—Elon Musk, April 2022
"Apparently not. That's bad."
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.
Hmm. I guess there's not a number they can call or email to try.
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.
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".
Automation gone crazy. I'm likely to believe this explanation rather than Musk personally hitting the "suspend" button on stuff he doesn't like.
Why do it by saddling the company with so much debt that it seems financially so difficult to survive?
Just from a business standpoint it doesn’t make sense.
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.
A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-start...
Seems so.
He seems to try very hard to show who he is, some people just won’t take him at is word / actions.
The only way Twitter will die is if the network effect is killed, or somehow used against Twitter to create a competing platform.
> Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else
https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-collapse/
Read through. The paragraph about how it manafests in the workplace is quite telling.
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.
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.
People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841
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.
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.
This is not new behavior.
Here's yet another savvy take by Eve Fairbanks:
We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion [2022-12-02]
https://www.wired.com/story/musk-denial-true-cost-twitter-im...
"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."
There are very few accounts here on HN that will sympathize with such an extremely uncapitalist, anarchist take.
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.
This is very good podcast about this exact topic.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the power of personal branding.
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.
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.
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.
Any ideas?
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.
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.
What billionaires do with the public square matters to our future.
The hastily written new policy from yesterday carves out an explicit exemption for reporters that's being ignored today. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
> For media, the following are not in violation of our policy:
> * the media is publicly available or is being covered by mainstream media;
> * the media and the accompanying tweet text add value to the public discourse or are shared in public interest;
> * contains eyewitness accounts or on the ground reports from developing events;
> * the subject of the media is a public figure.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/banks-financing-musks-twitte...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, he owns the worlds largest auto company, largest rocket company, and just threw down $40 billion to buy the worlds biggest social media company.
Dude is in dire straights indeed.
there is no mob here and the person without critical thinking skills is you.
You can practically see the switch flip. I’m not sure he’s openly said Musk has made bad decisions until this moment.
(Ridiculousness does not justify censorship, of course! Elon's actions and hypocrisy are indefensible)
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.
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 feel like I’m back in middle school.
The detail already came out. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841
I can find any reputable news sources saying positive things about Twitter and child exploration.
What they want is simply being the ones who get to cancel under vague tropes of "safety."
I'm surprised people think creepy stalking is free-speech.
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 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.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
Twitter is going to be Musks' undoing at this rate.
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"
A family man isn’t a brand he’s been going for up until now.
Now anyone who reports on it is banned too?
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.
But even if it was, just build your own Twitter.
Karma
>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.
Do you actually need a good reputation to be successful in a platform that caters to mostly brain dead on the toilet chatter?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
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.
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).
[See: Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz]
How is that a progressive haven, wtf?
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=32.124&lon=-...
Musk really doesn't want people to know where his jet is.
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
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.
So musk can't fall fast enough. good riddance
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.
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.
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.
The saddest thing is this only adds fuel to the pro-censorship crowd.
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
[^0]: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc
edit: grammar & typos
https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1603570995490455552
They were linking to the jet tracker.
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.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
"For media, the following are not in violation of our policy..."
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.
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.
This doesn’t appear to be true
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
Tinfoil hat off: all the admiration and money he received turned him into whatever it is that we are seeing today.
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.
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...
Elon changed the TOS to obfuscate from it being a personal and vengeful decision.
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.
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?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-assange-idUSKBN20...
"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."
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.
It was neither of those things.
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.
https://in.mashable.com/culture/42675/internet-slams-elon-mu...
> 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.
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.'"
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was struggling in the "big tech megaprofit" way, not in the "pay for the servers" way.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
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.
*granted he had to do a tiny bit of work to counter the insufficient obfuscation the FAA allows for privacy.
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.
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>
There are many shades of gray, of course.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...
> “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 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
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.
Whether that made him millions is less clear.
Do wealthy people not have assistants?
"Smithers, ban those guys making fun of me!"
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.
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.
…and I’m supposed to care?
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.
Certainly a good reason to ban everyone who had the same vowel in their name... or something.
They thumbed their nose at a rule, got banned, and then cried about it.
What am I supposed to care about, exactly?
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...
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.
The latest is that they have given up trying to make it autonomous-only and will be looking to launch in the next few years.
Not entirely implausible given that their close partner Foxconn is already making EVs:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/18/business/foxconn-electric...
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.
pg’s still on the side of journalism.
“…the Aristocrats!”
As Twitter’s policy has been, when they banned people for posting videos with visible house numbers because they doxxed the people in them.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/technology-donald-trump-conspirac...
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/tucker-carlson-s-great...
Ah, apparently he mistaken the Streisand Effect for a "coordinated campaign". We are closer than I thought.
> 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.
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?
From a thread 23 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33701999 ,
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.
- Twitter is going to experience a failure cascade over time.
- It's all going to be fine.
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
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.
https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1603570995490455552
Musk replied:
"Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else"
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 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?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603587970832793600
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.
Paid for (at least partially) by the U.S. government [1]. You can't easily say "no" to your own government even if you are a foreign asset.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...
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?
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.
Elon is constantly leveraging the "for the children" cover for his petulance.
What do you think this system is?
> 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.
Expecting the shareholders not to take the money and run is unreasonable.
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/elon-musks-the-boring-comp...
https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/elon-musk-las-vegas-tunnel-ce...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...
https://www.jumpstartmag.com/what-we-can-learn-from-elon-mus...
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.
Those wanting more should look at two recent articles from Jean-Louis Gassee. One where he makes the pro case: https://mondaynote.com/apple-car-software-and-money-51f86a33...
And one where he makes the anti: https://mondaynote.com/apple-car-bad-idea-after-all-94689476...
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).
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.
> They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603587970832793600
(None of the journalists banned did that: even the ones referencing ElonJet referenced stale data)
Is not equivalent to
> came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money
“Came from” and “apartheid” are doing a lot of work here. That sentence is written in such a way to:
1) imply a not insignificant portion of daddy’s money came from that mine
2) associate that mine with all the bad things we associate with apartheid
3) imply daddy’s money had a not-insignificant impact on Elon’s outcome
4) so it can then associate Elon’s current state with the crimes of apartheid
If the above isn’t true, I have a hard time understanding why GP would mention apartheid or the mine.
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.
I don't think so. The New York Times demonstrated this three years ago, nobody really cared: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...
His recent contradictions in regards to his commitments to free speech have certainly burned through a lot of my good will.
Anyone that actually wanted to use this data to harm Musk would have no trouble simply using the exact same original data.
Peer to Peer social media. No censorship, no surveillance and no advertising working with Lightning Network.
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’"!
Gives them time to think about it the next time they want to doxx someone's real location.
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.
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 ..
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.
...Too bad about Dave Chappelle, though. He's on his way to pulling a Gallagher.
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.
[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/VM31A4UsiU0?feature=share
[2] https://www.businessinsider.in/an-aide-to-elon-musk-hired-a-...
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"
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/16017204550055116...
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).
She claimed the identity of the account was of public interest on CNN here: https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/15182845369660456...
But then showed up at relatives' houses of LibsOfTikTok too: https://thepostmillennial.com/libs-of-tik-tok-exposes-taylor...
Do you mean to tell me that the relatives of that account were of public interest after exposing the account as an American woman?
It was a deliberate doxxing, by Taylor Lorenz aimed at LibsOfTikTok on purpose.
I doubt very much anyone let him walk into a trap that bad. He had to have been kicking and screaming the entire way.
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.
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.
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...
This is to say nothing of Elon's small-potatoes stealing from local governments via Boring.
Having $10 billion in cash sounds like a lot. But that's against the $500 billion car companies will be investing this decade: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
It's also not much compared to the $130 billion Tesla's top 10 investors have lost on Telsa since the Twitter takeover started: https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/tesla-stock...
And Tesla is coming under pressure to spend their cash not on investments, but on stock buybacks: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-...
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.
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
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...?
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/07/tech/elon-musk-wsj-government...
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
https://www.mic.com/impact/elon-musk-build-back-better-tesla...
Anecdotally, I did see the @ElonJet account, and have still never seen the source of the data.
Come on now. They were linking directly to the tracker that Sweeney was banned for, not just reporting on the story about it.
It was a childish petulant doxxing on purpose and they got treated the same as Sweeney.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I just want to learn from this fairly rare opportunities and see if I can predict what happens next.
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.
1. https://theconversation.com/zambias-copper-mines-hard-baked-...
2. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/cjpmefoundation/pages/...
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.
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.
(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. )
I'm just glad I avoided social media for the most part.
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.
Henry Ford bought a newspaper. Musk bought Twitter. The more the things change the more they stay the same.
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.
Disclaimer: I am not a free speech absolutist, and realize its shortcomings in public forums.
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.
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.
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.
See the terrorist attacks against Drag Queens.
And the test is simple: "Does it make me want to punch someone in the face"?
Not "me" as in the average reasonable person, "me" as in Elon Musk.
If you post something that makes Elon want to punch you in the face, you will be banned from his blog.
"I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence. That’s not cool."
Musk himself is personally on the hook for $25 billion
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."
So...cancel culture? Criticize the current #thing and get cut off financially and socially.
That would make #thing a cult, no?
If it were an algorithm, everyone in Twitter would be banned by tomorrow. I hope it works.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
a) People buy more than one car in their life so winners and losers will change over time.
b) We are close to to 2023 and EVs represent just 10% of total car sales.
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."
Obviously there are times when the rich and famous know that their location is public. At those times they generally have good security.
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.
Elon jet is alive and well over there.
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?
He was a diver- just not a rescue diver in this case.
Or in having a Twitter that has more lax rules around what they can say.
He's making rules he promised not to, and we don't have to pay for the privilege to criticize that hypocrisy.
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.
username is surely parody.
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.
"Members of the British Royal Family en route to Balmoral castle to see Queen Elizabeth after news of her failing health, very sad." - https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/comments/x91yli/members_of_the...
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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-suspe...
Last I checked, the police claimed they hadn't received any reports about the incident, either.
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/lgbtq-t...
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?
Even Air Force One shows up on ADSBexchange when it's in the air. https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf8
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 it is certainly worthwhile pointing out the hypocrisy of his statements. When people’s words don’t line up with their actions you should be wary.
Now that he forbid people from posting links to that too: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkEg9iyUUAAUFI6?format=jpg&name=...
Pretty sure he's just a dry caver, but he had the local knowledge of the cave system (when it was non-flooded).
Nice strawman!
It's a question of safety of provably true information in this case.
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 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HovxY1qBfek
A year later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
I'm not sure how they can prove much here. All I've seen is an activist in the space supporting him. Specifically https://twitter.com/elizableu
I could be wrong.
~~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?)
Elon Musk @elonmusk "I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people."
The airspace of a place is a commons, what happens in the commons is everyone’s to know.
They'll find somewhere else to go
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.
(Besides the fact that Elon literally doxxed his former employee trying to insinuate he is a pedo)
Or can you give other examples of disparity between free speech rule applications for themselves and people they don't like?
Plus he's a public personality, so not really concerned by most of that "anti-doxxing" rule
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.
Eg. "I'm at McDonald's getting a burger with my friend" is ban worthy because it says where your friend is
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.
Okay, prove the lack of safety.
> 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.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-suspe...
Did you really create a new account just to spread misinformation?
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.
It's here: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
The source code for the bot: https://github.com/Jxck-S/plane-notify
ADSBexchange (and FlightRadar and several other orgs) are just tracking the public broadcasts each plane makes every second with its location, altitude, airspeed, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
People making bomb or mass shooting threats get arrested all the time. You shouldn't have people fear for their lives.
Like he has to provide forensic level testimony with a timeline of who's holding a child while it's dying?
That's some psychopathic level lack of empathy for someone who's child died.
I've given my comment another looking over & I believe it is free of errors; if anyone spots any, please do call them out.
Posting public information publicly isn't doxxing and until you give up that falsehood, there isn't really anywhere the conversation can go.
Of course a free speech "absolutist" like Musk is a complete hypocrite for not allowing doxxing in the first place.
Elon Musk himself argued this exact specific thing is included.
Nov 6, 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456: "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk"
We've established now that Elon really doesn't like it when people dox him, and all his right-leaning supporters are defending that.
Well, that's a precedent now for when minorities and vulnerable people who aren't billionaires are doxxed by right wing hate groups (e.g. Kiwifarms).
And radical free speech just got abruptly limited when it got personal.
The important point should be that the principle should be applied equally, particularly since groups like Kiwifarms are much worse than ElonJet.
Like calling people risking their lives to save a bunch of kids pedophiles? Or using fascist dogwhistles?
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.
Or did they report about the banning of someone who reported his location?
Why stop at 100 million? Why not something like 10 million, or even 5 million?
This torrent of baseless confabulations about him is truly disgusting.
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.
Fabricating a story about his child to win points seems directly relevant here.
You reap what you sow. Enjoy guys
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.
> 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
The data comes from https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af. You'll see no passenger list there.
Sometimes it is.
For example, name plate on the mailbox is publicly available, but posting the address with full name online constitutes doxxing.
> a free speech "absolutist" like Musk is a complete hypocrite
One guy once said, who never changes his/her opinion, is a moron.
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!
I know crazy idea..
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's time for him to follow his own advice.
And maybe stop doing polls, especially ones he doesn't like the result of and must "redo":
It'd arguably be nice to have a national election without Twitter.
That's a pretty twitter-centric view of things
See this https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
I have no clue where the hell people get this "public square" analogy from because the numbers don't back it
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.
One of the groups that formed out of it is still active today more than 150 years later.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Anything he dislikes, if he filters through the lens of his children, he's willing to ban, apparently.
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.
In line with what I have noted elsewhere:
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 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.
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).
Do you have evidence of that? He claims they were reporting the location.
For one thing, it's different because there is no law that cars need an active transponder while operating.
But cars do have a license plate anyone is free to look at while they drive by so in that sense it's the same.
False memories are not uncommon with traumatic events like a child's death. I'd give anyone a pass on that one and give the benefit of the doubt.
You might be referring to JM Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind."
The question is what facts are changing? Here, it looks like the only difference is that something bad happened to HIM.
There are a few people with less money than Mush who have bodyguards.
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.
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 meant the Republican Party.
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!
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?
https://twitter.com/housegop/status/1593253229747265545
https://i.redd.it/4yfum3kpzy0a1.jpg (I'm too lazy to find the actual tweet)
1. The jet’s location is publicly available by law.
2. No one knows who’s in “Elons jet”.
If Elon wants to travel private without anyone knowing he is he can simply charter a jet. This is what most celebrities do.
The chain of relevance is broken.
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.
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.
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]
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200603215859/https://help.twit...
[3] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-ceo-nypost-blo...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20210301054617/https://help.twit...
https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Not-Abuse-Overstating-Respon...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073
> Telsa stock tanking all because he can't STFU and acts like a spoiled 12 year old.
Uh, the whole stock market is down. Amazon is down almost as much as Tesla. 48% vs 50%.
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.
And now all the tweets referencing mastodon are gone too.
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."
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.
[0] https://www.moneylaundering.ca/public/law/3_stages_ML.php#:~...
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!"
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.
So this stalker followed him home to Grimes' home and there's no police report?
[1] https://observer.com/2018/06/grimes-buys-house-pasadena-los-...
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.
I really don't think Elon would do well in quietly taking orders from CCP.
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.
- no swastikas
- no continuous real-time doxxing
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
> Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll.
The previous poll was bad because 3x of them were basically "No" and 1x was "Yes"
New poll is heavily leaning yes regardless
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.
(I disagree with the logic in both cases.)
Are you secretly deliberately making a bad argument?
This is 2022 Twitter-brained audience, now doesn't mean 24hrs these days.
This is not a new phenomenon, the only thing that changes is the terms used to signal the meaning.
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.
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.
A stranger should not be able to unplug your hard-drive and access your nudes.
I am not aware of any source for this claim except Elon himself.
Elon claims that "lil X" was in the car, which could either be the rapper Lil Nas X or his son (with Grimes) X Æ A-Xii.
> [Other comment:] days after. so by musk's own rules.. fine to post. wasn't real time.
Location of the jet was shared in real-time to my understanding, checking with the link given on https://grndcntrl.net/falconlanding/
> 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.
ADSB Exchange even has a ‘military’ filter to focus on them.
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.
The new poll with just two options is going the other way (unsuspend now). Having just two options is the right call here.
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.
And also when they are not hypocrite flailing liars.
> - 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"
Funnily enough this is literally exactly what Musk has done in the last 24 hours with regard to the @ElonJet account and the people reporting on it.
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).
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.
These only consistent rule on Twitter now is “don’t tweet shit that offends 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.
Here's the short version. Good: thoughtful, curious conversation. Bad: snark, fulmination, and flamewar.
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.
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?
To pretend that TSLA is an outlier is a bad argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like a bad deal, get paid less and have to "manage" your founder.
There's very good ways to guess who's in Elon's Jet.
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."
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.
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.
"A warm welcome to all the newest converts to the great American cause of free speech!" @pmarca
And she's also Qanon or at least Qanon adjacent. Few days ago she tweeted that she did believe the world was run by a satanic pedo cult.
Uh. That's /exactly/ what free speech is. I have the ability to say whatever I want, because in our society it is impossible to not offend.
I wish someone would electronically silence musk for a month or twelve. Take away all his toys, gadgets, conveniences...
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.
This is certainly not true in Europe, and in the US there's generally zero restrictions on publicly sharing any kind of PII.
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.
My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15894149585086914...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/elon-musks-daughter-gra...
[2] https://people.com/parents/everything-to-know-about-elon-mus...
For example, in Europe what they're doing is strictly in violation of the GDPR.
Would https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-start... be better? It seems to have most of the same info, just in a somewhat more sensational way.
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! :-)
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.
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.
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.
E: can't reply below due to ratelimits
>Hence why I said "in the US"...
Hence why I said "in Europe"...
They're just sick and tired of the billionaire hypocrite.
Edit: that said, there could be some small tenuous grain of truth to what Musk thinks happened...
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.
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.
They provide vital checks and balances against the government in charge.
It would be scary if he didn't have half the power he currently holds.
[0] https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440?s=46&t...
uhhhh, no. Doesn't seem like they're having a reckoning. Will check back with next shoe drop.
Edit: I see 2 on this comment. Good for them.
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:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking
According to that page cyberstalking is the use of the internet and technology to stalk an individual and those actions “may include monitoring”.
Here is the definition of “stalk”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking
“Stalking is unwanted and/or repeated surveillance by an individual or group toward another person”
If you find fault in my definition, feel free to push an edit to those Wikipedia pages.
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.
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.
Yeah no shit. That's why EV's are super useful, even if you wish we had a lot less cars, like me.
> I just said they were an attack on the objective. One of many.
Doesn't matter. EV's still help the climate relative to keeping gas and diesel vehicles around. Blaming them is stupid.
> Switching to EV's will undermine any effort to do that "bEcaUsE EV's aRe grEeN!"
Nah. The problems preventing greater uptake of public transit are largely unrelated.
https://twitter.com/artywah/status/1603592195046400000
(I don’t have a direct link to that tweet, but I’m confident that screenshot tweet isn’t faked.)
Edit: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657
That said, Musk's comments were unnecessary.
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.
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.
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.
Long live the King.
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
The information is provably true by going to the location and verifying that the person is there.
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.
@elonjet can be found on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
Incredibly, links to Mastodon instances are now flagged as a safety risk on Twitter.
Video of the Twitter spaces meeting, until this link gets removed: https://twitter.com/ForeverEversley/status/16036127708929187...
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.
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 same day the $54.20 buyout was announced.
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.
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
[2] https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/personal-...
Musk isn’t actually doing anything but applying the already existing anti-doxing rules.
Project Veritas (also a “journalists”) was banned for over a year for accidentally having an address in one of their videos.
I think both cases are ridiculous, but the same journalists who were recently banned cheered veritas being banned.
No banning, anyone, for any reasons, besides direct threats - aka first amendment (I would argue real-time tracking is probably a threat, but idk)
He also changed his mind on free speech absolutism. He came around to the "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" argument.
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.
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.
Your comment erroneously claims the reason was "for doing their jobs".
I'd recommend reading dang's comment since you have a lot of inflammatory comments in this thread.
> a company with a European or UK connection about an EU or UK data subject
If you have EU or UK data subjects, you have an European or UK connection and have entered GDPR enforcement territory.
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.
You say your not an Apple fan, but really sounds like you've been hanging out the Apple Store a bit too much lately.
> Apple would be a formidable player.
Hehe. Stop.
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.
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.
First they aren’t “seething”, they’re not even that surprised, they’re just pointing out that the loopy billionaire was insincere the entire time.
It’s simply news when a famous person does the exact opposite of what they’ve been loudly pretending to champion for years. Man bites dog.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221215173935/https://twitter.c...
Well, what Twitter was doing
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.
Fake news.
>You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress, not because they’re Democrat sleeper agents
They suppressed it because they were very awake Democrat agents.
>but because they don’t wanna be responsible for swaying the election because of fake news.
No they wanted to deliberately sway the election, because of their partisan alliance. You can read the story here:
Part 1: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
Part 2: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600
Part 3: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281
Part 4: Michael Shellenberger: https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/16017204550055116...
Part 5: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515
Banning people for posting a link to someone else possibly violating the rules seems like a step way too far.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The security risk is entirely overblown.
All tech stocks took a dive.
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.
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".
Here is a past thread of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154200
You can buy the antennas for like $100 and share the data in real time with whoever you want.
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.
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.
There are some legitimate things to pick on Musk for. This isn't one of them.
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.
There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it’s very far from obvious.
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.
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
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.
Isn't that considered to be anticompetitive behaviour, what with Twitter being the dominant player in the microblogging space and all?
Care to substantiate this?
The reason Trump was booted was his role in supporting and promoting Jan. 6th. The whole thing started as a rally put on by Trump.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/forevereversley/status/16036127708929187...
[2] https://twitter.com/katienotopoulos/status/16036045712884695...
[3] https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1603622824177848326
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.
[1]https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1603454821700452365 [2]https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/elon-musk-planes-9-minute-35-m...
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
Couldn't, there's no legal requirement for anyone to record and publish ADS-B transmissions.
> data that cannot easily linked to an individual (number plates are not protected by themselves)
This is incorrect, number plates of cars belonging to individuals are going to be protected in almost any context you'd be storing them in.
> This jet isn’t owned by musk, it’s owned by a company
Doesn't matter, Musk isn't the only person with a plane. I own my own plane, it gets tracked by these sites.
> Journalists (including citizen journalists) also have broad protections in European law and those must be weighed against the GDPR protections
Websites like flightradar24.com are not journalists, but data brokers. That's simply ridiculous.
>There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it very far from obvious.
No there isn't, this is crystal clear.
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.
I can't find the original, but from read it seems like the last tweet was a day before this.
On the insta this was closest i could find and it looks like was LAX not huntington
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.
[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515?cxt...
Also used for things like A/B testing.
(My understanding was that the Twitter files did on the end not contain such evidence, but information overload … I may have lost some consensus)
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.
Btw thank you so much for checking. Since you bothered that much, why not kindly share the proof with us?
Because you see I have this little problem: I cannot believe you without seeing the material that allowed to make you this conclusion.
If you don't answer, I'm afraid I might think that you weren't being truthful.
Of course Musk could have simply flown commercial and bypassed the entire "problem".
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.
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.
"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.
Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.
Musk lived long enough to become the villain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are presenting these two things as if they were mutually exclusive. They are not.
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.
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.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/former-bush-speechwriter-says-feds-...
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.
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.
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.
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].
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-n...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings
[3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/news/chilling-whatsapp-chil...
Twitter only censored the oldest continually published newspaper in America during an election about the Hunter Biden laptop.
[1] https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003891153108997You can’t be serious. So Musk can’t take any credit for what those companies have achieved?
By that logic, he should also be blameless for any problems at Twitter.
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.
But in the short term at least, this circus just seems like a waste of time.
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 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.
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.
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.
> Fake news.
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.
It's just abhorrent design of cities, that is the problem, especially in US.
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.
If I was a multi billionaire it’s certainly not how I would want to be spending my days.
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.
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).
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.
Just dont look people.
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?
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?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-15/the-se...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
And I definitely prefer social media that support long form posts and contextual discussions instead of these weird loosely linked twitter threads.
We will see if that works out.
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.
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.
There are interesting phenomena to discuss here, but Elon's mood swings aren't one of them.
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.
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.
I wonder if you're in a bubble here?
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).
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.
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 currently had 41k followers, and 2.5k likes on the post about it being banned on Twitter.
Comparatively, Elon's most recently Twitter post ("Twitter right now is <four fire emoticons>") has 186k likes.
It seems very unlikely the "great exodus" is happening or likely to happen due to this, at least to Mastodon.
That’s an instinct we can and should avoid in general debate though.
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 seems more likely if you are rich or powerful, you have much better alternatives available.
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?
The data published was not just ADS-B data, but ADS-B data + content intended to violate the specific privacy ICAO.
I'm not defending Musks actions, simply providing additional context.
And the stock in Tesla dropping directly correlates with the stock in the SV bubble economy dropping, mass layoffs, and overall economical downturn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 see how it could be, that seems like an entirely separate issue.
3/5:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916379
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366810
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31163090
>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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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
Let me rephrase:
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.
Less terroristy but still super shitty: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axmy3/far-right-attacked-dr...
If Musk wants to demonstrate a newly sensitive attitude towards doxxing and its dangers, he’s welcome to ban Libs of TikTok.
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.
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.
I’m not sure why you’re so obsessed with a fantasy version of a man.
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.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969?s=20...
No one’s saying he can’t do this. They’re saying he promised not to. Including, specifically, banning the @elonjet account.
False. They very publicly tweaked those rules after the ban. (They also include a media exemption, which is being ignored.) https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1603165959669354496
> Project Veritas (also a “journalists”) was banned for over a year for accidentally having an address in one of their videos.
No, he wasn’t.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/15/twitter-bans-james-okeefe-...
“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.”
Still convinced all this is really about is anger at the destruction of the class system that existed on Twitter.
Wasn’t about his plane anyway someone in a mask made a threat on a car his child was being driven in thinking it was Elon.
Let's see if its really that simple, reachable and affordable such that any mildly disgruntled oaf can do in an impetus.
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.
Mind elaborating on this? Would be a shame if something so important got lost in all the noise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 agree.
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.
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.
Can you prove this statement or is it just how you feel about it?
How many rich and famous have been disgraced in the last 200 years because journalists posted outside their hotel room or followed their car?
This is hn, not 4Chan
- 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 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.
I don't, so I assume I'm not that intelligent. Would you please explain to me how is it a paradox?
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.
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.
That doesn’t mean the plane tracking was or wasn’t good, it just surprised me that Calacanis was so unaware.
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.
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.
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.
One wonders why someone let him do that in the first place if that’s his state of mind. He’s clearly not surrounded himself with competent people.
https://www.hueylong.com/programs/share-our-wealth.php
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
US company using Paypal to accept money from US persons? Paypal has presence in the EU and will hand your money over.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Or how well it would actually pay out, as he's alienating his original user base at the same time.
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)
In all EU countries you would be violating the GDPR if you stored this data without a lawful basis. (If you're wondering what constitutes "lawful basis", here's a helpful tool https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/gdpr-resources/lawful-b...)
> I doubt the EU courts would argue any other way otherwise we'd need to criminalize tracking of UPS trucks and the like
Why would the GDPR prevent UPS from tracking their own trucks? How is this even remotely related to what we're discussing here?
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Finally, welcome to the club!
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.
Somehow getting, storing, and sharing passenger manifests would constitute PII of the sort that falls under GDPR.
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.
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
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...
It sure as hell does, just like it applies to movements of cars and movements of mobile phones.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
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”.
https://www.privacy-ticker.com/decision-to-fine-the-norwegia...
> 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.
> Please provide some evidence of your repeated claim that they're illegal in Europe
What kind of evidence do you want exactly? This is crystal clear to anyone with the most basic understanding of the GDPR.
Elon is harshing the vibes of Twitter addicts.
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.
90% of comment when Twitter was censoring before Musk were in support of it.
Now 90% of comments in this thread are against it.
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.
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.
https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_composition_of_state_legisl...
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.
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.
It's bad faith through and through.
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".
You know HN has hundreds of thousands of users, right?
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.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/deportation-rates-historical-persp...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-suspends-biden-administra...
[3] https://www.vera.org/news/children-are-still-being-separated...
[4] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/09/08/dhs-publishes-fair-and-h...
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.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/elon-musk-slashed-tw...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/28/chinese-b...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...
HRW points out the general problem here, predictably it came to pass less than a month later lol.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/11/02/why-twitter-under-elon-m...
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!”
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!!
Previously you could tweet "kill all white men" and nothing would happen. Not so much with the same statement targeting a different group.
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?
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.
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.
> "Free speech" is a paradox.
I'm not convinced, see above explanations.
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603587970832793600
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603181423787380737
Here he is claiming that his pinpoint location was shared and that the rule in place is against sharing real-time location data.
Sharing already available flight tracker information - This is an assassination attempt.
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.)
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.
Shadowban was literally talked about earlier this year. https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/5/23012046/twitter-prisoner-...
My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.
GM is down 41% YTD. Stocks are funny that way.
What kind/level of activity are you looking for?
Just curious, not trying to make a criticism of you or anything, to be clear.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahar_Mustafa_race_row
http://i.imgur.com/iojbGhE.png
http://i.imgur.com/W4uU8ZN.png
http://i.imgur.com/ia3aZxo.png
http://i.imgur.com/8vg96Cz.png
http://i.imgur.com/AWLJS2P.png
http://i.imgur.com/LbS3mdS.png
http://i.imgur.com/tRtLegn.png
http://i.imgur.com/2vP3vyh.png
[1] PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INOA-EA22002-3184.PDF
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.
I think you got the wrong takeaway from that.
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.
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?
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.
But it was proven that one side was correct in the case of twitter:
Part 1: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
Part 2: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600
Part 3: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281
Part 4: Michael Shellenberger: https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/16017204550055116...
Part 5: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515
Even Greenwald agreed with their assessment. Disagreeing with four of the best journalists alive today seems to me like someone drank some Kool-Aid.
I have seen confirmation about several of the suspended accounts:
Aaron Rupar confirmed he posted a link to ElonJet's Facebook page [2]
Drew Harwell (of WaPo) confirmed "in the course of reporting about ElonJet we posted links to Elon Jet" [3]
The Verge says Mastodon tweeted a link to ElonJet [4]
Micah Lee confirmed he linked to both the Twitter and Mastodon accounts of ElonJet [5]
1: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-manually-reviewed...
2: https://aaronrupar.substack.com/p/aaron-rupar-twitter-suspen...
3: https://boingboing.net/2022/12/16/musk-ragequits-twitter-spa...
4: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23511894/twitter-suspend...
5: https://theintercept.com/2022/12/16/elon-musk-twitter-suspen...
And it's really obvious why, too: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg
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.
People here keep omitting that part.
Sure, there are phonies. Therefore it is impossible to believe that anyone is genuine? No.
Do you have a citations for this? His son seems to disagree with your depiction of DePePe's political affiliation.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11537665/Son-Paul-P...
> responsible journalism
We haven't seen that in at least a decade.
edit: Specifically mentioning planes and their locations, I mean, not "extrapolating from cars to planes".
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.
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.
And for what it's worth, there are already perfectly applicable precedents https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-851
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
I worry the American education system is failing us.
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?
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.
Elon Musk does not and should not get similar privacy protection as Joe Doe. (under the law or sane moderation policy by any corporation)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I did that to you, you'd be pissed.
Will be pretty funny if he loses control of Tesla.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Progressive_Cauc...
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.
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.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/asylum-appli...
That is what I would call a real anti-immigration policy, at least when we judge policies by their visible results.
>up to-the-minute location information on him and his family
Nice exaggeration- you make it sound as if people are posting his real-time location at every moment from his phone or something.
All the plane info tells you is where he is in the sky, and then basically what city he landed into.
> 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.
_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.
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.
[1] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
[2] https://sapphireconsulting.co.uk/is-a-car-registration-plate...
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.
Walking away isn’t enough.
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.
>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.
https://estd.org/narcissism-consequence-trauma-and-early-exp...
“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.“
https://www.farahtherapycentre.co.uk/blog/narcissism-and-the...
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?
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.
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.
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?
1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944
2. https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1603857524574531584
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
http://enforcementtracker.com/ETid-851
Instead of car license plates, we have tail numbers and ICAO addresses. That's the only difference.
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.
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.
Build a receiver with a Raspberry Pi
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.
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:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fallen-faangs-nasdaq-wipeout-...
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.
This article from TC confirms:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodo...
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 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.
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.
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.
This is amusing because the ElonJet guy was actually a fanboy (originally, probably not anymore as he's being sued by Elon).
There's a number of ways one can avoid being tracked and Elon saying there aren't is a blatant lie.
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.
It's a terrible job, but, at least, it has a great compensation package.
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.
Elon made himself a public figure long ago.
He owns it; he gets to decide the rules, and everyone else gets to decide whether we want to use a platform with those rules
It's not going to work out well for musk financially when nobody wants to use it anymore, but that's his problem. Our problem is finding alternatives
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.
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.
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
Musk is a right-wing extremist who will protect his own.
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
People are making fun of him because of that, and really dont care about about the censorships or bans
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
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.
In this case it appears that you did not think.
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.
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.
To most people, that's lunar...
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.
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)
Not legal in Europe. You can't legally collect this (or any other PII) for fun, you'd need particularly strong reasons to do so without consent.
Mobile phones also broadcast their IMEIs and location, it would be similarly illegal to collect and store those signals to track phone movements.
>2. Nobody has a right to keeping their aircraft movements private, and aircraft movements != personal movements.
While not all aircraft movements are personal movements, many are.
Elon in fact has a lot to do with the apparatus of GDPR enforcement.
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.
Except that they have never been treated equivalently in any legal venue or government regulation.
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.
Private aircraft are neither private cars nor private phones and have he ever been treated equivalently under EU law.
You’re reasoning through false analogies.
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.
Are you joking? Lots of EU countries have had this, and still do.
For example in Finland, https://www.traficom.fi/en/services/vehicle-data-and-tax-pay...
In Sweden you can text the cars registration plate to 72503 and get the cars owners info.
In Norway you can look up car owners by registration plate or VIN https://www.vegvesen.no/en/dinside/kjoretoy/finn-eier-og-kjo...
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.
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.
The GDPR even covers you just writing notes into your diary about what your neighbours have been up to.
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.
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?
You're the one arguing that there's some special exemption for aircraft, but have done nothing to substantiate that claim.
Besides, with the GDPR it works the opposite way. You have to justify why your data processing is legal, not the other way around.
And for fucks sake, neither of Flightradar24 or ADSBExchange even offer a GDPR-compliant privacy policy. ADSBexchange does not offer one at all.
Regardless, we can be confident that a naturalized citizen like Musk doesn’t meet the requirement.
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.
Your argument falls flat, sorry.
But, I mean, the board did the right thing; their obligation is to the shareholders, and the price Musk offered was absurdly high.
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?
Yes, there are a plenty of precedents in the usual sense of the word. Such as this case, https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-851
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.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1603454821700452365
[2] https://www.facebook.com/ElonJet/posts/pfbid02Ldh5x93kQe6E6E...
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.
I can rant about Brown and Newsom for days, but he’s worse.
> 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.
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.
What does that have to do with anything?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
What am I wrong about? It obviously makes an exemption for CB radio which is intended for random people to socialize on.
"public calling channels" refers to a variety of specific channels such as 8.1 for PMR446 or 71,100 MHz VHF/RHA68.
There is no government censorship imposed on the content - it's a company that's unwilling to comply with the law.
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
> 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.
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).
In my opinion, you're lying.
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.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
