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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.
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.
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.
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