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> Update: Musk just weighed in on the suspensions, characterizing them as intentional. “Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else,” he tweet

• JohnTHaller 4y ago
  It's not a good rule. It was implemented for the sole reason of preventing people from saying where Elon Musk's private jet is, even though that is publicly available information by law.
  • SamBam 4y ago
    And it was forseeable. People were joking that Musk was paying $40B to buy Twitter simply to just down the ElonJet account.
    • kennywinker 4y ago
      Which is hilarious because as I recall the account admin asked for something like $50k to shut it down…
      • huhtenberg 4y ago
        And that would've caused an avalanche of copycat accounts, each going after their own 50K.
        • iso1631 4y ago
          You can't stop the signal, but you can slowly dampen it Of course Musk could have simply flown commercial and bypassed the entire "problem".
          • fragmede 4y ago
            Commercial airplanes don't have doors that go like this, unfortunately.
• GoofballJones 4y ago
  Those journalists weren't reporting specific locations of his jet...they were reporting on a legit news story about it. Musk didn't like it so the journalists are now banned. The dude is truly off his rocker now. The "rules" are whatever he makes up on the spot. He's self-destructing before our eyes...no longer the richest man in the world. Telsa stock tanking all because he can't STFU and acts like a spoiled 12 year old.
  • fourstar 4y ago
    • dang 4y ago
      We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I really hate to ban a 14 year old account, but you've been posting abusively so consistently lately—in fact it seems that's all you've been doing—that I don't see what choice we have. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  • NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    >Those journalists weren't reporting specific locations of his jet...they were reporting on a legit news story about it. 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.
    • TulliusCicero 4y ago
      How is it "doxxing" to use public flight data? Am I missing something here?
      • 4y ago
• nemothekid 4y ago
  >It seems like a good rule, 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?
  • textbookrental 4y ago
    He doesn't suffer cognitive dissonance.
    • bb88 4y ago
      His reality distortion field prevents him from feeling that.
      • blitzar 4y ago
        Being the smartest man on the planet means you can make the mental leaps to see that was them and this is him so it is totally different.
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      No, he enjoys cognitive dissonance.
  • ilyt 4y ago
    >Furthermore, it just seems that Elon is doing what he accused Twitter of doing for so long; Well, what Twitter was doing
    • 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
      Was it capriciously banning journalists that said anything the CEO found offensive? That’s what he’s doing, and I really, really don’t think that’s what twitter was doing.
• burkaman 4y ago
  > 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. 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/location-data-national-security.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...
  • zerocrates 4y ago
    There's history of this kind of thing spurring political action: what comes immediately to mind is the Video Privacy Protection Act, enacted after a reporter got hold of Robert Bork's video rental records. At the time, Bork was in the middle of a contentious (and ultimately failed) confirmation process to be named to the Supreme Court, and Bork's views on the lack of a constitutional right to privacy gave the writer an idea. The actual movies were nothing interesting, but general distaste for the move, plus a healthy dose of worry from members of Congress about the contents their own records, led to a law that explicitly penalized video stores that handed out that kind of info about their customers. I think you're right in general that people are pretty blasé about tracking now, though.
    • selimthegrim 4y ago
      I am pretty sure people got a hold of Clarence Thomas’s too
• jupp0r 4y ago
  This does not always happen with rule makers. It's yet another item on a list of more and more unhinged public embarrassments specific to Elon Musk.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  No, he banned a bunch of journalists for doing their jobs.
  • chinathrow 4y ago
    Billionairs hating public discourse, news at 11.
  • trap_goes_hot 4y ago
    The article states that given reason was "journalists had revealed private information about his family" 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908
    • Sakos 4y ago
      I don't think it's difficult to become inflammatory when people are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to paint what Twitter/Elon did as justified. You're not arguing in good faith and I see that as far more harmful for HN.
      • trap_goes_hot 4y ago
        That is simply your view, and I don't agree. Again, its no big deal, people can disagree. People are attempting to moralize the issue due to a personal vendetta against Elon (such as the poster I replied to).
        • Sakos 4y ago
          You can disagree all you want. Doesn't change the facts about what happened. Stop lying and trying to defend Elon.
          • trap_goes_hot 4y ago
• lamontcg 4y ago
  Weirdly I'm almost on the other side of the whole doxxing issue. 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.
  • unlipkert 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • comte7092 4y ago
    Precedent only matters if the rules are applied consistently. These only consistent rule on Twitter now is “don’t tweet shit that offends Elon”.
    • lamontcg 4y ago
      Twitter is kind of gone at this point. But the lessons could live on after it.
      • comte7092 4y ago
        Hopefully the main lesson is: don’t give this kind of power to privately owned platforms.
  • UncleMeat 4y ago
    But the principle won't be applied equally. No property of the universe will swoop in and force Musk to take action when trans people are threatened. It is an error to assume that systems that protect the rich and powerful will be used to protect the poor and oppressed.
  • badwolf 4y ago
    Elon, quite literally, immediately asked for the Internet to doxx someone right after making this rule change. He posted a picture of a car/license/person and demanded everyone find this person. Strangely, the 'incident' was never important enough to actually contact law enforcement over...
• duxup 4y ago
  Did any of these journalists report his location? Or did they report about the banning of someone who reported his location?
  • t0mas88 4y ago
    They reported about the banning and that the ElonJet account has moved to Mastodon.
    • ilyt 4y ago
      @joinmastodon got banned for that too
      • fluidcruft 4y ago
        Additionally all links to anything in mastodon (may be server specific) are also being blocked. Mastadon users are reporting this morning that they aren't able to post links to their Mastadon accounts with error messages that Twitter has identified the site as harmful. https://mastodon.social/@daveleeFT/109521035468131464 https://mastodon.social/@daveleeFT/109521035468131464
        • mcv 4y ago
          Banning all links to Mastodon? That's just censoring the competition. Lots of people have been leaving Twitter for Mastodon, so silencing that might be a welcome side effect of widely overshooting his elonjet ban.
          • TheHappyOddish 4y ago
            "Lots" might be an overstatement, in relativity at least. The peak of the Mastodon migration was mid November, reportedly around 400k per week. This sounds like a lot, however a) many have moved back to Twitter due to it not being what they expected and b) Twitter has over 300m monthly active users.
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  I have this crazy idea.. If only there was.. now hear me out Some type of team at Twitter that could look at more tweets.. the resources to look at ALL of Twitter.., systematically, for these issues of “trust” and “safety” You could the create a very clear policy, and work to remove any doubt such a policy was consistently enforced! I know crazy idea..
  • eric_cc 4y ago
    That idea failed. Such teams will always be corrupt. Trust and Safety teams might as well be named what they are: Ideological Control teams.
    • mindslight 4y ago
      A more accurate label would be "Ideologue Strawman" teams. The idea failed, but not for the reason you think - even when doing a decent job with a very hard problem, the corner cases create a lightning rod for criticism that results in a breakdown of public trust. But still, a bureaucratic committee that produces relatively stable results instills a lot more trust than a single forum addict who then buys the forum so he can ban anyone who argues with him. We, which very much includes myself, had come to take bureaucracies for granted. We focused on their failures, got frustrated at their stifling nature, and concluded the whole concept was worth raging against. But the resulting rise of individual-autocratic personalities has shown the value that bureaucracy had been bringing - slow moving predictability. All hail our Beige overlords? Having said that, on the larger topic, I've been waiting for "web 2.0" to be revealed as the authoritarian dumpster fire it is since someone coined the term "AJAX". The obvious answer is decentralized systems that get the meddlesome third parties out of our personal interactions completely. And if this rampaging petty tyrant will help many more people to realize the intrinsic tyranny of centralized webapps, then I guess these events are a good thing?
• h11h 4y ago
  It's also worth noting that revealing real names and workplaces of anonymous accounts is still allowed. The doxxing that is banned is a specific class of doxxing that isn't often considered to be doxxing.
  • alangibson 4y ago
    This. Since when is current location of a well known person doxxing? AFAICT, Elon made that up to suit himself.
    • mcv 4y ago
      That's probably true for everything about how he runs Twitter. It's his personal platform now, and not a public town square anymore. He makes up the rules to suit himself, and he'll enforce them the way he wants.
      • alangibson 4y ago
        Clearly true. I, like so many others, are just having whiplash over how sudden and brazen it all is.
      • toofy 4y ago
        most of what you say is spot on, but lets be clear: twitter has never nor would it have ever been "a public town square" anything owned by a private company is the literal opposite of a "public" anything. and way more importantly, anything with a character limit of 280 characters is absolutely thoroughly inadequate to discuss the most complicated and nuanced subjects that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries with entire tomes and libraries worth of space.
        • mcv 4y ago
          I completely and wholeheartedly agree. These companies always love to present themselves as a public space, while simultaneously leveraging their control over it. And I definitely prefer social media that support long form posts and contextual discussions instead of these weird loosely linked twitter threads.
• emodendroket 4y ago
  > It seems like a good rule, but in this case the application of the rule seems less impersonal than it could be I don't think it seems like a good rule. Not only is the information public but I think it is not hard to dream up reasons why it would legitimately be in the public interest to report on the comings and goings of someone's private jet.
  • nearbuy 4y ago
    Public or not, it is a security concern, especially for a celebrity/politicized figure/widely hated person. I wouldn't want my live location posted on the internet either, and there's a lot fewer people who want to hurt me than Musk (AFAIK, no one wants to hurt me).
    • emodendroket 4y ago
      I don't find it credible that someone is committed enough to doing you harm that they're willing to rot in prison for the rest of their lives but not quite committed enough to look up the public data themselves instead of finding it conveniently collated for them.
      • nearbuy 4y ago
        I'd like to think I'm smarter than the average nutcase who tries to assassinate a celebrity, and I would not have known how to get that information before people started posting it online. I wouldn't have even known it was possible. All you get from the flight tracking websites is flights with serial numbers. There's no obvious way to know which one belongs to Musk. His jet isn't registered under his name. People had to do some sleuthing. Edit: I think you're also implying that people who have attempted to assassinate or assassinated someone are a) rational, and b) believe they'll be caught. But often neither of those are true.
        • akiselev 4y ago
          > People had to do some sleuthing. 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! :-)
• calculatte 4y ago
  What is everyone up in arms for? This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants. That is what everyone has been saying for years. I mean, it turns out they were wrong and Twitter was actually colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment. But censorship and targeted suspensions were defended tooth and nail by internet commenters. Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Surely people wouldn't be so shortsighted?
  • xracy 4y ago
    In a word, Hypocrisy. Everyone is up in arms for Hypocrisy. Musk's statement was that free speech would be allowed on Twitter. And yet, here he is chilling free speech. It's not surprising. It's just also really bad. So people are up in arms that they're losing a platform that, while by no means perfect, was better for free speech than it currently is.
    • Dma54rhs 4y ago
      And the "this is private" company folks are seething now private company doing private things. All these American political flights are so incredibly dumb.
      • mint2 4y ago
        No, this argument drops flat faster than Twitter ad revenue dropped. 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.
      • zimpenfish 4y ago
        > And the "this is private" company folks are seething now private company doing private things. No. It is 100% A-OK for Ol' Muskie to ban who he wants for whatever spurious reasons he wants to post-hoc claim. It's his company, he can do that. 100%. What people are correctly pointing out is that he rode in on his "FREE SPEECH IS GOOD" horse waving a "BOTS ARE BAD" banner, loudly proclaiming that "Only illegal speech will be banned", re-enabled a whole bunch of accounts for bigots based on bot-ridden unreliable polls, swerved hard to the alt-right lane, picked up a transphobic smoothie and blew both his feet off with a +100 Shotgun Of Hypocrisy by starting to ban people who mock, track, or report on him.
• haberman 4y ago
  I agree. Principles are the only way out of this. People need to feel faith that an evenhanded application of impartial standards will protect both them and their ideological foes alike. Whatever privacy standards are established need to protect everyone the same. It's easy to point out Musk's hypocrisy and shifting standards. Conservatives did the same when it was more liberal people who ran Twitter. We need to appeal to something higher than "everything is great when people who agree with me are in charge."
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    For Twitter it is too late though.
• bongoman37 4y ago
• belter 4y ago
  "Elon Musk rages off Twitter Spaces" - https://youtu.be/znFNKlzuTSc https://youtu.be/znFNKlzuTSc
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    Wow… that was… bad. Worse than I expected and I have low expectations. That’s toddler level behavior. 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.
• ladyattis 4y ago
  The problem is that Musk is suggesting that anyone posting anything regarding ADS-B data, sites, applications, and so forth are violating the rule which isn't the case. These are legal and open radio topics, we're not talking about posting his bank records, we're talking about posting where a plane was last seen in the air which isn't the same as posting his private address.
• DonHopkins 4y ago
  How does the 24 hour delay location tracking rule agains DOXing benefit somebody who doesn't have a private jet to hop around the world in every day, and always sits at home in the same place, isolating to not get sick, and working hard at home to pay the bills and feed the cats? Is it just fine and not DOXing to track and publish the location of people who don't move around all the time, after a 24 hour time lag? Sounds like this 24 hour rule is specifically designed to protect Musk himself, and only incidentally anyone else who happens to own a private plane.
  • andromeduck 4y ago
    The man literally posted a video of a guy in a car with his license plate and asked his followers to identify them. It's bad faith through and through. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969