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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29266 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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So, how's that whole Elon free speech Twitter thing going? Turns out, not great. An article from Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has the details. Basically, back in November, shortly after Elon finished buying Twitter, he noted his belief in free speech was so strong it extended even to leaving up the Twitter account @elonjet. For those who don't know the @elonjet Twitter account used publicly available data to Tweet whenever Elon's private plane flew somewhere. Elon tweeted:

My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

The man behind the account, Jack Sweeney, also operated a bunch of other plane tracker accounts for other billionaires (including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and various Russian oligarchs). As of today it seems the @elonjet Twitter account, along with all the other plane trackers and even Sweeney's personal account, have been suspended. Apparently this suspension is pursuant to a new Twitter rule about sharing personal information:

Under this policy, you can’t share the following types of private information, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:

...

live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;

It took a whole month for Elon to craft a policy to ban the account he specifically said he wouldn't ban due to his commitment to free speech. So much for the idea that the limits of Twitter moderation would be anything like "only illegal speech." It also seems (according to the TechDirt article, and I tried this myself) that you can't even tweet links to @elonjet accounts on other platforms (like Facebook or Instagram). Amusingly Elon's original tweet from November now has a Community Note on it noting what the account that was being mentioned in the tweet was and the fact that it's banned.

Twitter files dump about the internal deliberations on how this policy change and these bans came about when?

ETA:

Seems @elonjet was unsuspended. Apparently the new policy requires "slight" (no word on how long that is) delay before posting info. Although, at the time of this edit the account appears to be suspended again. Link.

ETA2:

Elon now claiming that legal action is being taken against Sweeney. Would love to hear what legal action he's alledgedly taking.

Further updates from the digit town square: a number of journalists have been banned from twitter for unclear reasons (the article implies for critizing Musk, but as far as I can tell there's no confirmed reason).

People were saying from that start that Musk has thin skin, and that this is how it will likely end, so it wouldn't surprise me. On the other hand journalists, on the whole, aren't very credible, and they knives are out for Musk, so I'd take it with a grain of salt.

There is probably more to this story than being reported by the media. Likely an escalation of the situation.

I sort of vaguely was aware of this story but my initial read was skepticism because it seemed just way too blatant. In case anyone is curious about my thought process, I wondered whether Sweeney either took down his own account, or intentionally got his account suspended some other way (the publicity motive seemed plausible to me). But it does appear to be true that Twitter indeed updated their terms of service specifically to prohibit sharing live location information. I find all this confusing because Musk's tweet about his commitment to not banning Sweeney's account still hasn't been deleted. I can understand Musk being annoyed at Sweeney's account, but this seems like a needlessly pointless way to burn credibility, and just weird and erratic behavior from Musk. He's the face of a $44 billion company, what exactly is the end game here? One last thing that remains curious to me is why would facebook and instagram also prevent people from sharing the elonjet account? It doesn't make sense that they would want to carry water for Musk, so I wonder if something else is going on.

When Musk first took over Twitter, this was my prediction:

Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies

I didn't expect a speedrun

My guess is that initially (in the heady days when he was going to buy Twitter and "save" it) Musk was willing to bite the bullet and say "Yeah, even the asshole who's electronically stalking me, I'll prove my commitment to my principles by not banning him."

What probably happened was not so much that Musk suddenly did a 180 and decided to ban the guy who was an irritant to him personally, but once he dug into how Twitter moderation did (and didn't work), and also talked to lawyers, he had to start revising his ideas of what should and shouldn't be allowed. And if you can track a billionaire's travel itinerary and current location, why can't you do that to anyone you don't happen to like?

Whether he came down on the right side of "free speech," I don't know, and it will depend a lot on how evenly this rule gets enforced.

If you want to get really paranoid, this policy is a big hit to OSINT accounts and comes on the heels of a kerfluffle about UA accounts not being able to get verified.

It seems like some people harassed the car with one of his children in it, and this sort of behaviour is enabled by tweeting live positions. This doesn't seem egregious honestly.

A real shame that techdirt succumbed to TDS so hard, before 2016 it was an excellent tech website.

Oh honey, techdirt was embarrassing itself by constantly lying about tech/intelligence/surveillance law long before 2016.

Oh honey

Don't insert patronizing digs like this.

Ars Technica too. They really went out of their way to shoe horn "Orange Man Bad" into as many articles, ostensibly about tech, as they could. Then a long time, pretty open pedophile, and downright toxic personality they hired was arrested by the FBI and they never, ever reckoned with it.

I wish I were exaggerating about that too. But this was a guy who regularly got into heated arguments on their forum about how he wanted to get rid of age of consent laws. Then they made him a moderator of said forum?! Eventually he got promoted to staff writer, and honestly did a pretty OK job at breaking down difficult technical details. But his habit of belittling and insulting people in the article comments who pointed out details he got wrong never stopped. Then eventually he got nabbed by the FBI to the surprise of literally no one who had been paying attention to how psychotic the man was.

I'm still waiting for the skeletons in Ben Kuchera's closet to finally burst forth. Dude is way too unhinged not to have them.

That's such a shock to me, Ars Technica and/or TechDirt and/or TechCrunch (I don't remember which site had the "from the X dept" thing on every article) seem like good sites for reporting news on digital rights and copyright stuff, and they seemed sane during the GamerGate years.

I don't remember which site had the "from the X dept" thing on every article

I think that might've been Slashdot.

Stokes' substack is pretty decent at least. His gun stuff on Ars felt a bit out scope at the time but now OpenSourceDefense handles that bit with better branding and writing. Aurich has much more personality on his Twitter than what I remember from when they occasionally lend him a typewriter and he came off as a weird shy art guy. There was a culture change even before 2016 with the Conde Nast buyout and they started going more broader culture related to tech then as detail focused as before. That might be colored by memory of them requiring accounts to comment killing off the anonymous coward option I preferred from /.

It was super sad. Anandtech went down the tubes once he sold, so I moved to Ars. I only got a couple of years out of it before they went insane.

I don't go to tech websites much - can someone explain how politics ever really intersects with what these websites report on? Don't they just, like, do benchmarks on GPUs and review new tech products? How is it that we even know what these websites' writers and editors think about politics?

Think of topics like "how AI algorithms discriminate against underrepresented minorities", "why do tech companies hire so few black people", "here's the latest outrageous thing Trump/Musk said on Twitter", "Amazon suppresses worker organization at its warehouses", "which tech giant has the greenest commitments and initiatives", "sexist gamers are review-bombing the latest AAA video game because the protagonist is a woman", etc etc.

But also, while less frequent, stuff like "lobbyists are trying to make copyright even worse" and "politicians are trying to dial up surveillance in the name of protecting the kids" does show up.

This reads like “boo out group.” Publishing personal location details was always an edge case re free speech. Suggesting this ban proves free speech isn’t going well at Twitter ignores whether there is more free speech before or after / how much of a change.

But instead it seems like your goal was to be able to post something negative about Musk.

Signal-boosting existing publically available information was never an edge case re. free speech. It is an edge case viz-a-viz internet etiquette, where signal-boosting contact information will often lead to someone getting unpleasant e-mails from ikilluufaggot @momsbasement.4chan.com and suchlike. But the reasons for that rule don't apply to public figures at Musk's level who have staff to handle incoming communications on publically-available channels. In any case, Elon Musk's stated position going in was that moderation wouldn't be used to enforce rules of etiquette like "don't be a shit-tier racist troll"

You can argue that the FAA shouldn't publish the movements of private aeroplanes (although even then the location of a large object with a registration number painted on it is still publically available - it just takes some shoe-leather journalism to get to). But Musk hasn't even tried to do that.

Signal boosting is a form of doxxing. Doxxing seems beyond etiquette. Doxxing often is used as a means to silence opposition.

One could argue that so is making “racist” claims. After all group X can become discouraged as a result of Argument Y. The difference is there could be some truth value in Argument Y. It is really hard to imagine how knowing the location of Elon Musk provides any meaningful truth value.

Amusingly, Bud Fox impressing Gordon Gecko by guessing which of multiple possible deals is more likely to happen by tracking executive jets is the turning point of the original Wall Street movie.

I haven't followed this story at all, so please enlighten me if you know the answers. But I'm wondering, how much do we know that Musk himself had anything to do with the ban of the account? Twitter is a big company, and I'm sure there are subsystems upon subsystems stretching down many managers in depth. CEOs have thousands of issues that need their attention at any time, I'm sure things like bans typically are beneath a CEOs attention. Even if they want it to be in their attention, it can be hard to have full visibility of all teams that are 9 to 12 managers-deep beneath you.

Even if Musk was involved in this ban, is it possible his hands were tied? It's up to a CEO to set direction, so Musk came out guns blazing with his free speech direction a few months ago. But not everything that's shot for in a lofty north star can be achieved, or can be achieved easily. Are there laws or regulations or entrenched Twitter policies that make it a really bad decision for them to not ban this account?

In short, I feel like both Musk supporters and naysayers seem to think like Elon is sitting behind his computer, writing the code up himself, and that the code and policies within the company are each a maximum of 1000 lines long. In reality, companies and code are really really complicated. More than you can imagine if you haven't worked for a large company that develops mass customer-facing distributed systems.

s. But I'm wondering, how much do we know that Musk himself had anything to do with the ban of the account?

He has known about this account for a long time. This has been a thorn at his side for awhile. ElonJet has been in the news many times, and Elon himself offered to buy the account to take it offline.

This being done without Elon's direction or consent is highly improbable. First, we know Elon publicly said he will not ban the account because he believes in free speech. Second, we know Elon has an iron grip on his company, with him laying off a significant chunk of employees, and off-the-cuff public firings with tweets. It's clear he can make unorthodox decisions fast, regardless of company processes, with the in-person print-out code-reviews, and the "I'm hardcore" email, and so on. So it's extremely unlikely some random employee or twitter staffer will go against Elon's wishes to ban the person he specifically said won't be banned, and even if they did, and Elon didn't like it, Elon would be on Twitter firing everyone involved and reinstating @elonjet as we speak.

I disagree. Elon can try to have an iron grip on his company, but once again, companies are huge. So much information can get lost in the shuffle, from him to individual teams, or from teams actions to him. They very well might not know every individual thing he's said or promised, and he absolutely cannot not know, and probably doesn't care to follow every single ban they do. It'd be impossible for him to have that visibility and still have time to run the company. In-person print-out code reviews are probably nothing like this, because it probably was process that's cascaded down to teams. I don't believe for a second that Musk was actually successfully reviewing every code review himself, that would completely fail to scale.

This being done without Elon's direction or consent is highly improbable.

And even if it wasn't, the consensus in the non-MSM Twitter files discussion appears to be that Jack Dorsey was still culpable for moderation decisions that should have been escalated to him but weren't.

As free speech goes, publishing and tracking location of a specific person seems to be towards the low end of the value spectrum. That said, if he promised not to ban it and then banned it, it certainly sounds like hypocrisy, unless something happened that changed his mind (like somebody used this data to personally attack him?)

I wonder though if it comes all from public data what's the point of banning it on twitter and not at the source? Sounds like useless vindictive move, which is bad form. But if the choice is between banning a couple of especially obnoxious trolls and banning everybody not toeing the party line - I'd still take the former. It'd be better to avoid this, but I'm not sure it is possible - and surely it is hard - to practice it to perfection. I think as imperfections go, this is definitely one, but not a very concerning one, for me. More a gotcha point than a real danger to the public conversation.

(like somebody used this data to personally attack him?)

He tweeted something regarding a masked driver

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969

I dunno if this is related

Yeah I didn't know that when I wrote it, but now I know about that case and it definitely looks like something that could trigger a person. If somebody used some stupid twitter doxer service to attack my kid, I probably would be hugely pissed too, both at the attacker and at the service. It's not unprecedented for bad things to happen to rich/famous people's kids, even without political angle, and some antifa types have absolutely no limits nowdays, as it seems...

Even Elon Musk is a human - nobody holds their principles so highly that they won't discard them to safeguard their 2 year old child. To me, the real problem is the people who seem to think that they're exposing hypocrisy by trying to goad Elon into breaking his own rules. They're not.

I remember Trump's 2016 platform weirdly containing a plank about reforming American libel law to protect celebrities. Big world changing heroes have their own hobby horses. I'm sure Augustus did some things that were just personal opinions.

What does this have to do with big heroes? Prioritizing the safety of your 2 year old child over abstract principles is not an eccentricity - it is entirely normal, predictable human behavior.

nobody holds their principles so highly that they won't discard them to safeguard their 2 year old child.

I absolutely hold my principles that highly. For example, if someone told me "you have to murder this other child or I'll kill your child", I wouldn't do that even if that meant my own child died (though I sure as hell would try to kill the attacker before that happened). Sometimes you have to uphold your principles no matter the cost to yourself or others. To do otherwise means you didn't actually have principles.

Now, if you said "most people don't actually hold the principles they claim to hold", I would absolutely agree with you. But there do exist people who live by inviolable principles, even if most people don't.

If you mean that in principle, you shouldn't do that, I will not disagree with you.

If you mean that in practice, you wouldn't do that, I will not believe you.

I mean that in practice I wouldn't do that. Believe me or don't, it makes no difference to me.

then why write the comment claiming you would do it in the first place?

What? I said I wouldn't kill a child to save my child.

if you don't care if people believe you, why would you post the comment in the first place?

Because I wanted to weigh in on the discussion? What kind of question is that. There's no contradiction here: I wanted to participate in the discussion, and if someone calls me a liar I'm not going to allow that to bother me.

More comments

It's easy to say you'll hold to your principles over your child's safety when you're not actually in that position.

You murder this child or I kill 50 children.

Yeah no. Still wouldn't do that. There's a reason I'm not a utilitarian.

What if it was murder this child or all of humanity goes extinct? That's where my commitment to deontology gets stretched thin. Or I suppose anything approaching that.

Nah, I can't see myself doing that either. My morals aren't based on outcomes, some things are wrong no matter what good end may be achieved with them. If I killed one person to save billions, I'm still a murderer.

Do you actually have children?

Lol this is the question. I feel like I have a pretty consistent moral framework but there's no question that "your kid" scenarios are my corner-cases.

Yeah they're everyone's corner case, as they should be. Someone who isn't partial to their own children is typically considered a lowlife (i.e. deadbeat dad, druggie mom). When discussing politics, people can be awfully bold when it comes to distant hypotheticals, but it just makes me distrust what they're saying. I just don't believe someone who has real life children would say something like that and mean it.

Good for them, but I most certainly don't. When it comes to "your 2 year old child" or indeed any relatives its gloves off/mask off.

There are principles like "I won't do a viscerally horrifying thing like killing a child" and there are principles like "I won't stop people from distributing any sort of information on the platform I administrate".

And? Not all things are worthy of being a principle, I never said otherwise. But the poster I responded to didn't say "nobody holds the principle of letting people say what they want on Twitter so highly that...", they said "nobody holds their principles so highly that...". They made an absolute claim and I responded to that claim.

Was Elon defending doxers before this happened to him?

You tell me, I don't follow the twitter saga that closely.

I mostly skim it as well, to be honest.

Now that I think about it, I think I do remember Elon going "everything that is not forbidden by law should be allowed on Twitter", in some interview before the purchase was finalized. I think I'd put that in the "rookie mistake", rather then "violating principles" bag, but i suppose it's debatable.

Principles have to be weighed against one another. Otherwise you don't have principles, you have a principle.

I don't think it's so much an indictment of Elon as it is of the position of 'free speech absolutism'

Bringing the most powerful people in society slightly more in line with the level of safety the rest of us make do with? I'll bite that bullet.

This type of thing hits you harder the less powerful you are. Elon has already recovered from this; you or I never would.

How many real-time location trackers do "the rest of us" have to put up with? How many people would care about a twitter that posted updates like "John Doe has just left Rite-Aid at 1234 Main Street"?

Very few people of course, but then very few people have access to the kind of protection Musk has either.

Should we want the rich and powerful to have to cocoon themselves off from the general public?

No, but I don't think it's worth ceding ground on free speech to stop.

Most people denouncing "absolutism" do it with the same goal as the infamous Holmes' "fire in the theater" quote - to justify infringement of freedoms going far, far beyond the corner case example they are using to demonstrate the un-viability of absolutism. They are not attacking "100%" to preserve "99%" - they are attacking "100%" to get it as close to 0% as they can. Holmes used it to ban people from speaking against forcibly sending people to war. Would we agree with that? Would we say "if Elon Musk values his privacy that much, then banning criticizing the government is ok too!"? I hope not. Thus, fighting "absolutism" is useless - and in many cases, under this guise what actually happens is the fight to take your rights.

I'm not a big fan of him definitely not living up to his hype but I will say I'm mildly more comfortable with him running it than the type that were running it before purely on who/whom grounds. The main place that political topics are discussed in public being run by people who loudly hate you is a low, dull weight lifted off my back.

I'm mildly more comfortable with him running it than the type that were running it before purely on who/whom grounds

Note that the same conditions were true on 4chan back when moot was running the show; ultimately, he retained the power to ban people or topics merely on a whim and did so on many occasions. ("Say whatever you want, but don't create [personal] problems for the King" who/whom actually can work if the list/implications of things that create said problems is sufficiently small; the problem is keeping it that way.)

That fact didn't (and doesn't) stop 4chan from being the freest place on the Internet to speak to a general audience; most of the splinter groups his actions created from time to time didn't fundamentally cost the site that many users (in the same way we see woke Mastodon users returning to Twitter- user movements to and from 4chan are publicly illegible because everyone on chan sites uses the same username).

"When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended." - @TwitterSafety

This is every bit as dumb as those "hacked materials" rules that were used as a fig leaf for the Hunter Biden story. "An increased risk of physical harm," is this actually true? How many people have been hurt because someone saw their live location on twitter? Oh, I'm sure it's inconvenient to celebrities to have their location constantly reported on, but is this a non-negligible safety threat? Did anyone think about how many cool use-cases for Twitter a rule like this breaks? I'm sure SBF didn't consent to having his location in Bahamas court (and jail) shared live to the world, too fucking bad. Ooops, better not share that pic you took out in public for 24 hours. It might reveal someone's live location.

Twitter is done. It's over. I take no pleasure in reporting this. I had high hopes for ElonTwitter. There's no reason to trust that Twitter is committed to free and open news and discussion if basic elements of reality (the physical location of individual persons) are not allowed. It is especially concerning that this seems to be a direct reaction to Elon not liking how certain people were tweeting about him.

Ooops, better not share that pic you took out in public for 24 hours. It might reveal someone's live location.

It is clearly not going to be used to ban people posting recent photos, unless you happen to be a stalker. Stop it with these goofy histrionics.

Basic elements of reality also include your internet search history, your penis length, your medical history, your number of sexual partners and recordings of you sleeping. If I can’t see all of that The Internet Is Officially Over.

Twitter is done. It's over.

Allow me to take a page out of their playbook. No it's not, and even if it was that would be a good thing. It's a win/win/win scenario for me and mine. Journos get teh shaft, the woke loose a viable avenue for exerting pressure on corpos, and I get to hear the lamentations of xeir women.

You really need to contribute something other than low effort "BOO my outgroup!"

The OP is one big “Boo my outgroup.” The whole tone is smug on steroids.

This has never been an adequate justification to break the rules. You're not a newbie unless you're just borrowing the old zeke's username.

It isn’t a justification! But shouldn’t there be equal moderation of the OP?

No.

The OP is a post about how he thinks Elon Musk is a hypocrite, and Twitter sucks now. You can agree or disagree with his position, but your objection is typical of many complaints we see here (and in reports), the belief by a lot of people that "A post that criticizes my in-group and makes an argument I don't find convincing is by definition boo outgroup." If he posted something like "Of course Elon Musk, as a billionaire, does not believe in free speech - guillotines when?" - that would be modded.

@FistfullOfCrows' post was basically "I hate journos, I hate wokes" and contributed nothing else to the discussion.

Maybe it is tone policing but the way it was written was just “sneer.”

"Hacked materials" was invented not for Hunter Biden though - they instituted it after DNC emails revelations in 2016 (for which I think it's still not proven they were hacked and not leaked, but Twitter doesn't require proof as it turns out, it makes its own proofs). I am not sure though I can remember any instance of using it before Hunter Biden story.

I'm sure it's inconvenient to celebrities to have their location constantly reported on, but is this a non-negligible safety threat

I don't think it matters. I wouldn't like being publicly tracked over the internet, why Musk shouldn't be allowed the same? He's not a public official or some kind of special figure where it could be justified, he's just a a guy with a lot of money.

How many people have been hurt because someone saw their live location on twitter?

Elon Musk: Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.

Weird how all the reporting I've seen so far leaves out that tweet. Is it even true? Did the attacker us the ElonJet account? Who knows! Reporters seem content to just pretend it never happened instead.

Edit: Actually searching for the exact tweet text does show it getting some coverage within the last hour or two. CNET, Newsweek, The National.

Also "lil X" is his 2 year old. Which I actually hadn't known.

From the name I assumed it was a rapper.

In general, I don’t buy the “we should ban sharing true information because someone else might do something bad with it,” argument, but there are certain extreme cases where it may be valid. This is not one of them. Some guy getting on the hood of a car sounds a lot more like inconvenience than injury, even if it is scary. “Won’t somebody think of the children,” hits a lot harder when it’s your children, so it’s understandable why Elon might overreact, but it’s still a bad decision, and it shows that Elon’s principles cave hard and fast when they run up against something he personally cares about.

At what point would you consider it a credible threat? You seem to be setting the bar incredibly (and unfairly) high.

Uh, no. Someone getting on the hood of your car is not an inconvenience, it's a threat.

Maybe they have a good reason to come up to your window--it's a public sidewalk, after all. I'd consider it defensible, but not injurious, to block traffic. Getting on the car is worse than trying the goddamn handles. At least then you can floor it.

If someone is on your hood, you can either wait politely for them to leave, or you can apply potentially lethal force.

Cool, make the geotagged location of your children public.

Oh, you won't? What a hypocrite.

I'm being 100% facetious, but I hope it illustrates the, frankly, insane and bone chilling standard you are holding Elon too. I literally cannot fathom the relentless, unceasing anxiety I would suffer if my child's whereabouts were inexplicably public knowledge. Much less if I were the current target of the neo-liberal media machines two minutes hate.

I mean christ, I remember once upon a time one of Gawkers perceived crimes was their live crowd sourced tracking of celebrities. I have, or at least had, an old clip of Jimmy Kimmel chewing out a Gawker report for that, in a scene that appears to look like he's subbing in for Larry King for some reason? Oh hey, it's still on youtube.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2-avakrRUaU

Just curious, do you really think the attraction of the ElonJet account, and the embarrassment it caused, was primarily due to the invasion of privacy as to what city Elon is in? The nature of private aviation facilities means that Elon would have minimal or no public contact regardless, and anyway that problem would be obviated much more effectively by flying commercial (including renting a private jet a la NetJets) which would eliminate the information altogether not just the Twitter account.

And anyway, I've never tried because I don't care, but I'd imagine it's fairly easy to know (by city/airport) where Elon or a comparable celebrity is most days because there's at least one public facing event a lot of days. Would reporting on all pubic events a celebrity engages in run afoul of your theory? A TaySwiftTracker that told fans where her concerts/events were for the day?

The primary appeal of the account among people I know who initially told me how funny it is was "Ha, look how ridiculous this supposed green ecowarrior billionaire is, flying his private jet here, there, and everywhere, all the time! Sure seems like he burns more fossil fuels than my f150! He should shut the fuck up about climate change." Probably some would be Czolgosz out there is rooting for his assassination, or more likely some would be Lord Dawlish, but I'm not sure that's a realistically large portion of the fan base. How do we balance that?

Not that I begrudge you taking a side with your boy Elon on the internet, but I'm just curious how far you carry this principle.

The nature of private aviation facilities means that Elon would have minimal or no public contact regardless

I think you vastly overestimate the level of security available at the median and even higher-security jet-serving private aviation field. In addition to most runways being state-owned with private FBOs that are open to the public, the nature of the fields themselves make anything more than preliminary security extremely difficult (large ground area with regular maintenance required), and margins are low enough that many air fields can't afford things like fences.

Further information not available here.

A months delay on publishing from and to where Musk flew would be sufficient to prove his extensive pollution by flight emissions, while not putting his safety at risk.

Which to my (limited) knowledge of Elons interactions with the ElonJet kid, was never a request Elon made. It was always I'll give you a Tesla if you stop reporting, not please put it on a delay.

Obviously "the airport elon's jet most recently landed at, which is available to anyone at (i think) https://www.adsbexchange.com" and "the live location of xae12" are different

I literally cannot fathom the relentless, unceasing anxiety I would suffer if my child's whereabouts were inexplicably public knowledge.

If someone knows you personally, it basically is? They're, usually, either at your house (which you can usually get from a name), at school/school-associated location (the school is often directly derivable from house location, and generally not private) - and at predictable times!

This was 2rafa's point earlier, the knowledge necessary to harm someone is universally available and fairly easy to use. That people aren't usually harmed is due to people not desiring to, and law and society imposing punitive costs on those who try to.

public knowledge

If someone knows you personally, it basically is?

These are literal, exact opposites. Is everyone's brains so thoroughly melted by the last decade of social media that all concept of not being a public facing person 24/7 been completely forgotten?

Something being knowable if you tell someone is not the same thing as being public knowledge. Even your example of, hey, some people know your home address, so that's basically public knowledge, right? No. That's called doxing.

Just... what even?

When you said "public knowledge", did you mean "public knowledge that a large number of people were interested in"?

My point was that if someone's motivated enough to go to the IRL location of your children, they're probably motivated enough to look in voter registration databases, or do the 5 hours of research necessary to dox 90% of people who use the internet. The motivation is the problem, not the publicness of the information. Doxxing is bad, but unless you put a lot of effort into hiding it, it's really easy to dox people. (I don't know precisely how one does it, but have seen it happen many times).

My point was that if someone's motivated enough to go to the IRL location of your children, they're probably motivated enough to look in voter registration databases, or do the 5 hours of research necessary to dox 90% of people who use the internet. The motivation is the problem, not the publicness of the information. Doxxing is bad, but unless you put a lot of effort into hiding it, it's really easy to dox people. (I don't know precisely how one does it, but have seen it happen many times).

Your point is meaningless, most people and governments have shit opsec and corporations will actively sell your info out for penies, compilation of personal info has a quality all of its own and that is in itself unacceptable when it happens to you. Doxing is one of those "life ruination" strats that's off limit/over the pale you just don't do it. And yeah kiwifarms has its uses but I don't see them as anything more then the lowest of the low, its only funny when it happens to some one you hate.

As much as I enjoyed kiwifarms, and as much as I agree with your point in general, I think it and sites like it put paid to that idea. There are a lot of people out there who apparently can't be fucked ruining someone's life unless all the hard work has already been done for them - but if it is, their motivation is through the roof.

If someone's motivated enough, they will not be stopped by your home security - does that mean you leave your door unlocked?

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Here's what I think is interesting about Musk's very public leadership of Twitter: It's like he's isolated a number of areas where he thinks the company was failing, and re-building those areas from scratch in public view. This is a very novel approach and a kind of public service.

Just about everyone agrees that content needs some moderation, but Twitter's moderation model was broken. So instead of patching what was already in place, he's going back to square one and learning what needs to be moderated, in the hope of avoiding the missteps where the same process broke in its previous incarnation. And then we can all see how it got from Point A to Point Z. At the very least, he isn't being opaque about it, like the previous regime was.

See also: the poor opsec on Twitter's backend.

It's like he's isolated a number of areas where he thinks the company was failing, and re-building those areas from scratch in public view.

Yes; the operative phrase is "move fast and break things". Shoe's just on the other foot politically now; that faction is learning that actually yes, it does suck when the products you use are broken on a whim by organizations opposed to your goals.

I can't be made to care. I just can't. After watching the entire internet break to the yoke of the intelligence services, and living under the rule of man (who hates me), masquerading as the rule of law, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's lies, damned lies, and hypocrisy the whole way down. If the activist that appear to have permanently ruined the internet I loved have to get a taste of their own medicine before Twitter dies permanently, I'm just going to enjoy the show.

You can't appeal to my morals. I no longer have any.

I'll just say it: hypocrisy is not a weakness in the Culture War. You can't put a social justice-believer in their place by attacking their epistemology, what makes you think you can do it to The Chief Twit himself? Applying Ctrl-H to rhetoric does not win you the argument, let alone the Culture War. Maybe highlighting someone as a hypocrite worked back in the old Internet Atheism days (and that's a big maybe), but now? Your opponent is likely to just ignore it, able to perfectly compartmentalize the reasons as to why they're right and you're wrong.

Hypocrisy may not be a tactical weakness in culture war, but it is a moral failing. Moreover, if you're doing the exact same thing you criticize your opponents for doing, then you deserve to be cast down just as much as they do.

I am actually inclined to agree and feel a little ashamed of my post. Accusations of hypocrisy appeal to the lowest denominator. No matter what one's object level positions are one can generally agree that hypocrisy is bad. This makes hypocrisy seem like the worst sin one can commit (both right and left think you're bad!) but actually I think having bad positions consistently is much worse than being a hypocrite if ones hypocrisy leads to one doing good.

"Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue." ― Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld,

I remember seeing this in Diamond Age as a kid, and not really understanding it, but now I do and yes.. there are far worse things that being a hypocrite.

Obligatory, rest in peace

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ljaP2etvDc4

This makes hypocrisy seem like the worst sin one can commit

If you're operating under mistake theory, it is. By contrast, it's the equivalent of shelling one's own position in conflict theory (i.e. 'if hypocrisy leads to one doing good'); and if you're not willing to shell your own position, you are not willing to win.

Eh, especially now that the account is back with an imposed 24-hour delay on posting the data, I have to say I don't see a big problem with what transpired. Sure, Elon once again came away looking like someone who talks without thinking, but it seems to me that the sensible, actually useful notion of free speech (as a belief that we ought to expose as many people as possible to as many ideas as possible, rather than a rule of "nobody must be allowed to interfere with your decisions on when and how to speak") does not cover what this account was doing. I'd be more worried if Elon banned accounts saying things like "we ought to kill people like Elon Musk and divide up their wealth" than if he bans accounts that contribute data that would be useful for doing that but no substantial ideas pertaining to the proposition.

(I originally wanted to say that forced delays are an elegant solution to the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" problem (feel free to claim there was a fire at yesterday's show), but it's not so simple - consider a hypothetical "you are not allowed to say why policy X is bad until policy X has already been ratified")

So what? Posting people's current location should be considered doxxing. Paparazzi can get fucked. Stalkers can get fucked. Weirdos posting pictures of people trying to live their lives so their followers can mob them and harass them can get fucked. It's a good rule and I don't see the problem.

Good decisions made for bad reasons are still good.

I'd disagree a bit - having information public is incredibly useful, generally. It's an odd contrast to the KiwiFarms case - they're certainly, in a similar sense, stalkers, 'weirdos posting pictures of people trying to live their lives so their followers can mob them and harass them'.

Good decisions made for bad reasons are still good.

I don't think that's true. A decision made for bad reasons with a good outcome is still a bad decision. The important part is the process you follow to get there, not the outcome.

I disagree. If someone, with the best intent in the world, like feeding orphaned children or whatever, robbed me, I'd still think it was a shitty thing to do. It doesn't matter what you intend to do, only the actual tangible material outcomes of your decisions matter. I do not excuse an action that causes me material harm just because it means well and I do not quibble over an action that benefits me accidentally.

Hold up, I didn't say intention. That's a different story (although I do think good intentions matter). I'm talking about the decision making process. For example: if I had spent $10,000 on Powerball tickets when the jackpot was at $2b, that would be a bad decision even if I won. Similarly, if I make the decision to go to work but someone (unbeknownst to me) commits a premeditated assault on me, going to work was a good decision even though I wound up in the hospital as a result. Good or bad decisions are about "did I make the best choice I could at the time given the information I had", not whether or not the end result did indeed turn out to be good.

So Elon is a liar of a hypocrite you shouldn't trust to keep his word, your opinion on @elonjet nonwithstanding.

He's known for exceedingly optimistic timelines, however; but since his companies have done some almost miracles, who gives a shit as long as he eventually delivers a year or three late. Everyone who's following e.g. SpaceX knows about "Elon time". So far BFR has been developed on a shoe-string, if we consider budgets for other projects of similar scale. If it takes longer to mature than Saturn rockets, it's really no big deal. Especially given that it's far more capable.

Elon time (uncountable)

(automotive, astronautics, journalism) An estimated time of arrival (ETA), that is exceedingly optimistic, needing to be doubled or tripled to arrive at a reasonable estimate. Used by journalists, editorialists, and fans, concerning the ETAs of milestones and products from commecial spacelaunch provider SpaceX and electric car maker Tesla Motors; as well as other endeavours of Elon Musk

I don't think 'Elon time' is in the same ballpark as lying about your stance on free speech, and if I'm honest, I don't think you really consider them one and the same either. Being a succesful businessman and being a lying hypocrite are not mutually exclusive.

Lying or update his views based on new information? He had one view before that weirdo climbed onto the car his toddler was in and a different view afterwards.

"The account can stay, but I don't like it" turned into "the account can stay, but with a 24 hour delay so crazy stalkers cannot so easily harm my baby". I'm not going to denounce someone as a lying hypocrite for modifying their views a bit when they crash against reality.

He may simply have been mistaken about how much speech is actually legal, considering he's not from the United States and frequently operates in international contexts which are more circumspect.

@elonjet had been up for a pretty long while. This isn't a legal issue.

So, the lie is, before he had to run a giant social network, he said he was a free speech absolutist, and he's not anymore after he finds out some of the problems that are caused by that approach ?

That's what you meant, right ?

He know @elonjet existed. He specifically called out not fucking with @elonjet as something he'd do. Then, damn near immediately after taking over, he does it anyway.

That's what you meant, right ?

Fuck off, you very well know what I meant. If you want to bulverise, find another forum.

I have no idea why you would think this is a remotely acceptable response. You can dispute someone's purported mischaracterization of your position without telling them to fuck off. Banned for a day.

He said it's going to be able to continue eventually, once there's a 24h delay on the account, no ?

You can have free speech, unless you're a nazi, white supremacist, or spread misinformation.

Trust is not my default position, so that's no change.

I can't believe I find myself agreeing with Elon on a policy, but... yeah, this reads as a policy to ban doxing. And I'm ok with that. This is the exact type of carve out that you need to keep the Kiwis from using your platform.

ADS-B records strike me as closer to court records or traffic cameras, in my mind: you're required to transmit them (barring a few exception not relevant here), they can be easily recorded with commonly-available antenna, and they're commonly used for the same class of purposes. They have some bad uses (ie, paparazzi), but they're not really centralized to those bad uses -- in addition to the anticollision efforts that drove the ADS-B development, they're regularly useful for tarmac scheduling and safety purposes (eg, if someone doesn't land at or near the scheduled time but doesn't have flight following, it can be a quick way to check if they just got a headwind or if they're in a ditch somewhere) in the United States.

I can understand Musk not wanting to be That Sort of Site, in the sense of drawing a broad line around the torah, but there's some limits to what can be done, here.

ElonJet's owner's personal account, @JxckSweeney, has been suspended too. plausibly because he posted internal twitter slack leaks?

e: unbanned, https://twitter.com/ElonJet/status/1603168950489350144 , new rule - 24hr? delay on live location. Neither action stopped people from going to the elonjet instagram or just getting the data from adsbexchange

e2: ... rebanned again. A year ago, I'd say twitter moderation would probably improve under elon, but this is ... not worse, but it's top-down dumb as opposed to 'jack doesn't care' dumb.

e3: taking legal action against sweeny is ridiculous, legally laughable, and just makes him look worse. Someone's location, that sweeny got from public data sources, is very obviously protected by the first amendment.

And? The ban was done according to the rule against sharing people's location data, so what more do you want? It's a private company, after all. I hope all the vile antifa doxxing accounts targeting kids get banned and prosecuted too. What else can I say but "purge them, they have no right to free speech on someone else's platform"?

Can you point to an instance of you being upset about a non-leftist account being banned? Why do you care about this one?

And? The ban was done according to the rule against sharing people's location data, so what more do you want? It's a private company, after all.

I'm not sure there's anything I "want" as such. I'm just amused by Elon's quick 180 on his own free speech commitments.

Can you point to an instance of you being upset about a non-leftist account being banned? Why do you care about this one?

I'm not sure I could point to an instance of my being outraged at a leftist account being banned, tbh. I care about this one because of its plain demonstration of Elon's lie about being committed to freedom of speech on Twitter.

Elon's quick 180

It seems to me to be a small modification of his old stance rather than a 180 degree turn. "Yes, he can do it" to "yes, he can do it with a 24 hour delay".

Is there any evidence that you care about hypocrisy? Like a post somewhere where you go after the hypocrisy of your own side?

Frankly, my opinion is the opposite as I mention in another comment. I would rather someone be hypocritically good than consistently evil. That seems like a no-brainer. There was definitely a period in my life where I would have cared more about the hypocrisy than whether it was good or bad, but not now. I feel a little bad about contributing to a lowering of political discourse with my OP, by appealing to hypocrisy rather than discussing why it was good or bad on its own merits.

So, to circle back, do you have an object-level opinion about the new Twitter policy?

I still think it's a dumb policy. It seems to me there's tons of innocuous content that would be prohibited by it (say, tweeting you're at a concert with friends while at the concert) and it's not clear to me what the benefit is. Especially as this pertains to publicly available information. I think there situations where sharing someone's location can be problematic, but if I were writing the policy I'd probably require at least some kind of malicious intent element.

tweeting you're at a concert with friends while at the concert

The most literal and strict possible interpretation of the rules is not what actually happens. "Hanging out at the beach today!" type tweets would probably not get banned.

Every time a rule is proposed people pretend like really poorly programed robots are going to rigidly enforce the strictest possible interpretation.

Every time a rule is proposed people pretend like really poorly programed robots are going to rigidly enforce the strictest possible interpretation.

What seems to actually happen is selective enforcement, where e.g. normally "hanging at the beach today" is OK, but if the wrong person posts it, they get banned for violation of policy. One might imagine Trump posting a picture of a rally and getting banned for doxing a reporter visible in the pic. (Consider the "hacked materials policy" as applied to the New York Post)

I have a really hard time understanding your worldview.

I do actually care about hypocrisy, but I think when you point it out you should be careful to compare behaviors of the same kind and scale. "Dude upset at a social media monopoly banning a newspaper in order to influence an election, is now upset he has a stalker" isn't much of a dunk.

But to go full "I don't care about hypocrisy" is a bit of a mindfuck for me.

I think it is too strong to say I don't care about hypocrisy. I do think hypocrisy is bad, but I would rather someone were a hypocrite who did good some of the time than be consistent and evil. There are (many!) worse things than being a hypocrite.

Depending on the magnitude of the hypocrisy, and the good they are doing, I suppose you could come up with a case where I'd agree, but as a general statement that's a hard sell, especially when the good is directly related to the subject of their hypocrisy.

I could never trust a person who flaunts their own rules.

Which of course also further fuels my point this was just a “boo outgroup” post.

Then I guess my answer to your question is "pretty well actually," because he actually seems to be learning that free speech absolutism can't be extended to groups that want to abolish free speech and destroy him. "So much for the tolerant right" is as lame an argument as when conservatives tried to use it to universal jeering and gloating.

I expected he'd eventually learn once he was in the driver's seat, but maybe he'll actually pick it up fast enough to avoid any stupid mistakes like providing the attackers a platform.

So he's... learning that he doesn't want to be a free speech absolutist? Because as I see it (as something close to a free speech absolutist), free speech can be extended to groups that want to abolish free speech and destroy me just fine. Free speech can't be abolished, and I can't be destroyed, by ways of speech alone. What you are saying, on the other hand, seems to be pretty close to the "speech is literally violence" view that I otherwise hear from progressives, despite you being seemingly anti-progressive (insofar as you wantonly suspecting OP of discriminating against non-leftists seemingly solely on the basis of getting leftist vibes from an anti-Musk account is an indication).

Don't be a free speech absolutist. The concept doesn't work.

Speech is the best coordination mechanism there is. When people start using it to coordinate meanness against people like yourself, that is in fact an existential threat to you. If they decide to oppress you, your free speech absolutism will not restrain them, nor will their rejection of it summon magical karma justice from the ether. There are principles worth dying for. The right to try to use speech to generate evil without restraint is not one of them.

Naturally, I applaud your principles to the exact extent that they seem instrumentally useful to me. This is because I'm a human. Still, your principles should probably account in some way for the evident nature of humans.

The whole concept of Free speech Absolutism is based on the idea that a specific set of rules can be codified that will flawlessly constrain human behavior, that can't be worked around or ignored, that have no loopholes. The idea that human frailty and malice can be solved by sufficiently-elegant rule design constantly runs afoul of observable reality, and yet people stubbornly cling to it. They should stop, before they get more people hurt. To the extent that rules work at all, it's when people are actually motivated to cooperate in keeping them. Absent that cooperation, no rules will ever be sufficient to fix what's broken in mankind.

It does work. People can speak about being mean to you all they want. It's not until they do something that it becomes a problem, and free speech absolutism has nothing to say about what actions should or shouldn't be allowed.

This is not as hard as people like to think it is. Allow anyone to SAY "We should kill X" and punish whoever attempts to kill X. Speech is protected, easy peasy.

The only "hard part" of this is when people try to characterize actions as speech or vice-versa, and while it's not a completely trivial problem to solve, there are many ways to thread that needle.

People can speak about being mean to you all they want. It's not until they do something that it becomes a problem

That distinction makes as little difference as "I can swing my fist in the vicinity of your face all I want, it's only when the impact actually happens that it becomes a problem".

People aren't against the government banning speaking out against them because words are those ittle bittle harmless things that shouldn't be banned because they're so harmless. People are against it because words are a powerful weapon and they want to reserve the use of it against the government. I'm fine with that, it's when that weapon is turned against me that it becomes a problem.

I agree they're powerful, and that's why they must be unrestrained. Granting any large body, government or international corporation, the power to censor (significant amounts of) speech is too dangerous to contemplate. So quite simply, it must remain free because any scheme where an entity is given power otherwise is not safe to try.

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against the government

I'd argue it's to reserve the use of them against society at large. Government is just society's (the organization's) corporate arm, after all, and 1A covers the first three boxes of liberty (soap, ballot, jury) in the same way the 2A covers the last box (ammo).

The government did not order neighbors to go smash windows on Crystal Night, much as they did not directly order the mass hysteria and riots over the last 2 weeks.

Your neighbors did that all on their own, and so you need protection from them- being able to tell them they're wrong is your first line of defense.

This is not as hard as people like to think it is. Allow anyone to SAY "We should kill X" and punish whoever attempts to kill X. Speech is protected, easy peasy.

There are a lot of different ways to say "we should kill X". Some of them actually make it a whole lot harder to keep X from being killed, and to punish those who kill X. It is entirely possible to use speech to coordinate harm against people in such a way that, once you move from speaking to acting, the people being harmed have no effective recourse.

Free speech absolutism assumes that the above either can't happen, or is too remote a possability to worry about. Both positions are dead wrong, because they ignore the simple reality that humans are social mammals, not robots. Words have consequences, and can change the world in meaningful ways. Everyone who achieves large-scale responsibility is forced, sooner or later, to grapple with this simple, obvious fact. Occasionally, for a little while, times are good enough that some people can allow themselves to forget this simple reality. Sooner or later, though...

No, I'll bite the bullet here. Sometimes, people will coordinate and do something bad and you can't prevent it, only punish afterward. I do not assume it can't happen or is remote. I ACCEPT it as the cost of allowing free speech, and it is a cost worth paying because speech categorically must remain free for society to be worthwhile at all.

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That seems like a very general argument against a lot of principles. "Don't be for the rule of law. (...) Law is the strongest mechanism for collective violence in our society. When people start using it to instigate lawsuits against people like yourself, that is in fact an existential threat to you. If they decide to jail you, your rule-of-law absolutism will not restrain them. (...) There are principles worth dying for. The right to try to use the law to sanction people without restraint is not one of them." Basically every societal policy benefits some and harms some, and, yes, those who it comes to harm tend to regret previously having supported it.

...and, you know, now that I think about it, I don't see that as a problem. Lots of people out there are enthusiastic proponents of punishing criminals and sending people to jail based on the decisions of a jury of their peers, but will curse the jury, the state and the entire legal system if they are deemed to have committed some crime and they are the ones sentenced to prison - especially if they believe themselves to be innocent. Were they wrong to have been for legal punishment before it was levelled against them? Would you hold it against them that they flipped opinion once they pulled the short end of the stick? Should an argument like "you know as well as I do that the legal system sometimes punishes innocent people, and if that were to happen to you, you would rage against it; so it is hypocritical of you to be a proponent of it now" persuade the pro-law-and-order individual to change their stance?

That seems like a very general argument against a lot of principles.

It's an argument that very few principles are strong enough to be terminal.

"Don't be for the rule of law. (...) Law is the strongest mechanism for collective violence in our society. When people start using it to instigate lawsuits against people like yourself, that is in fact an existential threat to you. If they decide to jail you, your rule-of-law absolutism will not restrain them. (...) There are principles worth dying for. The right to try to use the law to sanction people without restraint is not one of them."

Law is not the strongest mechanism for collective violence. Human will and human cooperation are.

Beyond that, though, all you have is a somewhat confused and uncharitable description of the simple principle that rule of law is not a terminal value. We assent to the law, to society, because we believe that doing so will deliver a better life for ourselves and for people in general. From John Brown to the Warsaw Ghetto to Omelas, History and philosophical theory overflow with examples of cases real and readily imagined in which it is better to reject the rule of law than to consent to it. One need not declare war on society over the slightest legal inconvenience, but likewise one need not bow to law that is plainly destructive of the good. Sometimes laws are bad, and the only recourse is to break them or to tear them down. Do you disagree?

If people hate you or your group, it's possible for them to use the law as a weapon against you. If they do so, especially if they do so for reasons that seem irrational or evil to you, why should you accept oppression to preserve a law that exists to stamp on your face? This principle, the recognition that law used as a weapon will inevitably lead to conflict, should ideally serve to keep people from abusing the law in this way. Far from undermining the common peace, such a recognition preserves it by not allowing foolish people to lie themselves creating a conflict they are powerless to end.

Would you hold it against them that they flipped opinion once they pulled the short end of the stick? Should an argument like "you know as well as I do that the legal system sometimes punishes innocent people, and if that were to happen to you, you would rage against it; so it is hypocritical of you to be a proponent of it now" persuade the pro-law-and-order individual to change their stance?

It's a reasonable argument. Only, how "innocent" are the "innocent" people in question? Innocent in the sense that they've spent their lives peaceably and with goodwill to their fellow men? Innocent in the sense that they didn't do this particular crime, but definately did dozens of other crimes? Innocent in the sense that they did do this crime, but you can't prove it? Innocent in the sense that they did it, you can prove it, but you proved it the wrong way so procedure says we let them get away with it?

And on the other hand, why are they caught up in the system? Is it a legitimate accident of fate, wrong place, wrong time? Is someone out to get them? Is someone out to get anyone like them, and they were the first [X] handy? Is there a coordinated campaign to find a way to screw them, and to hell with the law?

Inconvenient questions, to be sure. The Correct Answer(TM) is to put one's faith in the system, in the rules, in the Proper Procedures, and trust that everything will work out for the best, in this best of all possible worlds. That answer worked pretty well when we had a high trust society, when everyone was pulling together. It appears that it works somewhat less well when we only have enough trust for credit cards to work.

This is all a long way round to return to the original point: Your systems and your rules and your procedures aren't what society runs on. They never were, and they never will be. The foundation of any society is trust and good will, and the institutions, the rules and procedures are built on top of that foundation. When the foundation goes, how can the structures built upon it remain standing? All the principles you're pointing to are good and useful... provided we have mutual trust in our fellow man's investment in our common peace and prosperity. Without that, it's foolishness, nothing more.

That seems like a very general argument against a lot of principles.

It is. "The Torah is not a suicide pact" is one example of the same argument. As with most such general arguments, the problem is that an escape hatch designed to avoid the very worst of consequences quickly swallows all the principles it applies to. For instance, not allowing people to plan murders on the platform quickly leads to the most milquetoast of things as being tantamount to planning a murder and thus prohibited (this was the fig leaf for the Trump ban, after all). The only way around that is basically good faith, people with as much dedication to the law as the rabbinate who can actually be trusted to keep such general exceptions in check. But good faith actors are thin on the ground; good faith actors with authority even less so, and no procedural safeguards can constrain the bad-faith ones.

I am very interested in hearing how an automated account posting publically available flight plan information "want[s] to abolish free speech."

The information is public because there wasn't an obvious reason to make it private, and making it private would presumably impose additional costs.

I'm comfortable asserting that the account is posting the flight information of billionaires because the person who made it doesn't like billionaires, and sees this as an easy way to hurt them as badly as he can without getting in too much trouble. Granted, mass-dissemination of specific information about their movements and locations doesn't hurt them very badly; the additional risk added to their lives is likely infinitesimal. But it didn't cost him much of anything to do, and he didn't get in trouble, and it is, after all, the thought that counts. He's doing his part to make it slightly more likely that something very bad happens to a person he doesn't like, and in a way he can't be held accountable for. When this sort of behavior is tolerated, it proliferates. When it proliferates, the odds of something bad actually happening can go up a whole lot.

I'd guess it's probably pretty unlikely that he's doing this specifically about Musk's pro-freedom-of-expression stances, and rather was already doing it simply because he despises billionaires. Still, I'm confident he's not actually on Musk's side on the Free Expression question either. If Musk hopes to preserve the liberal ideal, people like this guy absolutely are his enemy, and must be fought.

Does that paint a clearer chain of logic for you?

[EDIT] - Nope, Sweeney appears to be a Musk fan and a plane nerd, and the above culture war narrative is baseless.

Does that paint a clearer chain of logic for you?

No. This guy tracked lots more wealthy people that Elon, and no one of them complained that putting publicly available info on Twitter makes them feel unsafe. Including Russian oligarchs, who possess fraction of Elon's net worth while having several magnitudes more of serious enemies.

So, it is not "poor Elon so afraid, please stop", it is more like "how dare you lowly peasants look at mighty lord!"

I'm comfortable asserting that the account is posting the flight information of billionaires because the person who made it doesn't like billionaires, and sees this as an easy way to hurt them as badly as he can without getting in too much trouble

Isn't "he's a nerd who likes flight data" just as plausible? It's hard to tell, as pushshift's twitter data is private because twitter doesn't let one publicly index twitter, so I can't search his now-suspended tweets, but his website looks a lot more like 'plane nerd' than 'anticapitalist'

It's not the way I would bet, or just have bet, but if there's no evidence of him being generally anti-billionaire and lots of evidence of him being a plane nerd, a prompt mea culpa is the appropriate response. Certainly I've presented no evidence of him actually being anti-billionaire, and that website looks pretty plane-nerdy, so that's good enough to shift my opinion.

https://instagram.com/p/CSGXpRLrT90/ Looks like he's just a SpaceX fan, sad case of friendly fire. (Also he has a truth.social account, and I'm pretty sure a communist can't enter that website without being struck by lightning or mysteriously bursting into flame).

If Musk was smart he'd offer the guy a job.

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I think billionaires who push green products should have their energy intensive consumption highlighted. A significant portion of Elon's wealth comes from our collective taxes and higher prices on basic cars subsidizing expensive cars for big spenders to save the planet. Him burning some fraction of that energy savings galavanting alone in a jet should be publicized along with all the other rich doing the same.

What a strange reply. This is obviously about Elon's hypocrisy re: free speech. You going after OP and invoking the "private company" spell, as if OP was using that same excuse pre-Elon-Twitter, is against the spirit/letter of this place.

https://www.themotte.org/post/155/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/25045?context=8#context

He wasn't just using the "private company spell," he spent a week acting shocked that anyone could have a problem with the government censoring people via a partnership with Twitter. I don't think he cares about the object level issue he's talking about, it's just a way of sneering.

Fair enough. I didn't know you'd been keeping track of this particular user's views. This context helps.

You're right that I jumped too hard, sorry. The whole "pretending not to get it" tactic on both twitter fed-censoring and the Sam Pantythief affair got me irrationally angry, and I lashed out.

I think I was pretty clear in that post and I'll be clear now. Twitter has not violated the First Amendment in either its conduct in 2020/2021 nor by banning the @elonjet account. As @czr notes I am merely amused by the quick demonstration of Elon's own hypocrisy on the topic of free speech.

The jet tracker seems like a security threat by making Elon's whereabouts at any time so easily known by a potential assailant. I'm sure a twitter account could be created that publishes public home ownership information that only tracks prominent journalists. They would be right to feel threatened by this account. Jet tracker and public homeownership information are publicly available but aren't exactly voluntarily given.

Trying to frame this as hypocrisy ("Oh so Mr Free Speech doesn't want crazy people to know where he is at all times?!?!") on the same level of censorship as banning Babylon Bee for misgendering Rachel Levine is eyerolling.

I mean, he's the one who publically committed to not banning that account. Nobody made him do that.

Hypocrisy is different than the free speech angle you started with.

This confirms my belief your post was trolling / boo out group.

I feel pretty confident my OP was about both hypocrisy and freedom of speech, and specifically Elon's hypocrisy with respect to his commitment to freedom of speech.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t but we can agree to disagree.

You seem to be shifting the goalposts here, your only point now is this very narrow one where he is throttling an account that can be reasonably perceived as a threat to his personal safety when he said he wouldn't do that earlier. You're not making any broader claim about how he is being a hypocrite about Free Speech? Because the context for why he criticized old twitter management was very different than doxxing/safety threats.

The more I think about it, this is actually a great demonstration. Prior twitter management censored political speech surrounding various issues (COVID, trans issues). Current twitter management censors accounts that are threats to personal safety. Which one is gets criticized by the mainstream press?

Do you apply these standards consistently? When an account like @LibsOfTikTok posts about a drag event, is that a threat to the safety of those going to the event?

If LibsOfTiktok had made a habit of publishing the home addresses of those involved in the drag event, then yes that would be a threat to the personal safety of those involved. As it stands, the standard that got LibsOfTikTok repeatedly suspended was resharing videos that people voluntarily posted. How you think this is the same standard is beyond me.

Different things. If Libs post about “they are having a drag show at school X at time Y” it allows people to protest the event. That is, it serves a social use (for the reader to decide if benefit or detriment).

But showing the location of a single person? Hard to imagine the social use there.

Just because something serves a social use doesn't mean it can't also pose a threat to safety. Both can be true at the same time.

For the record, I have no issue at all with LoTT posting about “they are having a drag show at school X at time Y” even if there were dozens of credible shooting or bomb threats. They have the right to post that information, and what other people do with that information isn't LoTT's responsibility. I also have no issue with posting publicly available flight tracking data, but I also don't believe that's in any way shape or form a threat to anyone's safety (it also doesn't matter if it is).

Anyone who has the ability to harm Elon Musk based on flight data (i.e. the ability to stake out an airport) has the ability to get the publically available flight data from the original source. Signal-boosting this information posts no threat to anyone's personal safety whatsoever.

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