zlacker

Musk on November 6th:

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...

>>jrmg+(OP)
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that’s what free speech means” —@elonmusk 20220425

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

>>bigiai+M4
And in the 3 minute call where he popped onto a Twitter space tonight, he now says doxxing is zero tolerance and journalists aren't above the rules. But the alleged "doxxing" was the journalist doing nothing more than linking to the @elonjet account.

@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...

>>bigiai+M4
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657

The same day the $54.20 buyout was announced.

>>jrmg+(OP)
That was the case until a stalker got close to his toddler. That clearly shook him and changed his mind. Now the account will come back with a delay.

He also changed his mind on free speech absolutism. He came around to the "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" argument.

>>camjoh+q6
Honestly, I was on the side that expected Twitter to get better (like pg), and have mostly not been against any of what he's done until now, but this seems like a bad decision all around.

I assume he got emotional because his child was involved, then did this in a fit of rage, and is now unable to admit that he was wrong. There is no way you can look at this and say what he did was right, no matter what political stance you have.

A newly created rule, the violation of which isn't clear either.

I suppose this is unavoidable if you give one person complete control over a platform. Perhaps it should be illegal for big social media platforms to have a shareholder with over 50% of the voting power.

>>camjoh+q6
Not only was the space removed, but in fact, the entire Spaces feature has been removed from Twitter.

>>camjoh+q6
Mastodon’s Twitter account has also been banned.

>>Laaas+B7
I have no expectations around whether Twitter gets better or worse. The incentives have not changed, and the incentives point in the direction of the likes of the New York Times or Fox News.

But it isn't obvious that this decision is bad. What is quite clear he has changed his mind on pure free speech - which, realistically, was widely predicted. This isn't a political exercise though, he's just booting a few journalists in a hasty, poorly planned but ultimately not unreasonable policy. There is no ideology that requires a geo-fix on Elon's jet.

Although I'll postfix that all with "yet". People were claiming Alex Jones was the end of it relatively recently, and that story ended with the US president being booted off for partisan reasons.

>>Laaas+B7
He has been shadowbanning all sorts of people. Ukrainian war reporters, financial reporters, all sorts of stuff. This is just an upgrade to actual suspending accounts from what he has been doing the last 10 days.

>>jrmg+(OP)
Even mastodon twatter account got banned with last tweet being about @elonjet having mastodon account

https://web.archive.org/web/20221215173935/https://twitter.c...

>>jrmg+(OP)
Publishing personal information should not be covered by "free speech" at all. It provides no value to society and can cause real harm to individuals.

Elon was wrong in that tweet. It would be much better to show zero tolerance to doxxing.

It doesn't matter if the data is already available from public sources - publishing aggregated personal information from public records is dangerous and should be banned.

>>jrmg+(OP)
Yes, thank you for reminding this forum, although I’m sure everyone here remembers or has already been made aware of this contradiction.

Can you argument this point further or is it enough to imagine it with a trollface meme?

Me personally, I argue that it was an exaggerated policy position to take. Under no circumstances should menacing, harassment, threats to personal safety be tolerated.

It’s definitely a good thing that Musk backtracked on this, as the previous policy would have been used to cover some outrageous behavior, such as invading the personal space of LGBTQ accounts, outing them at work, or even menacingly posting selfies in their neighborhood.

There are limits to speech, free speech is meant within the context of public sphere debate and politics.

This tit-for-tat confrontation has to be suppresses, or the verbal rioting that is online trolling will again spillover into IRL.

>>Chinju+k8
Whoa wtf. I don't "wtf" a lot on HN but I had not noticed the whole spaces tab disappeared in the iOS app without an app update. A WTF both on the decision to remove it and that it can be removed without having to update the app.

>>memish+i7
So shaken that he (and his security team) forgot to file a police report.

>>jrmg+(OP)
I think the take away here is that any "digital town square" should not be a privately owned for-profit corporation.

>>camjoh+q6
> Incredibly, links to Mastodon instances are now flagged as a safety risk on Twitter.

Isn't that considered to be anticompetitive behaviour, what with Twitter being the dominant player in the microblogging space and all?

>>Laaas+B7
I thought he went off the rails back when he started banning satire accounts that bought a blue checkmark. That felt like a pretty clear admission that he was wrong about the blue checkmark but didn't want to admit it.

>>roenxi+s9
> partisan reasons

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.

>>eecc+Cb
I posted that deliberately without comment. I think it stands on its own as something people should reflect on when forming their opinion of the current situation, and thought that adding commentary would only muddy the perception of it.

I definitely did not intend it to be imagined with a troll face meme.

But since you asked my opinion, I’ll post it and people can judge it separately to the tweet.

I actually do agree with the idea that you shouldn’t post the whereabouts of people, even celebrities, if they’re not at public events - even if the information is technically public. That seems like a reasonable rule.

It’s the capriciousness and lack of concern for consistency - the seeming knee-jerk, ad hoc decision making - that is so frustrating. (And that many of the people defending it are the same people who perceived old Twitter to be capricious - but that’s another digression.)

I believe that rule-making (and enforcing) for something like Twitter requires more consistency, more deliberation, and more decorum than is currently being presented. I am afraid that this is not in Musk’s nature, and afraid about what the consequences of that will be.

I think the tweet I quoted, combined with knowledge of the current situation, is evidence for all of that.

>>Dudela+qe
The internet is the town square. Twitter is a shitty bar on the square.

>>memish+i7
This is most likely another lie to get sympathy from the internet. Just like when he lied about holding his dying baby in his arms.

>>alangi+Ae
In their original post on his suspension they didn't think they had a good argument for suspending Trump based on the current situation. They had to resort to a hyper-partisan reading of "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." [0] for example, rather than an appeal to something more reasonably interpreted as dangerous.

Then the so-called "Twitter Files" [1] provide confirmation of what we already sort-of knew that the inside of Twitter was a highly partisan environment creating internal pressures to boot Trump for political reasons, looking for excuses and testing attempts blindly. Note that the process outlined to ban him was to keep testing tweets, the policy team returned "no violation", then they tried the next tweet. Then eventually the executive got impatient and seem to have overruled the process to get him kicked off.

Compared to that, what Musk is doing is rather mundane and palatable. It is more or less up front that he doesn't like the journalists targeting his affairs, and isn't politically motivated or likely to be meaningful.

It has been a couple of years now, there was a big investigation that turned up nothing. Trump is running for president again the usual way and just launched an NFT token so it is pretty clear he wasn't seriously plotting a revolution. Their interpretation of Jan 6 was wrong, partisan and material.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515?cxt...

>>jimkle+Ib
Many apps have lots of feature flags that can be turned on and off based on what the API says.

Also used for things like A/B testing.

>>roenxi+Ug
I somewhat agree with you, if we're defining 'political reasons' as 'not liking violent interference in presidential elections'.

They did bend their own rules. But not because they are all card carrying Democrats. They did it because they couldn't stand having the person that very obviously instigated Jan 6th on the platform anymore.

It took a mob (following, supporting, assembled, and whipped up by Trump) storming the capital building to get them to boot Trump. I don't see how you get from there to 'political differences'. If that was the case he would have been gone much sooner.

Problem was that he didn't do it (entirely) by tweet. So they found an excuse. That much is true.

>>jrmg+sf
Thanks. I prefer this comment, where your considerations are reasonably articulated and "on the record" rather than letting the reader project their own assumptions.

I don't think Musk's behavior is capricious, but rather _improvident_. It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the problem domain -- social media -- and functional capacity to process its signals. I'd prefer he turned back to tech, where he undeniably has a much better track record.

>>eecc+dH
Yeah - though I would argue he is also exhibiting capriciousness, “improvident” is a great description. Basically I agree with all of that.

>>the_du+oh
Ah, I developed an Android app back in 2012 with explicitly no permission to access the internet, so I think my app development experience was quite limited :-) Thanks for the heads up on how that works now.