When I said last thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33988883) I was awaiting to see what moderation rationale Elon would use I was not expecting "making up new rules" and banning ex post facto.
But unbanning the account without an apology is somehow weirder.
Twitter was started as a democratic, real time, and completely free resource. It now no longer is any of those things.
While I do think it's unethical to publicly post anyone's whereabouts online for everyone to see, I think that it is equally just as bad to buy a resource like the one mentioned above and then turn it into your own money making bulletin board... He should have just developed a totally new fork of Twitter under a different name perhaps. Twitter is dead... Has been for a long time now...
At least everyone still has the ability to abandon it and move on to creating more useful places.
Elon has turned Twitter into his own personal bulletin board... His posts are obviously intended to resonate across the entire platform now, even for people that block him.
Yeah, I thought about this, but by your logic you are never sharing live location of a person, it's always just hardware, whether it's airtag or smartphone and you could always argue you are sharing location of device, but privacy policies usually don't distinguish between these two.
Slightly more than nothing. Like being in a dictatorship but being allowed to leave all your friends and family behind (and work perhaps) to go to a land that may not have any of those things.
Yes I'm being dramatic yet I think we may keep bumbling through until we figure out some new form of governance for massive online platforms besides the current form of CEO decided (with maybe board of directors oversight, assuming the CEO isn't the chairperson and has captured the board).
Good analogy. There are many people who have a harder decision to make due to work/life entanglements into the network that can’t be easily replaced. There are several facebook groups that I need on occasion that keep my account active there.
Thank you. Yes, it's easy for some people to move countries, as they don't have a house or a job or kids or other things that tie them down. Ironically, I think it's one of the main things the US Embassy checks when foreigners are trying to get tourist visas: how much do they have tying them down to their home country so they will be unlikely to overstay their visa?
I think what happens in these situations is that people often start to organize to gain more say in the decision making process, whether that's unionizing in the workplace or political protests and/or revolutions.
What I'm wondering is what will we do, those of us who have invested so much time and energy into building our digital homes and businesses in these digital nations? Just leave? Stay and organize? Organize how?
I don't personally like the idea of organizing as a user union or something, as I find unions to often be an antagonistic response to company management. I hope that we would start to see ourselves more like digital citizens of these digital nations and organize to try to have more representation in the decision-making processes of these platforms that may govern much more of our social interaction than our analog governments do.
Unless you're Elon Musk, Twitter is not your platform. Twitter is not a public square. It's some guy's personal media platform and he lets others use it at his pleasure.
Yes, I wish it would go in the other direction and we'd have more ownership of such platforms as users/creators/informal workers, at least in the decision making process, if not in the profit sharing as well. In a way, I'd argue us users of many social media platforms are both consumer and producer.
I'm not so excited to have a federation of digital towns trying to interact with each other. I believe in the benefit of having overarching communities with shared rules and rule-making processes.
The analog equivalent I imagine would be to have no countries and only towns where each town has control over its laws and when towns interact, they try to create treaties. I, on the other hand, would prefer we even had much stronger coordination above the nation-state level.
But perhaps I'm not grasping the rule-making process of Mastodon, just feels very independent and not sure how it handles inter-instance conflict.
I noticed how the process before seem to be decided by a CEO and board, and now it seems to be decided purely by a CEO, therefore having less oversight and more control in the hands of one person. Previously, they had set up a Trust and Safety Council, which the new CEO recently disbanded.
So for me, it's not about the specific decisions being made (what to ban and what to keep) but rather the process of how to make those decisions and I see that process becoming more and more in the hands of one person.
I noticed some popular flight tracking websites flightradar24 and flightaware have disabled sharing location information per owner request. I did find one site that still shares flight data and flight history.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=32.124&lon=-...
Reason was explained in other topic. FlightRadar and few other services use information provided by US FAA thus they must follow FAA rules regarding disabling information sharing.
ADS-B Exchange use information gathered by private individuals and there is no law that require to hide something.
Flightradar and other sites have a vast network of receivers. Almost everyone that feeds ADS-B Exchange probably feeds to FR24 as well, and FR24 have even more receivers.
They also use radar data in North America, I guess that's the FAA provided data. If they wanted to they could probably do without it since they have so many receivers enabling them pretty good MLAT, but they probably prefer to not provoke FAA.
They have mentioned that they don't want governments to encrypt ADS-B or regulate it in other ways, so by self regulating they hope to be left alone.
"Information about a small number of flights may be limited or blocked based on requests from owners or operators via third-party services, such as the FAA LADD. Some high profile aircraft, such as Air Force One are not displayed. Most other aircraft subject to restriction are shown as anonymized by aircraft type."
That link you mentioned stated that certain planes (including business jets) do not have ADS-B or are not visible on FlightRadar24. Thought that was interesting.
Full Oligarch, is more like it. Musk never concerned himself about people's privacy until it was his own privacy.
I'm convinced this is all about him doing a favor for all the corrupt rulers and fellow oligarchs, silencing one of the last few platforms where people with millions/billions can't shut down a story they don't like. Twitter, for all its faults, is the one place where people with little financial resources have a shot at getting restitution or justice as long as their tweet gets some attention and signal-boosted.
In the space of 30 minutes a clip of video of something unjust happening to someone who would otherwise not even get a mention in the local paper, can become a national news story and wildly exceed the local power structure's ability to suppress the story.
Corporations, dictators, oligarchs, and powerful politicians really, really don't like that.
I have a theory about Twitter's often odd actions since Musk took over, although I fear HN won't like it because it may tend to paint Musk in a reasonable light:
I think that we are seeing the symptoms of a team (Twitter) who is not yet used to Musk's management style, whereby he says something like, "we should do X", and he means, "we should investigate and take reasonable actions which have the same effect as (the too-bold action) X". The team interprets the first statement too literally and actually does X, which isn't really what Musk intended. I developed this theory in the roll-out of Twitter Blue, because it matches what happened very closely: Musk publicly said "hey we're going to start charging for verification and it's no longer a mark of validated identity". The team jumped and made something overnight, but this was rolled back because it's not what Musk meant for them to do. Rather, what he meant for them to do was sit down, plan what to do, and then execute it - quickly, but not immediately. And that's what happened in the end, i.e. in the past few days.
This effect is exacerbated by the remaining employees at Twitter including those who are most eager to suck up to the new boss, frankly, leading to them jumping and doing what he said (over-literally).
Anyways, the same theory would explain the elonjet thing. Elon says, "hey posting people's real-time location is generally seen as a bad thing, like that elonjet guy, we should look into a policy against that." Overeager underling takes this as a commandment to ban elonjet. More reasonable people who are beginning to catch on to the management style go and actually develop the policy; once it's developed, it makes sense to just Ctrl-Z the actions of the overeager group.
I think the team is afraid to stand up to Musk, and this makes things worse... but I think you're crafting an explanation where Musk isn't in the loop and pressing for things to happen immediately. This isn't consistent with Musk's public comments and tweets during the Blue rollout. E.g. he talks of having personally killed the gray checkmark, and that "Blue check will be the great leveler."
He even says at the time:
> Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.
> More reasonable people who are beginning to catch on to the management style go and actually develop the policy; once it's developed, it makes sense to just Ctrl-Z the actions of the overeager group.
and now elonjet is back to being banned, so this doesn't really make sense.
Any management style that results in your direct reports doing things wrong isn't their fault. It's the manager who didn't communicate clearly, didn't correctly incentivize, didn't set the right example, didn't create pathways to desired outcomes, etc.
On what do you base this claim? What is one example in the last 3 years where you think Musk's intention was to "investigate and take reasonable actions"?
Did Elon decide to investigate and take reasonable action when signing an agreement to buy Twitter? Did he do so when trying to weasel his way out of the deal?
Did he investigate and take reasonable action when making bids about hyperloop and tunnels that were stupidly low to block public transit efforts but then never came to fruition?
As reported by insiders from other Musk companies, the issue is actually that Musk means everything he says, concerns himself with minutiae, and constantly demands insane and counterproductive things. These other companies have built up a layer of managers who are dedicated to lying to Musk and coaching their teams on lying to Musk while allowing actual useful things to get done instead of the things Musk would prefer. Twitter's current situation is what happens when a company lacks this protective inner layer.
That might be a factor (and I've entertained this idea myself!) but Elon is also shown to be impulsive and tyrannical enough in his public words (and leaked communications) that I don't think this explanation is actually needed.
>>I have a theory about Twitter's often odd actions since Musk took over, although I fear HN won't like it because it may tend to paint Musk in a reasonable light:
Reminds me of the "The Bear is Sticky with Honey" situation
when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
musk isnt some gratioud thoughtful genius surrounded by incompetence. he’s a malicious, selfish, narcissist.
and if you dont see that, well, nothing can be done about it. just look at his tweets and “enlightened centrism”. and that time he called a guy a pædo.
> ded. I developed this theory in the roll-out of Twitter Blue
My theory around this is that this was a test to see which developers are willing to do what he says on a short timeline and are able to have the required impact across the stack.
Does that include group selfies from the invite-only afterparty because it's "related" to a public event, or no because it's invite-only?
What about sharing location information related to a virtual public event? Or location information of an individual who's only virtually attending an in-person public event?
And more practically, what about live-documenting crimes, police brutality, war crimes...?
How do guys like Bezos, Gates, Kerry, Trump family, Schwab, Soros and other billionaires get around without twitter accounts tracking their planes?
He could have just switched to NetJets and put his plane into a jet share rotation until people got bored of watching the account. I get why he would use a plane, but surely someone told him the old wisdom about things that fly or float?
And just the other day Musk accused Roth of being a pedo for disagreeing with him. Roth has been threatened and has had to leave his home for safety reasons since.
Does Musk not remember what happened the last time he accused someone of being a "pedo"? Though US courts will be more sympathetic to him than UK ones were.
Oh, and we all know what it means when someone is publicly fixated on finding / bringing pedos to justice, right?
Vernon Unsworth sued in the US and lost. His lawyer was Lin Wood, who went from losing what seemed like an easy case, to proposing some of the more batshit legal theories of the 2020 election.
But Musk won, on the basis that he was making a joke. IANAL but I have to think that legal precedent that he jokes by calling people pedos means he can now call anyone a pedo with impunity.
I do support it, actions have consequences. Using an API is not a defense. You can probably use an API to do untold damage to the world. It's not a neutral action because it's an API. Further, at 19 you're responsible for your actions.
Similarly, I support legal action against Musk in cases where his unhinged tweets do real world damage to people.
Nonsensical comment.
The rule was made to justify the ban of the musk jet tracker account, since the account was banned BEFORE the announcement an hour ago.
How do you judge this rule by itself, on merit?
Would you have judged this rule differently, had Musk not be attached to it in any way?
The point being, you fail to separate actions and outcomes from the person. Since you already decided that he's an asshole and this narrative cannot be broken.
Had another person come up with this rule, then it would be seen as a cool, progressive anti-doxxing measure. Wonderful.
If you don't see an issue with this type of clouded thinking, then you've been fully indoctrinated in Twitter discourse.
Why do people who disagree with you have to be 'indoctrinated', 'clouded', or ruled by some 'narrative'? Maybe other people can just look at what Elon does and says, and come to the personal opinion that he's an asshole. It's not something that can ever be objectively true or false anyway, don't act like we're out here denying some set of facts or evidence to fit with our beliefs. I'm literally watching him do and say things, that in my personal opinion, firmly set him in the 'asshole' camp.
The issue is Musk literally tweeted support of the account and said it was allowed to exist. Then banned it for existing. Then made up a rule afterwards. Those are facts, why debate hypotheticals.
The issue is that you failed to answer any of the questions. Hence, you're unable to separate a person from an action. You must marry them into a narrative. That's Disney thinking.
Apply the same logic to yourself. You worship the ground Musk walks on and he can do no wrong. Everything he does has a reasonable explanation to you, but if someone else did it then it might not be so reasonable. You have been indoctrinated by a conman and are projecting your psychosis onto other, more reasonable, people.
This comment is completely in bad faith. You are literally saying that anyone criticizing this new policy -- which directly contradicts what Elon has promised in the past in regards to free speech in general and this account in particular -- is doing so only because they think Elon Musk is evil.
This is clearly a self-serving action that is hypocritical on the part of the new owner of Twitter. Please engage this story on its own merits, and not based on your own assumptions of the HN audience.
To be fair, a lot of us do actually believe Elon is evil. However one can still have valid criticisms of someone (or something) despite firmly believing that this someone (or something) is evil.
Except that I literally did not say that as that's not what the word literally means.
Further, Musk has never promised absolute free speech at Twitter, nor is this even feasible or legal. You're hearing random echos from random interviews and then parrot them into a wildly different contexts. You're all over the place.
Is it a self-serving action? Possibly, maybe even likely. And if it is, can you explain the problem with wanting to protect the safety of yourself and your family? Is wanting to live out of fashion these days?
To end, my point wasn't that you can't criticize the policy. The point was that the policy was not criticized. Musk was criticized. Had somebody else come up with the policy, people would be clapping.
Flipping around, without notice, a few weeks later... and banning all of the developer's accounts, including personal ones and ones that track NASA aircraft... seems slightly hypocritical and lends credence to the belief that Elon's actions are capricious, arbitrary, and impulsive.
When I said last thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33988883) I was awaiting to see what moderation rationale Elon would use I was not expecting "making up new rules" and banning ex post facto.
But unbanning the account without an apology is somehow weirder.