5 ms·

A journalist has his account on X suspended after writing critique of platform

71 points by stanislavb 3y ago

stanislavb 3y ago
"The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said" I.e. be careful of criticising Musk, the king of FREE speech, if you wish to use X/Twitter. p.s. in the meantime, you will be OK with posting hate speech, Nazi speech, porn, etc...
- o11c 3y ago
  On the bright side, Elon Musk is very effective at promoting alternative platforms. The people follow the content, after all.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  The corporate press is brought to you by pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors, neither of whom market to consumers. You can't write yourself a prescription nor buy an F-35. These companies advertise to ensure unfavorable coverage is immediately killed. If you keep the "mainstream" media on your payroll, then you can easily dismiss one or two independent news reports as fringe or conspiracy-riddled.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > corporate press is brought to you by pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors What press are you reading and in which decade? If you pay for your news, you’re likely getting it from a provider that makes most of its money from subscriptions. > companies advertise to ensure unfavorable coverage is immediately killed Again, what news are you paying for and reading? The Times and Journal and Bloomberg are relentlessly critical, in my opinion to a fault, of the American military, defence contractors and pharmaceutical industry.
- adamredwoods 3y ago
  He allows a madman who in the past terrorized dead children's parents, but draws the line at proficient journalism by NPR. There's no free speech on X/Twitter, it's a platform dictatorship.
  - andrewinardeer 3y ago
    What online platform subject to American law doesn't remove user submitted content if it falls outside their ToS? There's no "free speech" on any legal website. Try posting a cat picture to this website. Is dang the platform dictator in this case?
  - threatofrain 3y ago
    Elon draws the line at referencing other social media platforms — Paul Graham had his account suspended for this, all awhile live updating the rules. Another time Elon joined a live chat with other reporters. He didn't like their tones and he immediately had the entire feature suspended mid-chat. This is the same guy who thinks it's fair play to accuse emergency rescue workers of pedophilia when he feels insulted.
- _kbh_ 3y ago
  [dead]
- o23jro23 3y ago
  There's a fundamental paradox at the heart of free speech and in the concept of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant, everything goes to crap. So how can Twitter tolerate this "journalist" who says negative things about it? Elon is protecting his delicate little antisemitic sheep from this big mean lie-teller. What a hero.
skymast 3y ago
[dead]
boomboomsubban 3y ago
The alleged article https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41328670.html https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-4132... https://archive.is/Vs0jy https://archive.is/Vs0jy I feel like your average twitter user tweets more scathing criticism of twitter on a regular basis, so there might be more too this.
- jjackson5324 3y ago
  [flagged]
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
There might be a case for countries with a tradition of a free press banning their leaders and agencies from posting on Twitter/X.
xenadu02 3y ago
I don't know about this case specifically but X has certainly not lived up to Elon's free speech claims. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise - people with big egos often have thin skin and can't live up to their supposed principles when it affects them in some way. Actually a lot of people have trouble living up to their principles when it affects them. Human nature I guess.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Human nature I guess Sorry, plenty of people and companies live up to their principles. Including many of Musk’s. Free speech was simply never a value of his, and that’s pretty clear if you observe how he’s hired and fired.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    Everyone billionaire needs to control a media outlet to protect themselves and project their ideology. It was never about free speech
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Everyone billionaire needs to control a media outlet to protect themselves and project their ideology Most billionaires who owned newspapers did so as patrons. They were fiercely defensive of the press, e.g. Kay Graham, or left things alone, e.g. Bezos. This independence is historically what separated journalism from tabloids.
      - tsunamifury 3y ago
        I worked in journalism for a decade. Owning publications allowed them to catch and kill, publish their own opinions and defend their strategic positions in ways people never noticed. Larry Page literally attempted to block his name from Google News. It was not at all like you think.
        3y ago
lreeves 3y ago
"I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means". - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?lang...
Veuxdo 3y ago
> O’Reilly said if he did not get his account back it would be “personally, quite annoying but professionally quite depressing” as Twitter was his route into his current profession as a journalist and author. He used it as a “shop front” in ways, he said. I do feel bad for everyone who was using Twitter professionally like this. That said, everyone is now on notice that they can't be dependent on a single platform (or even two or three) regardless of how well it is going. Here today, gone tomorrow.
- ijustlovemath 3y ago
  I hope that the outcome of all of this is that regular working professionals start asking for, and advocating, open source products and community led protocols, and for all the major networks to interoperate. The tech pessimist in me says that won't happen, in some ways due to how openness kicked off this whole AI arms races (commoncrawl is the source of OpenAIs dataset, which got most of its corpus in the early days from Reddit), and now people are locking down their platforms to secure their own data fiefdoms to feed their AIs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
labrador 3y ago
Free speech for Vladimir Putin and censorship for Séamas O’Reilly is all you need to know about Elon Musk's intentions. I get those who support Musk, as I do in some part, but please let's cut the b.s. that he's a noble fighter for free speech and liberty for all.
aik 3y ago
Not entirely sure I believe everything here. Curious how it plays out. Lot of narrative-affirming content. “In the Examiner article, O’Reilly made reference to a “scam bot [that] had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out”. Is the argument here that someone is creating an army of paid accounts and spamming with them? And this is a major source of bots? Is this actually happening? I think that is probably unlikely given how expensive it would be?
- orwin 3y ago
  Doesn't Twitter use localized payment? So it would be extremely cheap if you localize your account in Zimbabwe or something. If it doesn't, I guess that explains why the last time I went on,twitter seemed even more American than before.
richardatlarge 3y ago
Twitter must be free of your speech
stanislavb 3y ago
Does anyone know why this was flagged?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  HN posts are generally flagged by users clicking flag. Posts which make Naughty Old Mr Car look silly are almost always rapidly flagged; the Muskovites are very protective of the inventor of free speech.
aftbit 3y ago
Twitter is the free-speech wing of the free-speech party alright.
threatofrain 3y ago
On free speech Elon draws the line at the mere reference of other Twitter competitors like Mastodon. Paul Graham was suspended for such behavior.
renegat0x0 3y ago
I think that we should not judge by what one says. I think that we should judge actions more closely.
rsynnott 3y ago
Some context on the author, who's probably Ireland's foremost Twitter celebrity (in the sense of being famous due to stuff done on Twitter, not a famous person who is on Twitter): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html tl;dr - accidentally ended up talking to the then-president while on ketamine. > So at this point I'm thinking, wellll, I'm definitely fired but this will one day make a great story on an Nazi-riddled microblogging platform. Six years later, the microblogging platform decided that it preferred the Nazis to the presidential ketamine stories :(

71 points by stanislavb 3y ago

"The author’s account had over 100,000 followers and was around 14 years old, he said" I.e. be careful of criticising Musk, the king of FREE speech, if you wish to use X/Twitter. p.s. in the meantime, you will be OK with posting hate speech, Nazi speech, porn, etc...

o11c 3y ago
On the bright side, Elon Musk is very effective at promoting alternative platforms. The people follow the content, after all.
infamouscow 3y ago
The corporate press is brought to you by pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors, neither of whom market to consumers. You can't write yourself a prescription nor buy an F-35. These companies advertise to ensure unfavorable coverage is immediately killed. If you keep the "mainstream" media on your payroll, then you can easily dismiss one or two independent news reports as fringe or conspiracy-riddled.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > corporate press is brought to you by pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors What press are you reading and in which decade? If you pay for your news, you’re likely getting it from a provider that makes most of its money from subscriptions. > companies advertise to ensure unfavorable coverage is immediately killed Again, what news are you paying for and reading? The Times and Journal and Bloomberg are relentlessly critical, in my opinion to a fault, of the American military, defence contractors and pharmaceutical industry.
adamredwoods 3y ago
He allows a madman who in the past terrorized dead children's parents, but draws the line at proficient journalism by NPR. There's no free speech on X/Twitter, it's a platform dictatorship.
- andrewinardeer 3y ago
  What online platform subject to American law doesn't remove user submitted content if it falls outside their ToS? There's no "free speech" on any legal website. Try posting a cat picture to this website. Is dang the platform dictator in this case?
- threatofrain 3y ago
  Elon draws the line at referencing other social media platforms — Paul Graham had his account suspended for this, all awhile live updating the rules. Another time Elon joined a live chat with other reporters. He didn't like their tones and he immediately had the entire feature suspended mid-chat. This is the same guy who thinks it's fair play to accuse emergency rescue workers of pedophilia when he feels insulted.
_kbh_ 3y ago
[dead]
o23jro23 3y ago
There's a fundamental paradox at the heart of free speech and in the concept of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant, everything goes to crap. So how can Twitter tolerate this "journalist" who says negative things about it? Elon is protecting his delicate little antisemitic sheep from this big mean lie-teller. What a hero.

skymast 3y ago

[dead]

boomboomsubban 3y ago

The alleged article https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41328670.html https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-4132... https://archive.is/Vs0jy https://archive.is/Vs0jy I feel like your average twitter user tweets more scathing criticism of twitter on a regular basis, so there might be more too this.

jjackson5324 3y ago
[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

There might be a case for countries with a tradition of a free press banning their leaders and agencies from posting on Twitter/X.

xenadu02 3y ago

I don't know about this case specifically but X has certainly not lived up to Elon's free speech claims. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise - people with big egos often have thin skin and can't live up to their supposed principles when it affects them in some way. Actually a lot of people have trouble living up to their principles when it affects them. Human nature I guess.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Human nature I guess Sorry, plenty of people and companies live up to their principles. Including many of Musk’s. Free speech was simply never a value of his, and that’s pretty clear if you observe how he’s hired and fired.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Everyone billionaire needs to control a media outlet to protect themselves and project their ideology. It was never about free speech
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Everyone billionaire needs to control a media outlet to protect themselves and project their ideology Most billionaires who owned newspapers did so as patrons. They were fiercely defensive of the press, e.g. Kay Graham, or left things alone, e.g. Bezos. This independence is historically what separated journalism from tabloids.
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      I worked in journalism for a decade. Owning publications allowed them to catch and kill, publish their own opinions and defend their strategic positions in ways people never noticed. Larry Page literally attempted to block his name from Google News. It was not at all like you think.
      - 3y ago

lreeves 3y ago

"I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means". - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?lang...

Veuxdo 3y ago

> O’Reilly said if he did not get his account back it would be “personally, quite annoying but professionally quite depressing” as Twitter was his route into his current profession as a journalist and author. He used it as a “shop front” in ways, he said. I do feel bad for everyone who was using Twitter professionally like this. That said, everyone is now on notice that they can't be dependent on a single platform (or even two or three) regardless of how well it is going. Here today, gone tomorrow.

ijustlovemath 3y ago
I hope that the outcome of all of this is that regular working professionals start asking for, and advocating, open source products and community led protocols, and for all the major networks to interoperate. The tech pessimist in me says that won't happen, in some ways due to how openness kicked off this whole AI arms races (commoncrawl is the source of OpenAIs dataset, which got most of its corpus in the early days from Reddit), and now people are locking down their platforms to secure their own data fiefdoms to feed their AIs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

labrador 3y ago

Free speech for Vladimir Putin and censorship for Séamas O’Reilly is all you need to know about Elon Musk's intentions. I get those who support Musk, as I do in some part, but please let's cut the b.s. that he's a noble fighter for free speech and liberty for all.

aik 3y ago

Not entirely sure I believe everything here. Curious how it plays out. Lot of narrative-affirming content. “In the Examiner article, O’Reilly made reference to a “scam bot [that] had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out”. Is the argument here that someone is creating an army of paid accounts and spamming with them? And this is a major source of bots? Is this actually happening? I think that is probably unlikely given how expensive it would be?

orwin 3y ago
Doesn't Twitter use localized payment? So it would be extremely cheap if you localize your account in Zimbabwe or something. If it doesn't, I guess that explains why the last time I went on,twitter seemed even more American than before.

richardatlarge 3y ago

Twitter must be free of your speech

stanislavb 3y ago

Does anyone know why this was flagged?

rsynnott 3y ago
HN posts are generally flagged by users clicking flag. Posts which make Naughty Old Mr Car look silly are almost always rapidly flagged; the Muskovites are very protective of the inventor of free speech.

aftbit 3y ago

Twitter is the free-speech wing of the free-speech party alright.

threatofrain 3y ago

On free speech Elon draws the line at the mere reference of other Twitter competitors like Mastodon. Paul Graham was suspended for such behavior.

renegat0x0 3y ago

I think that we should not judge by what one says. I think that we should judge actions more closely.

rsynnott 3y ago

Some context on the author, who's probably Ireland's foremost Twitter celebrity (in the sense of being famous due to stuff done on Twitter, not a famous person who is on Twitter): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/992006545473966082.html tl;dr - accidentally ended up talking to the then-president while on ketamine. > So at this point I'm thinking, wellll, I'm definitely fired but this will one day make a great story on an Nazi-riddled microblogging platform. Six years later, the microblogging platform decided that it preferred the Nazis to the presidential ketamine stories :(