It's not hypocrisy, it's the natural outgrowth of seeing other people as a collection of vague moving objects that either do things for you or cause problems for you.
He trashed talk a journalist immediately after the journalist complained he had to journey thru cold with out heater because his batteries would not last until the next charging point.
He trashed talk the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who supported the short sellers.
He trashed talk the ones who might as well be supporting the short sellers, e.g. sec aka shortseller enrichment commission aka security exchange commission.
He is a small guy with a oversized largely sensitive ego.
But most notoriously, he is a terrible public speaker. Like my public speaking teacher would be more ashamed at him than me.
When I mentioned that Elon had already been using his power unilaterally to re-platform personal allies like Babylon Bee and Ye, I got all sorts of pedantry about the difference between suspension and banning, more pedantry about the Ye reactivation happening moments before the deal went through and some justifications about Babylon Bee not having done anything wrong, etc...
I will reiterate here again. Musk will squeeze every bit of perceived power he may have out of Twitter by issuing personal favours like the petty, tin-pot tyrant that he is.
Note that I'm asking for an actual steelmanned argument for why there's no possible defense of Musk here, not why people have high priors to just assume there's no defense.
Free speech is complicated. Saying you'll "do free speech" without refering to implementation or intended resolution to various free speech dilemmas... that means you're probably not going to do free speech.
The part that I find most annoying is when politicians bring it up this way. It seems to be the one issue where nonseriousness meets fake passion most intimately.
Everyone is jumping to the conclusion that he personally did this and it's not in error, which is a leap. It's the same as everyone who blamed Jack personally for bans that were later reversed.
Let's see what the explanation is and whether it gets unbanned.
Don't listen to a word he says - assume it's false until independently verified.
PS. Boo!
Just curious, would you be ok with some guy tracking the location of your kids on a hourly basis?
IMHO Musk has a real opportunity to actually make Twitter great, Twitter was in a horrible shape and no one was happy with its state and I hoped that he can fix it because Musk is a product person. Unfortunately every passing day I'm losing hope. Even if he can fix it as a product, it seems like he will bomb it as a community.
No one ever forgot the calling the diver pedo incident and his handling Twitter can severely damage his image.
There is a reason why people pay Musk thousands of dollars for features that don't exist or cars that are not well build and still don't go after him like people went after Elizabeth Holmes and I'm afraid he might eventually burn out his social credit and be judged promptly for whatever he delivers without a slack.
I think it's also obvious that this jet tracker doesn't exactly aid in the public discourse, it seems far closer to targeted harassment..
Again, I don't think anything should be banned outside of direct threats (I'm a free speech absolutist). But it does seem clear, even from that tweet by Musk, that that twitter account seemed to impact his personal safety.
- "A screenshot of what he claimed was an internal Slack channel showed Ella Irwin, the person appointed to replace Yoel Roth as Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, asking a “Team” to “please apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-account-following-elon... ("Twitter Account Tracking Elon Musk’s Private Jet Gets Shadow Banned")
It's unclear if Ella Irwin still works at Twitter, but giving everything going on I strongly suspect there's no one to moderate against Elon personally banning an account he does not like.
"It appears @ElonJet is longer banned or hidden in anyway."
Basically, his entire tenure so far has been "free speech for me and the accounts that were rightfully banned for violating the TOS!" in public, and then "we'll deboost anyone who doesn't pay me a subscription" and "let's selectively release internal comms in a misleading way to make normal company operation in good faith seem like a liberal conspiracy."
Just look at some of the inflammatory replies to your comment that just mentions it. There's more going on with the semantics of the phrase being used to irrationally rile people up to outrage, rather than actually being about the definition of free speech.
Where's the hypocrisy? Musk said he wanted to broaden the speech allowed on the platform, not allow speech of all kinds.
> "let's selectively release internal comms in a misleading way to make normal company operation in good faith seem like a liberal conspiracy."
Maybe try getting your info from a non-leftwing source. There has been plenty of damning info coming from these internal comms.
> normal company operation in good faith
But it wasn't "normal company operation" because they completely disregarded preexisting company policy for dealing with political figures. Here are political figures that they didn't ban (who were inciting violence)
> 20. In June 2018, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
> 21. In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.”
But they banned the former president. What they were doing wasn't "normal company operation", it was a bunch of power tripping people in upper management (like Roth) who "took it upon themselves" to disregard preexisting company policies for some odd reason
You can dislike Trump/Elon/et al, but the "normal company operation" bit is an outright distortion of what actually happened
source: https://nitter.net/bariweiss/status/1602370518585221120#m
Also, if you read the twitter files, the enforcement was fairly lopsided. Look what happened to @libsoftiktok -- constant labels and suspensions even though they admitted that they couldn't actually find rule breaks. They just didn't like the "intent". And when that account got doxxed -- which is dangerous and malicious -- the company did nothing.
I don't think you need to call it a liberal conspiracy, it's just very clear that twitter has/had a very particular bias based on the facts alone.
If you agree its fine, would you apply the same reasoning to [favorite politician]? How about a bot that crowdsources the whereabouts of [politician] at any time?
When I mentioned that Elon had already been using his power unilaterally to re-platform personal allies like Babylon Bee and Ye, I got all sorts of pedantry about the difference between suspension and banning, more pedantry about the Ye reactivation happening moments before the deal went through and some justifications about Babylon Bee not having done anything wrong, etc...
I will reiterate here again. Musk will squeeze every bit of perceived power he may have out of Twitter by issuing personal favours like the petty, tin-pot tyrant that he is.
Meanwhile, those that dislike both Musk and Twitter are having a magical moment as each actively destroys the other, like two black holes circling each other, unable to escape.
They've also been aggressive about banning bots and valid stuff has gotten caught in that net.
I'll be not at all surprised if it's unbanned by end of day or we learn more details about what actually happened.
There's simply no Libertarian ideal that can be achieved in one place. The Internet as a whole is an absolute haven of free speech. Twitter caters to a certain audience, Facebook to another. They're very broad, but not infinite. There are plenty of other places that cater to the audiences that they don't. And people can always find ways to share their ideas with no interference. The thing they aren't entitle too is reach.
> The Administrator shall, upon request of a private aircraft owner or operator, block the registration number of the aircraft from any public dissemination or display, except in data made available to a Government agency, for the noncommercial flights of the owner or operator.
The only reason folks would be obsessed with this is for nefarious reasons or just out of a blatant disrespect for the privacy of another person. Only negative reasons.
Maybe it's a megalomaniac dictator thing, and I will never understand.
Advertisers have come back and the staff is muuuuch smaller than before.
[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...
[2] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
> Our primary aim is to protect individuals from potential physical harm as a result of their information being shared, so we consider information such as physical location and phone numbers to be a higher risk than other types of information.
> Under this policy, you can’t share the following types of private information, without the permission of the person who it belongs to....home address or physical location information
So Elon essentially gave permission, and now he has revoked it.
The difficulty those on the other-side of this argument have is that they themselves are not arguing that this shouldn't be the policy, and that this "doxing" behavior is not wrong. In fact, no one is.
There is not a single person claiming free speech is being violated here. There is not any kind of movement or group that is campaigning for doxing of location information as a right.
Essentially, people are saying: you are not allowing the things that no one thinks should be allowed anyway.
"Boss said to do it".
[1] https://twitter.com/GreatPaul_Smith/status/15894241378646097...
Think I'm wrong? Let's see if he'll go after Jack Dorsey in the future for recently correcting him on going after CSAM.
Jack didn't like that accusation:
But then again, Elon is hell-bent on alienating everyone. I was planning on selling our Land Rover and getting a Tesla but I changed my mind because a lot of people will associate me with the guy or think I agree with him. Still.. amazing cars.
He, SBF, and many more like them are just a bunch of Chauncy Gardeners. People convince themselves that they're geniuses until one day the realization dawns that they've been dunces all along.
There isn't a dichotomy between genius and asshole.
I still think Elon's contributions to society are much greater than his flaws.
And his contributions don't come from being a "genius" (there are at least hundreds of thousands of geniuses on Earth) as much as from being extremely hardworking.
Still, it's a very apt reference these days, maybe all days. The narrative arc feels evergreen, in that the surreal irony feels like it would land (and be thoroughly entertaining!) in any era of human history.
I'm neither a lawyer nor an American but AFAIK according to past SCOTUS rulings, it is illegal for the government to "outsource censorship" to private parties in order to silence speech protected by 1A. A relative of DNC's Podesta or an FBI lawyer working for Twitter add to the impression more than the legal argument I guess.
I think from the legal POV, an @ElonJet suspension backstory wouldn't be as interesting as the other installment of "The Twitter Files."
"Its open source data!" So are the (perfectly legal) doxes on Kiwifarms, yet that's one of the largest reasons its vilified.
Additionally, I doubt most people here would be okay with another person very closely watching your movements including this kid if Musk decided to beat him at his own game by setting up cameras around his house (Funny what you can do with enormous amounts of money). Musk is still human whether you like billionaires or not. You'd think that a place like this would be more privacy-oriented and wouldn't be okay with any kinds of telemetry period, or at the very least would want it handled more carefully (Plane data handled by in-house FAA units rather that broadcasted to the web for anyone and everyone to see).
Every minute you don't spend on Twitter is another minute we will be closer to Elon having to eat $44B and probably take a horrific haircut on Tesla.
A) Elon banned the account, reneging on his previous statement, "My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk"
B) It was erroneously banned by someone else or an automated bot net process without Elon's knowledge and will be overturned when he's made aware of it
C) It was banned for another reason we don't know about yet
D) Other
That’s why your comment, which demonstrates knowledge of the circumstances and asks the obvious questions, ranks 1/3 of the page down.
1) If you have no cookies, Twitter constantly recommends that you follow Elon Musk
2) “Elon Musk” appears to be permanently set as a trending topic for logged-out users
2. I just checked in incognito and he's currently not trending for me(from Germany).
Personally, depending on how often Elon is using this plane - I could see this as a form of doxxing (although not strictly). I think the publicity that the account has been receiving recently is probably why it got suspended. It will be interesting to see whether any other legal or social policy is created related to this issue.
In Elon's defence (not that he needs or deserves it) -- if I had a bunch of armed and angry folks who wanted to see me dead, I wouldn't want their job made easier thanks to some doofus publicising my location in real-time.
0. https://twitter.com/jxcksweeney 1. https://twitter.com/RUOligarchJets 2. https://twitter.com/NASAPlanes
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/16031245489032478...
also, the journalist reporting this is now filtered from search
major brands and advertisers jumped ship a month or two ago and very few have returned to see how elons checkmark 2.0, sink-dragging, maximum-hard-work "meet me on the tenth floor" late-on-the-rent leadership have panned out.
by all accounts, if your brand is safely evacuated from twitter, @elonjet is proof you probably dodged a bullet or two and should get some recognition by EOY for your efforts.
i've heard this before, is it backed by data? where is the data? anecdotally:
active: https://nitter.snopyta.org/pepsi/status/1603075671881879556#... https://nitter.snopyta.org/beatsbydre/status/160309134171347... https://nitter.snopyta.org/Ford/status/1603080041138733056#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/TOMFORD/status/160308497345149337... https://nitter.snopyta.org/SNICKERS/status/16026650177693286... https://nitter.snopyta.org/Oreo/status/1603042472866861068#m https://nitter.snopyta.org/Disney/status/1602725046463696903... https://nitter.snopyta.org/Samsung/status/160257553489808998... https://nitter.snopyta.org/ProcterGamble/status/160092252229... https://nitter.snopyta.org/AppleMusic/status/160245283600402... https://nitter.snopyta.org/OppenheimerFilm/status/1603027027...
inactive: https://nitter.snopyta.org/CocaCola https://nitter.snopyta.org/Charmin
or maybe I'm confusing "posting" with "spending on advertising"?
Authenticity has been confirmed with an update on the personal site: https://grndcntrl.net/links/
Elon Musk, 2022-11-06
Elon is not in the Ponzi business like SBF, but we've seen quite a few questionable statements and borderline vaporware predictions.
More rational scrutiny and skepticism is needed, as a general rule, for anyone in power.
Another person who defends Elon is Bill Maher. I am curious what he will say in the new year.
Also MKBHD.
(And that for the creator to refuse, not because he didn’t want to sell, but because he hoped to get more money out of Elon, not because of any worthwhile contribution of him, or because it was his data, but simply to take advantage of the concerns Elon shared with him, was dickish.)
He can do whatever he wants, for now, until his debtors own it in a year or two.
Everyone needs to use this time to build better alternatives.
Personally I'm hoping everyone just goes back to their own blogs and Twitter, Facebook, etc. goes the way of AOL
I definitely remember defending his actions in the past and apparently I was wrong. He is an asshole. I still maintain that he isn't stupid though. I enjoyed hearing him discuss SpaceX work on podcast interviews in the past.
EDIT: He has a Facebook page and a website. I am definitely going to be using the latter.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
Currently on the ground in Texas after flying out of LA.
> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.
1) Elon is trying to position himself as being "pro free speech" in the same way Jack Dorsey did (it's just marketing, and not a truly held principle).
2) Somebody in the organization is making decisions that Elon will reverse in the next 24 hours to prove that they did not come from him.
3) Some specific threat has been made against Elon that has him now paranoid about his security to the extent that he's rethinking his principles when faced with his own mortality.
The difference between 1 and 3 being whether he never had principles or is now giving them up. I'm guessing it's 3 because I've seen SO MANY public figures I once respected do the exact same thing once the danger of standing on principle became all too palpable.
This is public flight data reposted to a public channel. Musk now owns one of the biggest platforms on the internet so I’d argue that not only is the information already public but now in the public interest.
Ironically, still easily accessible via the 'best' list: https://news.ycombinator.com/best
Dang, you can skip the anodyne PR statement.
Sister: "oh yeah you are in (lat, lon)?, I saw it on elonjet"
Ella opens slack,
Ella Irwin: " team apply heavy VF on elonjet "
In recent memory, the only time the outrage was justified in hindsight was when ICANN had that issue with .org domains. The rest of the time it has seemed to me that the comments come up with 2 min hate and then emerging facts turn out to be different.
My priors are, therefore, quite high that the outrage is usually unjustified. The boy cried wolf too much.
There were several occasions when HN algorithms flagged my comments/submissions and then someone from the HN team would reach out saying that this was a mistake and the result of a non-human intervention. Why is the same scenario not considered?
We shall see, but honestly, I believe @ElonJet will be reactivated by the end of today.
From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
As I've said and will keep saying Musk does not care about free speech. People are falling for the lies of a billionaire who has been caught in multiple objective lies before.
And other places: https://grndcntrl.net/links/
if it even slightly puts him in danger, he takes steps at mitigation.
when it’s other people, and the situation is even more dangerous, it almost seems like he revels in the danger those people or groups are put in.
even more concerning to me, when those groups ask for mitigation efforts, he goes out of his way to make their concerns appear unreasonable or hysterical. again, even when those threats are more immediate/widespread.
this is not something to be brushed away, this has very real implications.
"Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok."
This action likely shows that Musk intuitively understands the dangers of stochastic terrorism for himself (this is really one of the mildest version imaginable), but doesn't understand or doesn't want to understand the abstract concept and that it should impact speech on his and other platforms or at least needs to be addressed in a mature way.
But this looks bad. He should have stated publicly why before banning it.
"Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code."
https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288?s=20...
Are they all going to be blocked?
I feel like I’m missing something.
Jordan Peterson is another example of this. He used to have some good insights but what I have heard from him lately sounds very authoritative and appeals to his followers but is pretty hollow.
I think Twitter may actually end up making more money in the future. Musk seems to be able to market his companies very effectively. I’m assuming there is significantly more interest in the going ons at Twitter since he took over.
On the other hand: there's no particular information here yet, regarding the reason why the account was banned, nor does anyone know if Elon Musk actually had anything directly to do with it. Elon Musk has a ton of fanboys who would probably continue to report and brigade such an account, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what happened here.
Elon Musk now reigns supreme on the platform we love, But his control has come at a cost, with many pushed out. The fired workers are left to wonder and roam, While Musk's grip on the site only continues to grow.
Oh Elonjet, how we'll miss your tweets and updates, Tracking Musk's travels with such keen insight. Your suspension is a sad moment, a loss to be sure, But your spirit lives on in the memories of those who adored.
-Credit to ChatGPT
It's also hard to say he's banning free speech against himself when it feels like half of twitter is anti-Elon sentiment these days.
If anything this shows how badly people want to find anything to criticize Musk for. Accounts get flagged, give it half a day at least.
edit...
seems there is already a reddit (where you'd expect), but it is (apparently) tied to a crypto token. They have a .io domain (the one you expect) and it's just promoting crypto and has an iframe to https://opensky-network.org/aircraft-profile?icao24=a835af to make it the "elonjet" coin. Man, people will attach crypto to anything.
I think there are two cases we should observe to be able to judge motives here: - What happens to Twitter accounts that are heavily critical of Musk, but do not track him or otherwise lead to real-world harassment/violence? - What happens to a Twitter account that is tracking someone else who isn't Musk?
If Twitter is allowing the former (Musk criticism), and banning the latter (tracking/harassment of non-Musk people), then I think this is fine.
Then the wild west internet was developed into a city and well, you just can't walk around shooting your gun wherever you want anymore. And changing the law to let people do that isn't going to bring back the wild west, and is more likely to just cause a bunch of chaos.
But tracking a flight like this on a regular basis to this intrusive a level strikes me as downright creepy and personally invasive.
Are you going to track the locations of his vehicles and where they park next?
An alternative argument - if we're going to do it to him, maybe we should do the same to everyone (which is crazy because no one cares that much about random plane movements from rich guys unless they are politically connected, or green hypocrites, or involved in some crime, but Law Enforcement protects this data etc)
A few years ago, we were all mad at Uber for their "God View" which tracked celebrity locations -> https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38314832
> Before the Capitol riots, the company was engaged in an inherently insane/impossible project, trying to create an ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between human beings.
> This project was preposterous, yet its leaders were unable to see this, having become infected with the firm’s groupthink, coming to believe – sincerely – that it was their responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom.
^ THAT, is the kind of policy I'm worried about.
“Private information: You may not publish or post other people's private information (such as home phone number and address) without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so. Learn more.”
Now.. his fight information is technically “public” but in that same sense, phone numbers and street addresses are also “public”. Thus, a suspension to the flight tracking account seems in alignment with Twitter policy.
Elon claimed he would not “ban” the account. And he has not done so. They were suspended.
Okay edit lol: I _actually_ didn't know that "Suspended" is the equivalent to "Permanently Suspended" aka"Banned" on twitter. Shocking, I know. I walk back my second statement.
