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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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It was all public to begin with, however. It might not be easy to find, but the account wasn't publishing information that would not have seen the light of day. This isn't a case like Scott Alexander's, the law requires that planes be identifiable to the ground and to each other.

Not really getting how this is doxxing. Is it bad? Probably. Should you signal boost such accounts? Probably not. But Elon Musk isn't the modal private citizen either, he's got lots of attention on him by default. If it was his home or something, that might be different, but I don't think you inherently have the right to not have your private jet identified by people and posted online when you fly.

I don't think it's accurate to say that the information was "all public to begin with", because Musk had enrolled in the FAA privacy program that periodically rotates tail numbers. ElonJet was deanonymizing it by correlating with other information, then publishing that non-public mapping.

Jets that fly with the temporary identification number can be easily found on the ADS-B Exchange, as shown by a screenshot shared with Insider that shows the jet that Sweeney says is Musk's was flying on May 7 with no callsign, no tail number, but had "PIA" flagged.

ref. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-appears-use-faa-tool-block-jet-tracking-twitter-2022-10

(even this quote is conflating two definitions of "easily found" - yes, the plane appears on the public list of all planes, but there is no indication that it is Elon's without the additional deanonymization performed by Sweeney.)

I think a useful analogy is Bitcoin transactions. In some sense they're "all public to begin with", because the record of all transactions and their corresponding addresses is in a public ledger. But someone who analyzes transactions and correlates them with other information, then publishes a mapping of addresses to their owners, isn't "just publishing public information", any more than someone who publishes a mapping of Twitter account names to their physical addresses is, since the set of all physical addresses in existence is public.

There seem to be a lot of mental gymnastics going on to try to make Musk look like a hypocrite. Maybe the location of Musk's plane is not, technically, doxxing but it's worlds away from censoring scientific information or unpopular political opinions. Twitter is free now in ways that it definitely wasn't before. And it's because of Musk. This is why people are upset, not because they think there is a legitimate reason to track his plane on Twitter.

Well, yes, if Musk changed the bias at the top, Twitter is free as it wasn't previously. You're free to be Alex Jones, you're not free to be someone Musk happens to dislike (not as easily, anyways). The complaints about Musk can definitely be seen as partisan whining, but we shouldn't take that to mean he's any better than the people he replaced. The only way to judge him as being better is to see how he acts against people he doesn't like. Hell, Bari Weiss even said as much, leading to a rift between her and Musk despite their Twitter Files collaboration.