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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 ris

• bigiain 4y ago
  “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 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 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657
  • camjohnson26 4y ago
    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 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/1603612770892918784 https://twitter.com/ForeverEversley/status/16036127708929187...
    • Laaas 4y ago
      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.
      • roenxi 4y ago
        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.
        • alangibson 4y ago
          > 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.
          • roenxi 4y ago
            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/suspension https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio... [1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515?cxt=HHwWhoCg6ezv3rwsAAAA https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515?cxt...
    • Chinjut 4y ago
      Not only was the space removed, but in fact, the entire Spaces feature has been removed from Twitter.
      • jimkleiber 4y ago
        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.
        • the_duke 4y ago
          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.
          • jimkleiber 4y ago
            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.
    • mustacheemperor 4y ago
      Mastodon’s Twitter account has also been banned.
    • irdc 4y ago
      > 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?
  • seaal 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657 The same day the $54.20 buyout was announced.
  • wesapien 4y ago
    • BryantD 4y ago
      Given that journalists are not showing up everywhere he goes, I think your scenario isn’t relevant.
    • alangibson 4y ago
      It's been said many times, but I'll do it again: the information that started all this is already public and freely available. There's even a Supreme Court decision backing up its publication. Everyone is up in arms because he's gone from 'free speech absolutist' to 'free for me but not for thee' in about a month.
    • memish 4y ago
      They previously agreed, but of course that was when it was them and not someone they dislike. If it's someone they don't like, then fair game. "Doxxing, stalking, trying to hurt people's loved ones, threatening them, it's not OK in any situation. People on here who want to constantly stoke these politicized outrage campaigns want to dismiss it, but it shouldn't be dismissed. Has very real consequences." @taylorlorenz
      • tehwebguy 4y ago
        That’s right — all doxxing is always bad. There is no good or evil, except doxxing. I think it was Benjamin Washington Paine who famously said, “Sir, I may not agree with how you keep convincing your followers to call bomb threats into my hospitals + libraries & blow up my town’s electricity substations, simply because they don’t like someone else’s speech, but I will defend to the death your right to do so without anyone ever exposing your identity.”
• memish 4y ago
  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.
  • blitzar 4y ago
    So shaken that he (and his security team) forgot to file a police report.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
    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.
• ilyt 4y ago
  Even mastodon twatter account got banned with last tweet being about @elonjet having mastodon account https://web.archive.org/web/20221215173935/https://twitter.com/joinmastodon https://web.archive.org/web/20221215173935/https://twitter.c...
• elurg 4y ago
  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.
• eecc 4y ago
  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.
  • jrmg 4y ago
    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.
    • eecc 4y ago
      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.
• Dudelander 4y ago
  I think the take away here is that any "digital town square" should not be a privately owned for-profit corporation.
  • alar44 4y ago
    The internet is the town square. Twitter is a shitty bar on the square.