tracking policy would have offered very little real attack surface if it had been rolled out in a remotely competent fashion.
At some point people will hopefully be sad for him, ignore him and move on. I hope he's got somebody in his life that can tell him this is increasingly looking like self destructive behavior.
I love the daily seethe posts about Musk. Surely He's finished this time. Nothing will happen. Normal people don't care and journalists are too addicted to Twitter t o actually leave.
I hope it doesn't correlate to the size of one's salary, because that seems to have little to do with the quality of the content being generated in the corporate media world.
I'm confused on why he thinks posting public information falls under doxxing. Doxxing someone usually requires you to share private information about someone that they themselves aren't willing to share.
How can he say this is doxxing, but he's completely for people posting about Hunter Biden's laptop which actually contained private information not meant to be shared publicly.
Seems like he just changing the rules that effect him and ignoring the rest.
Essentially making Twitter the same as it was before he bought it lol.
Apparently the bans were because journalists were posting about Mastodon being banned on Twitter. They shared a tweet containing a screenshot of a tweet from Mastodon linking to a Mastodon profile ran by the ElonJet guy.
The tweets didn't include any "doxxing" materials even under Elon's new definition.
So you are completely right about him making stuff up as he goes along lol.
I'm curious if this will ultimately extend to people being banned for linking to Mastodon in any context, and not just ElonJet:
>The situation followed the company’s decision to suspend the Twitter account of Mastodon, an open source social media alternative that’s built momentum since Elon Musk took over at the company. Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to the Mastodon page of @ElonJet, a student-made bot that tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.
ElonJet should be increased to constant surveillance of where Elon and his family are at all times. Including all friends and family and workers and their families and private associates. Any attempts to ban those accounts as doxxing should be met with public humiliation and judgement of Elon and Twitter, and evidence of their delusive and degraded states of mind.
It's a good way to announce that the policy is being enforced. Plus, it's only 7 days, no permanent suspensions have occured. The doxxing rule is a good one. Free speech remains. You shouldn't be able to shout into the internet megaphone: "they're over there"... especially in an automated fashion.
The Twitter ToS have been updated multiple times in the last day to try to target this particular thing that Musk didn't like. ADS-B is literally a broadcast designed to make planes trackable. Publishing it is not doxxing.
I predict in the coming days, the conspiratorialists will claim this is all 4D chess. Personally, I think Hanlon's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) is as sharp as ever.
Once again - private ownership means some small number of people (such as 1 dude) can capriciously control a platform. Supposedly he was a “free speech absolutist.”
You may say there’s “nothing wrong” with privately owning huge platforms (like Elon and Zuck), huge swaths of land (like Bill Gates) or otherwise have ludicrousoy outsize power in society accrue to one dude. But I say that trusting our public forums to privately owned platforms isn’t the best thing we can do. Our democracy is now greatly affected by that stuff. And even conservatives who love private property now understand that there may be diminishing returns from private ownership on that scale.
Jeff Bezos built a great company that helps a lot of customers. (It also exploits a lot of wage slaves.) But does that automatically mean Jeff is also the best man to allocate all those billions? Jeff complained it’s “very hard” for him to allocate his billions philanthropically, but his ex-wife seems to be doing a far more prolific job of it. After a certain point (say, 10 billion) those dollars become just a silly number game for him — something he could never conceivably spend even on penis-shaped rockets - while others could use those billions to end food insecurity, or get preventative checkups.
We don’t need government to come in and use force to solve this. As a society, we do have a libertarian alternative.
It’s called autonomous, decentralized open source networks — which are now available (I build two of them). Instead of putting your crypto in FTX or Celcius to be managed by the whims of Sam Bankman-Fried or Alex Mashinsky, why not use the blockchain and private keys and smart contracts?
Because it’s too difficult to understand and build solutions
Well, that’s why we spent years buulding the solutions to help you and your brand and your organizations to break free of Big Tech and billionaires. And what can be more libertarian than that?
Want to see more info?
It remains very funny that he paid forty-five billion dollars for the privilege of humiliating himself daily with these petulant temper-tantrums. Amazing bit.
To note, he didn't pay the whole forty-five billion dollars, investment banks have a part of that and are also eating dirt. I have no sympathy for them either, but it brings more flavors to the whole thing.
Secured as debt against his Tesla shares as collateral, which with the slide, means he has to put up more Tesla shares, causing a very nasty snowball effect
That’s not true. Most of the debt was leveraged against Twitter, it’s a classic LBO.
The investment banks have been attempting to change that to a margin loan against TSLA shares, because of course they are. They are holding effectively unsellable debt now.
IFAIK the loans are secured by Twitter equity. Trouble is the loans add up to more than what Twitter is worth. The banks will have to write down the value of those loans. But the equity investors, including Elon, will get what scraps, if any, are left after creditors get paid.
Musk is still on the hook for the loans whether Twitter goes under or not. The danger they face is if Musk loses enough to not be able to cover the loans personally.
If you go out just a little bit not everyone hates him. Personally I think he hasn’t don’t anything overt yet. So he banned a few journalists, do you know why? No right? So why judge so early?
Given that the rule didn’t exist when Elon originally banned @ElonJet?
I’d suggest that you care about the fact that Elon will ban anyone he wants banned, and make up a justification post-facto. If you don’t care who gets banned from Twitter, then I retract my suggestion.
Elon is pulling the wool to incite his mob. He states people are doxxing his real-time location. The only people he’s banning are those that reference publicly available FAA flight data. I even think the owner of the Twitter account put the tweet on a time delay. Far from the truth.
Not the whole Elon-inventing-rules-and-banning-people-who-are-mean-to-him thing. Nor the destruction of Twitter. Banning legit jounralists because of "doxxing" is ludicrous.
But Elon has done more in a few short months to shatter the myth of the meritocracy than anyone could have dreamed.
It's not what Free Speech means, but in the run-up to his buying Twitter, that's all it seemed to mean in many of the discussions. Of course, we know that they weren't serious about such things as shown by their silence in the face of Elon's actions.
People taking in this news and then automatically blame Elon really have no critical skills. I’d wait till some more detail comes out before judging and follow the mob
This is what will kill twitter. Out of the 10% who do the most tweeting, journalists are a big part. Elon is killing his biggest asset and replacing it with Nazi's. Insane!
Right, corporate journalists are are the enemy! That's why I get all my news from Karen on Facebook and John Q Anon on Twatter, they've done their own research didn't you know?
I wonder if the people who thought this xkcd was the ultimate rebuttal against those who think that these platforms should be more neutral are rethinking their stance on having a few very wealthy, very powerful people control major speech dissemination platforms.
I don't remember direct links to Twitter being so prevalent until recently. Is it... time to reconsider this? Twitter no longer seems like a reliable source for anything except Elon Musk himself, since he presumably won't suddenly suspend himself, or block links to things he wants to link to.
And so the truth is made abundantly clear now. Elon & his right wing sycophants have never actually cared about free speech & fight against "cancel culture."
What they want is simply being the ones who get to cancel under vague tropes of "safety."
this thread sure has a lot of clairvoyants. you cant predict chaos only sit back and enjoy the spectacle. for real though its been pretty funny watching the left now use the same complaints the right did when twitter wasnt owned by elon musk. its a private company and he can allow or disallow who he wants on his platform and honestly everyone on twitter could use a 7 day suspension, preferably a 21 day suspension to help kick the addiction a lot of people seem to have.
I'm sympathetic to the many newly minted free speech absolutists in this thread, but this sort of banning was always the status quo for right wingers until Musk bought Twitter anyways.
"so far, i’ve been able to confirm about half the accounts suspended posted links to the jet tracker thing in violation of the new doxx’ing policy. unclear just yet about the rest, but i think it’s safe to say the rule is for real."
I know Paul has been speedrunning awful out-of-touch takes these last few years, but this is literally just that meme of weird nerds diving in front of Elon to deflect criticism.
And my guess is Elon's just spouting random half-ass commands like "banscript anyone who ever mentioned @elonjet" and the hardcore codemonkeys (read: trapped and unable to quit so obviously fearful of being fired) just run them rather than talkback.
More seriously, Twitter has been a toxic cesspool long before Elon made it worse, and I’m happy I deleted my account and have never missed it. Actually it’s been a boon when I visit a Twitter link and then Twitter nags me to sign in, it’s a great reminder to close that tab and move on with my life.
Predictably, this story, despite almost a thousand upvotes, is nowhere to be found on HN front page. Daily reminder that HN is a commercial entity and works hard to avoid annoying their potential business partners.
The true meaning of free speech means freely saying things that Elon likes. It’s hard to tell now, but pretty soon we will have Musk chips in our brains to tell us which free speech is absolutely free.
You trolling? I don't care for Olbermann all that much but it's hypocritical for Twitter under Musk to ban him. If there are new "doxxing" rules perhaps a warning is reasonable instead of an immediate ban
Exactly, sometimes coming here seeing people just jump to conclusions pisses me off. How about wait for more detail comes out before calling Elon a douche bag for banning these people because he felt like it
Only elon haters could have so much cognitive dissonance that they’ll see self driving cars and privatized space and say “yeah, well what else has he done?”
Completely fair banning them over policy violation. But Elon promised 'absolute' free speech when he took over? No one would be complaining about these bans if not for the hypocrisy. I have never seen this two face stand.
Elon is now understanding the risk and fallacy of absolute free speech when some rando stalked his family. But glossed over when others shouted at the same.
Apples and oranges. I think the doxxing policy makes sense. It's absolutely not okay posting people's real-time locations, especially for famous figures who are already targets.
I don't hear anybody criticizing the policy. Because it is right. Instead people are attacking Elon's past promise, as it is the only thing they can attack.
So maybe "absolute" free speech is not a very good idea after all. What matters is good moderation.
Keep in mind, the most memorable thing the NYT has published in recent years...
Wordle.
Don't get angry with me. I don't make the news. I simply report it. Now if only self-proclaimed journalists would do the same. Orwell would not be pleased with the current state of things.
And you can't be bothered to think before you type. Clearly, those are outliers. They are not anywhere near the norm, and the norm is low and getting lower. Yes, there was a time The NYT was fantastic. I was a long time subscriber. Those glory days are gone.
Don't get distracted by the glitter of such prizes, Don't worry about the past. Worry about who is holding down The Fourth Estate fort. It ain't The Times.
A journalist is someone who gathers information on specific subjects from a variety of sources, including original documents, interviews with individuals, and others, then condenses that information down into a readable article or watchable video, with the goal of informing the public (in an unbiased manner) on that subject.
The closest profession to 'journalist' is probably 'historian', but the former reports on current events, while the latter synthesizes past events.
How does one distinguish between a journalist and a state-sponsored or corporate-sponsored propagandist, then? I think I'm going to go ask ChatGPT about this.
I can make a stab at that looking from that list. We're not looking at free speech here, we're looking at protected speech for nazis.
Our latest batch of nazis seem to think that people objecting to things like inciting violence, encouraging hate of minorities, white supremacism and all the anti-science nonsense they use to recruit new cult members should be protected speech in safe spaces. A very different idea to free speech.
Let Elon set fire to Twitter, it is a hard rule of the internet that any forum invaded by nazis is doomed to failure.
Huh. You're absolutely correct. Am now embarrassed I'd never thought about it like that.
Your framing neatly resolves the blog era slap fight. It was about access, what became known as "access journalism".
Traditional journalists didn't support mere bloggers having a seat at the table (gatekeeping). And the elite would only deign to talk to established journalists.
For my part, I've always felt the elite were accountable to the public. I was just a constituent who shared my experience and thoughts online. I didn't care what any one called (labeled) me, except when the purpose was to dismiss or exclude me.
Anyhoo... Thanks! Journalism is a verb. I love it.
I don't believe Journalism is elitist. Yes, there are standards to maintain. But by definition that's what Journalism is. Proven and established rules.
It's great that the internet allows for access. It's a tool for all. It's not great that anyone who strings two words together and "prints" them (on the internet) is now considered deserving of the title: Journalist. There's more to it. Just like giving me a scalpel and a pad for scripts doesn't make me a surgeon.
What I believe happen is that as the internet disrupted tradional media, Journalism panicked. It needed revenue. It need to cut costs. So it cut corners. The Standards were abandoned. They were too costly and couldn't produce sufficient results for a biz model based on clicks, views, etc. As a CYA they shamelessly continued to call it Journalism even if it was a lie. Fake Journalism if you will.
Since they were all doing it, since they were all fearing for their jobs few stepped up and said, "No, this is not Journalism."
The first section about the importance of investigative journalism is quite good. And ends on an unexpectedly positive note.
The rest of the movie is a true crime story. How perfidy and obstinance sacrificed journalism on the alter of corporate greed, beginning in the 50s. The rise of the internet was just the final blow.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Given some of the replies up the thread there are others who really need it. Badly. It's sad to watch other declaring the Titanic is not sinking. They'd make great "journalists" ;)
Im not a Musk stan, but which of those are 'prominent journalists'? Is there any of those left in the US or Anglosphere? Those who lied for 8+ years about nonexistent WMDs to facilitate the Iraq war are still at Twitter, Facebook etc - complete with their official blue check marks. Apparently, that is not 'misinformation'. And those people are still 'journalists'.
The people who shrieked loudest that Elon would allow hate and safety threats on Twitter are now shrieking that he's banned hate and safety threats on Twitter. @DavidSacks
It's not that complicated. This is a credible threat to his family and Musk is scared. I'd be scared, too. I'd have shut down the jet account and any account linking to it as well. If you think you'd have done something different, you're a liar or a robot or a fool.
There are some legitimate things to pick on Musk for. This isn't one of them.
To be clear, a crazy person jumped on the hood of a car carrying elons kid. Can’t really blame him for reacting by banning someone tracking his movements in real-time.
I think the people conflating this to an absolute free speech issue are missing the bigger picture. Sure Elon is doing this now for personal reasons just like he refused to reinstate Alex Jones' account.
But having public data on a website with few eyeballs doxxing your jet vs groups of coordinated users live broadcasting, retweeting, verified accounts amplifying the same data on a social media app. These are two different things.
Not trying to be snarky here, but I'm curious what percentage of the people complaining in this thread also complained about the constant censorship and deplatforming by Twitter pre-Musk? Don't get me wrong, I think it's all bad, both ways, it's just the outcry now is extremely telling.
Do you not believe it was happening before? Or were you not told that it was happening before? Or did you just not care before because it was directed towards people you were told are "bad"?
I wonder how many people in this thread are actual human beings, vs. bots/shills working overdrive to force the narrative through, but that's a topic for another day ..
It’s just a bit funny how “absolutely no censorship” turns into “lol k only censorship that I like”. Somehow quite a lot of people who were “free speech absolutists” playing mental gymnastics to explain why THIS type is acceptable.
Disclaimer: I am not a free speech absolutist, and realize its shortcomings in public forums.
Luckily this forum doesn't have any of those - and if any claim to be, it encourages curious discussion, so I'm willing to chalk it up to playing devil's advocate.
It's oversimplistic, to put it lightly, to just point to "everything after Musk" and "everything before Musk" and assert they're equal and anybody who smells like they've expressed more criticism on one side of that divide than the other is a hypocrite. There are a million variables that any honest person considers. Some bans are high profile, some aren't. Some bans are en masse, some are individual. Some are permanent, some are temporary. Some show bias, some are just for breaking rules while happening to also be apparently right/left-wing. Some are honest mistakes. Some are reversed.
People like Elon are particularly good at generating the image of disproportionate criticism, because he is the highest of high-profile, and he is a classic modern provoker. I.e. he invites rebuke and bitterness by mocking/trolling and generally being petty/childish toward those he disagrees with, which can work in his favor ("look at all the haters"). In this case, it's pushed even further by the fact that he is so aggressively pro-free-speech and critical of those who may take a more measured approach, and yet we keep seeing him apparently falling into the exact same trap of "well OK except for this case - let me modify the rules to be more subtle/pragmatic", except the result is perhaps now even less free than before by his own apparent definition. The irony/hypocrisy is mountainous.
Additionally, "the same people who X are now Y" is an extremely common fallacy. It may be true, but much more often than not, you're assuming that two groups of people are mostly the same people when they are not (i.e. that every person is either left or right, pro-Elon or enti-Elon, etc; and every opinion a person expresses must fall on one side of each line). It's very easy to project one's internal concrete images of enemies onto the enormous, dynamic masses of the internet, or a particular forum, and "discover" hypocrisy.
I don't care whether the Washington Post is right or not on this one; but it is good to see that these people are now getting a taste of their own medicine.
Nobody from that camp was lifting a finger when "conspiracy theorists" were being banned from Twitter. People were saying that "Twitter was a private company who could ban whoever it wanted".
Fwiw I checked comments of the ones that commented in your past thread and from those whoever has commented on recent Twitter threads has retained their opinion. So based on that cannot imply the people saying "Twitter can do whatever it wants" and people calling out what happens now are the same.
>I cannot believe you without seeing the material that allowed to make you this conclusion.
You misunderstand something. I make no conclusion. "Based on that" refers to the thread linked. It is you making an implication. It is you that is supposed to be providing proof that those are the same people.
>If you don't answer, I'm afraid I might think that you weren't being truthful.
What's up with that? Is this an interrogation and wasn't aware of? But considering you knew they're 3, will call this dishonest.
Thank you, I didn't think you would proceed with this.
Maybe I was wrong to mention the thread. Quoting myself from earlier:
> Nobody from that camp was lifting a finger when "conspiracy theorists" were being banned from Twitter. People were saying that "Twitter was a private company who could ban whoever it wanted".
By "nobody from that camp", I wasn't specifically meaning those people in the thread I shared. There are a lot of hypocrites in that camp. Maybe those people are among them, maybe they aren't. I don't really care as I think a few people don't matter in the big picture. And that's why mentioning that thread was wrong, because it undermined my own argument.
> those whoever has commented on recent Twitter threads has retained their opinion
I don't know if this is the case. I didn't care enough to analyze.
But apparently you did. I assumed that you were insincere in the beginning but you proved me wrong. I appreciate it.
> What's up with that? Is this an interrogation and wasn't aware of?
I was trying to manipulate you into answering. Sorry about that, my tone wasn't very nice. Of course this cannot be an interrogation and you don't owe my a damn answer.
Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html