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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29300 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Elon Musk has suspended a slew of liberal journalists and pundits from Twitter. It is, as Benjamin Braddoc puts it, a red wedding for the liberal establishment. I initially believed that he was just the "controlled" opposition of the deep state, obviously he's stepped on way too many toes for that. This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue. Social media, our Frankenstein, has made it insanely easier for mob rule to influence culture (not that it wasn't already).

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

EDIT: It looks like he's lifting the suspension.

Why did you not post the reason for that, which is that these accounts were posting or linking to the real time location of Elon Musk (and in some cases, inadvertently his children)?

As Musk put it,

If anyone posted real-time locations & addresses of NYT reporters, FBI would be investigating, there’d be hearings on Capitol Hill & Biden would give speeches about end of democracy!

This is absolutely true. If I had an account tracking the location of the editors of NYT, and one of my followers even blocked their car and jumped on their windshield wearing a mask, I would be: fired from any corporate job, investigated by the FBI, sued for harassment, have my own death threats against me, doxx’d by the NYT (including location of my home), and so on.

I think Elon Musk has greater chances of being killed by a left-wing vigilante than anyone else in America, because he’s now controlling what they previously controlled. There’s no substantive argument for why a person’s real time location should be shared publicly.

It was also the same link for a substantial amount (possibly all) of the suspended accounts.

These people talk to one another. It may have been coordinated with the intent of creating a news story about Elon banning liberal journalists.

I love it. These media narcissist were the biggest whiners, pressuring Twitter into selectively enforcing rules, or writing new ones1. Not that I think Twitter needed to be pressured that much. They are used to effectively writing the rules, not having them enforced on them. For many of them, this sort of unearned class privilege is all they've ever known. I wouldn't be shocked if many of them became "journalist" just to bask in it. Their lamentations are totally worth $44B of someone else's money.

  1. Case in point, how the hacked materials policy was applied in the Hunter Laptop case (assuming you take it on good faith that twitter believed it was hacked materials) versus how twitter handled journalist doxing random conservatives from hacked donor lists. Donors of the trucker convoy were publicly identified by journalist and harassed by mobs. Twitter took no action against many, many journalist participating in that digital lynching, despite how obviously their hacked materials policy should have applied.

I don't think the other poster said that they posted a real-time map of his car. (Such things do exist, but they're mostly behind-closed-doors at the car manufacturers and Apple for now.)

Presenting the flight records in real-time and likely landing spots do have risks. There are certain realities of private aviation that make securing things hard, and that mean someone paying attention from the ground can usually identify all the cars from a specific aircraft's passengers for anything smaller than Oshkosh, with a significant time advantage on them actually leaving the FBO office or tarmac. ADS-B Exchange has this data, but it's notoriously obnoxious to use, even for aviation people (and it's controversial among aviation people).

There's a better author than I with a pretty long piece on the ethics of this sorta thing. On net, I'm against a policy treating this as doxing (or otherwise bannable), but I don't think it's nearly as straightforward or banal as first glance.

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