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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 o

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.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    Not seething. Just pointing out that we were right all along. The “free speech absolutists” never cared at all about free speech. They just want freedom from criticism. No one has argued he isn’t allowed to do these things. He’s free to trash Twitter as much as he wants. Just as we are free to laugh at the idiocy and the Musk defenders twist themselves in circles trying to justify his behavior.
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    I think it's less that Twitter doesn't have the right to do these thing (frankly I agree that in the specific case of ElonJet that it's reasonable to have a policy around that), and more that a lot of chaos that affected a lot of people had to happen in order for Musk to realize that it's not as simple as "just have free speech, bing bong so easy".
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Except Musk has selectively applied and prioritized whatever he deemed harmful to himself prior to anything else on top of having hamsters in his head run overdrive on how he still 'supports free speech'. It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.
- refurb 4y ago
  It's just bizarre that the same people complaining about this are the same people that said "Twitter is private and can ban whoever they want" and defended censorship. Then Elon turns around does the same thing and suddenly they flip and claim they were always "free speech proponents" all along. They should just be honest and admit it's all political. But anyways, this NH post is now at 1320 comments. It's like CNN's talking heads shouting at each other.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    HN is not one person. Unless you have examples of actual people flip-flopping freely between the two, your comment amounts to "Person A said this thing, it's weird that Person B said something different!".
    - refurb 4y ago
      Don’t gaslight. 90% of comment when Twitter was censoring before Musk were in support of it. Now 90% of comments in this thread are against it.
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        It's gaslighting to tell you that different people can comment on things? You know HN has hundreds of thousands of users, right?
        refurb 4y ago
        Unless tens of thousands of different people are commenting in each thread, my description is accurate for the vast majority.
        scrollaway 4y ago
        Then I'm sure it'll be easy for you to produce examples. Until then, this discussion is worthless.
      - 4y ago
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  The irony is that this is also the most transparent decisionmaking at Twitter has ever been. It's a live public view of the negotiation with a userbase over the future of the platform. The release of the previous management's internal communications showed the liberal and comfortable application of euphemism, justification after the fact, and technical deniability in upper leadership. Twitter showing outage not over evidence that the culture of banning and de-amplifying both users and public interest topics without agency or notification, condemning by decision of a secret, unauditable council under influence of the federal government and corporations, and doing so under the tack of keeping their CEO in the dark shows how carefully calculated their appearance was. Remember, they lost their canary. I don't think Elon Musk is much if any better. I also can't say that Twitter is any worse. Speech was being chilled and controlled before, and unless your definition of "free speech" is "being free from what offends me or is counter to my opinions and beliefs", it's more likely the hypocrisy you worry about is nothing more than actually being able to draw a line between an action and its cause and a target you can confidently level a finger at. People will adjust as they ever have. However, the ones who interact now will be the influencers of what Twitter becomes. That is what matters, not any confused and petty logic that our leaders should all be infallible and godlike.
  - 8note 4y ago
    It's not really transparent decision making. 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
postingawayonhn 4y ago
> What is everyone up in arms for? This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants. They're just sick and tired of the billionaire hypocrite.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  What is the significance of the word “billionaire” in that sentence? Is it worse to be a hypocrite if you’re a billionaire? Do you think it’s unethical to be a billionaire?
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Yes. Billionaires have a disproportionate amount of power in our world and their bad behavior and beliefs leads to greater harm than similar behavior and beliefs by people who do not have as much power.
    - randomsearch 4y ago
      Genuinely curious and open, not sure why downvote. So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree. Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold? If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        > So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial. > Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical. I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.
slg 4y ago
> Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Yes, this is exactly the problem but in the opposite direction you are implying. Musk believed that Twitter blocking the sharing of an article about ToS breaking behavior was worthy of the “Twitter Files” when the story was bad for his political opponent, but he thinks it is fine when the story is bad for him. It shows that he has no actual principled beliefs. He simply is acting in his own best interest. Odds are people would be more willing to accept Elon’s rules if Elons’s rules weren’t a constantly moving target of whatever benefits him the most at this exact moment.
- arlcode 4y ago
  In other words it strongly implies that the shifting current moods of individual high profile people are not a good way to sort out the rules of public discourse. It's perfectly legal under the current rules as they apply to Twitter (in the United States) but one has to wonder (now and before) if it is advisable to keep them as such. That is the public discussion societies around the world will have. Elon Musk highlighted this issue by falsely and strongly claiming impartiality
  - mcv 4y ago
    Elon is showing exactly why we moved from absolute monarchs to constitutional systems with rule of law. He's running twitter as an absolute monarch, making up new rules to suit his whims, while he is above those rules. And I think this also shows why corporate capitalism is inherently at odds with democracy: every corporation is effectively a dictatorship, their internal economy a plan economy, its rules at the whim of the CEO. And Elon is more eager than many CEOs to abuse this power. I wonder if it's going to lead to a revolution against corporations similar to the revolutions we got against monarchs.
bcrosby95 4y ago
By some internet commenters. Personally I found Twitters bans distasteful. Even if they could do it. I also find Musk's bans distasteful. Even if he can do it. Oh, and he's revealed himself to obviously be full of shit. As is anyone cheering him on in the name of free speech. But I guess principles only last until they get in the way of petty tribalism.
smt88 4y ago
> That is what everyone has been saying for years. You're making a false equivalence between the left and the right on this topic. The left has said that moderating online communities is legal because of the First Amendment. They're private companies. The right then called for an end to the First Amendment as we've known it by banning private companies from moderating their platforms. There has been no such call from the left. The left (and this thread) laments what Elon is doing, but no one is saying he's breaking a law or that he should be breaking a law. No one is calling for the government to step in.
elygre 4y ago
Is it now genetally agreed upon that Twitter was actually “colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment”, or is that still a hotly contested statement? (My understanding was that the Twitter files did on the end not contain such evidence, but information overload … I may have lost some consensus)
mschuster91 4y ago
> What is everyone up in arms for? This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants. Not exactly. At least here in Germany, there is established jurisprudence that Twitter and Facebook are public "town halls" for discussion and as such have to maintain some sort of freedom of speech, with the borders being set by German laws. That means that for example Holocaust denial, which is perfectly fine under US law, has to be regionally blocked for Germany, while some instances of what Twitter/FB consider to be "hate speech" under their rules still has to be made available. The general judicial consensus in Germany is that while platforms do have a requirement to moderate discourse (e.g. to remove libel and outright Nazi content), they also aren't allowed to moderate too strictly.
Herbstluft 4y ago
Musk is free to do what he wants. And everyone is just as free to criticize him for his behaviour. You are presenting these two things as if they were mutually exclusive. They are not.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Twitter is allowed to be run by jerks who ban people for any reason they want. The problem is that people like Musk have spent ages arguing that banning fascists is bad because free speech absolutism is an important value. It turns out that free speech absolutism was never actually a value they cared about - the only thing that matters is that their guy is the one choosing the bans. If people like Musk had instead argued that platforming fascists is actually good this whole time then the discussion today would be different, but because they didn't want to publicly support fascists they had to fall back on the free speech absolutism argument, which has shattered into a million pieces.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Makes you wonder: for what reason did they actually care about banning fascists, if not for philosophical free speech reasons?
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    It seems plainly obvious that Musk was radicalized into a far-right conservative by the one-two punch of transphobia (his kid came out as trans, Grimes left him for a trans woman, and he'd always been somewhat transphobic) and lost profits due to COVID policy. This put him in alignment with the most radical wing of social media - the anti-COVID measures and anti-trans community. Combine this with a general support of conservative fiscal policy as a wealthy business-owner and the libertarian ideals of a gen-X nerd who came of age during "information wants to be free" and obviously suffering from a compulsive social media addiction (pot calling kettle black here), and it's no surprise he's completely bought into "free speech conservatism", where slander and hatred are placed on even footing with legitimate political argument.
finnthehuman 4y ago
> What is everyone up in arms for? 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.

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.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  Not seething. Just pointing out that we were right all along. The “free speech absolutists” never cared at all about free speech. They just want freedom from criticism. No one has argued he isn’t allowed to do these things. He’s free to trash Twitter as much as he wants. Just as we are free to laugh at the idiocy and the Musk defenders twist themselves in circles trying to justify his behavior.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  I think it's less that Twitter doesn't have the right to do these thing (frankly I agree that in the specific case of ElonJet that it's reasonable to have a policy around that), and more that a lot of chaos that affected a lot of people had to happen in order for Musk to realize that it's not as simple as "just have free speech, bing bong so easy".
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Except Musk has selectively applied and prioritized whatever he deemed harmful to himself prior to anything else on top of having hamsters in his head run overdrive on how he still 'supports free speech'. It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.
refurb 4y ago
It's just bizarre that the same people complaining about this are the same people that said "Twitter is private and can ban whoever they want" and defended censorship. Then Elon turns around does the same thing and suddenly they flip and claim they were always "free speech proponents" all along. They should just be honest and admit it's all political. But anyways, this NH post is now at 1320 comments. It's like CNN's talking heads shouting at each other.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  HN is not one person. Unless you have examples of actual people flip-flopping freely between the two, your comment amounts to "Person A said this thing, it's weird that Person B said something different!".
  - refurb 4y ago
    Don’t gaslight. 90% of comment when Twitter was censoring before Musk were in support of it. Now 90% of comments in this thread are against it.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      It's gaslighting to tell you that different people can comment on things? You know HN has hundreds of thousands of users, right?
      - refurb 4y ago
        Unless tens of thousands of different people are commenting in each thread, my description is accurate for the vast majority.
        scrollaway 4y ago
        Then I'm sure it'll be easy for you to produce examples. Until then, this discussion is worthless.
    - 4y ago
washadjeffmad 4y ago
The irony is that this is also the most transparent decisionmaking at Twitter has ever been. It's a live public view of the negotiation with a userbase over the future of the platform. The release of the previous management's internal communications showed the liberal and comfortable application of euphemism, justification after the fact, and technical deniability in upper leadership. Twitter showing outage not over evidence that the culture of banning and de-amplifying both users and public interest topics without agency or notification, condemning by decision of a secret, unauditable council under influence of the federal government and corporations, and doing so under the tack of keeping their CEO in the dark shows how carefully calculated their appearance was. Remember, they lost their canary. I don't think Elon Musk is much if any better. I also can't say that Twitter is any worse. Speech was being chilled and controlled before, and unless your definition of "free speech" is "being free from what offends me or is counter to my opinions and beliefs", it's more likely the hypocrisy you worry about is nothing more than actually being able to draw a line between an action and its cause and a target you can confidently level a finger at. People will adjust as they ever have. However, the ones who interact now will be the influencers of what Twitter becomes. That is what matters, not any confused and petty logic that our leaders should all be infallible and godlike.
- 8note 4y ago
  It's not really transparent decision making. 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

postingawayonhn 4y ago

> What is everyone up in arms for? This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants. They're just sick and tired of the billionaire hypocrite.

randomsearch 4y ago
What is the significance of the word “billionaire” in that sentence? Is it worse to be a hypocrite if you’re a billionaire? Do you think it’s unethical to be a billionaire?
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Yes. Billionaires have a disproportionate amount of power in our world and their bad behavior and beliefs leads to greater harm than similar behavior and beliefs by people who do not have as much power.
  - randomsearch 4y ago
    Genuinely curious and open, not sure why downvote. So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree. Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold? If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      > So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial. > Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical. I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.

slg 4y ago

> Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Yes, this is exactly the problem but in the opposite direction you are implying. Musk believed that Twitter blocking the sharing of an article about ToS breaking behavior was worthy of the “Twitter Files” when the story was bad for his political opponent, but he thinks it is fine when the story is bad for him. It shows that he has no actual principled beliefs. He simply is acting in his own best interest. Odds are people would be more willing to accept Elon’s rules if Elons’s rules weren’t a constantly moving target of whatever benefits him the most at this exact moment.

arlcode 4y ago
In other words it strongly implies that the shifting current moods of individual high profile people are not a good way to sort out the rules of public discourse. It's perfectly legal under the current rules as they apply to Twitter (in the United States) but one has to wonder (now and before) if it is advisable to keep them as such. That is the public discussion societies around the world will have. Elon Musk highlighted this issue by falsely and strongly claiming impartiality
- mcv 4y ago
  Elon is showing exactly why we moved from absolute monarchs to constitutional systems with rule of law. He's running twitter as an absolute monarch, making up new rules to suit his whims, while he is above those rules. And I think this also shows why corporate capitalism is inherently at odds with democracy: every corporation is effectively a dictatorship, their internal economy a plan economy, its rules at the whim of the CEO. And Elon is more eager than many CEOs to abuse this power. I wonder if it's going to lead to a revolution against corporations similar to the revolutions we got against monarchs.

bcrosby95 4y ago

By some internet commenters. Personally I found Twitters bans distasteful. Even if they could do it. I also find Musk's bans distasteful. Even if he can do it. Oh, and he's revealed himself to obviously be full of shit. As is anyone cheering him on in the name of free speech. But I guess principles only last until they get in the way of petty tribalism.

smt88 4y ago

> That is what everyone has been saying for years. You're making a false equivalence between the left and the right on this topic. The left has said that moderating online communities is legal because of the First Amendment. They're private companies. The right then called for an end to the First Amendment as we've known it by banning private companies from moderating their platforms. There has been no such call from the left. The left (and this thread) laments what Elon is doing, but no one is saying he's breaking a law or that he should be breaking a law. No one is calling for the government to step in.

elygre 4y ago

Is it now genetally agreed upon that Twitter was actually “colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment”, or is that still a hotly contested statement? (My understanding was that the Twitter files did on the end not contain such evidence, but information overload … I may have lost some consensus)

mschuster91 4y ago

> What is everyone up in arms for? This is a private company, so he can do whatever he wants. Not exactly. At least here in Germany, there is established jurisprudence that Twitter and Facebook are public "town halls" for discussion and as such have to maintain some sort of freedom of speech, with the borders being set by German laws. That means that for example Holocaust denial, which is perfectly fine under US law, has to be regionally blocked for Germany, while some instances of what Twitter/FB consider to be "hate speech" under their rules still has to be made available. The general judicial consensus in Germany is that while platforms do have a requirement to moderate discourse (e.g. to remove libel and outright Nazi content), they also aren't allowed to moderate too strictly.

Herbstluft 4y ago

Musk is free to do what he wants. And everyone is just as free to criticize him for his behaviour. You are presenting these two things as if they were mutually exclusive. They are not.

UncleMeat 4y ago

Twitter is allowed to be run by jerks who ban people for any reason they want. The problem is that people like Musk have spent ages arguing that banning fascists is bad because free speech absolutism is an important value. It turns out that free speech absolutism was never actually a value they cared about - the only thing that matters is that their guy is the one choosing the bans. If people like Musk had instead argued that platforming fascists is actually good this whole time then the discussion today would be different, but because they didn't want to publicly support fascists they had to fall back on the free speech absolutism argument, which has shattered into a million pieces.

ModernMech 4y ago
Makes you wonder: for what reason did they actually care about banning fascists, if not for philosophical free speech reasons?
- Pxtl 4y ago
  It seems plainly obvious that Musk was radicalized into a far-right conservative by the one-two punch of transphobia (his kid came out as trans, Grimes left him for a trans woman, and he'd always been somewhat transphobic) and lost profits due to COVID policy. This put him in alignment with the most radical wing of social media - the anti-COVID measures and anti-trans community. Combine this with a general support of conservative fiscal policy as a wealthy business-owner and the libertarian ideals of a gen-X nerd who came of age during "information wants to be free" and obviously suffering from a compulsive social media addiction (pot calling kettle black here), and it's no surprise he's completely bought into "free speech conservatism", where slander and hatred are placed on even footing with legitimate political argument.

finnthehuman 4y ago

> What is everyone up in arms for? 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.