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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:
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:
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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).
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.
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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.
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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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