I fail to see the connection between this video, which was posted well after the account was blocked, given that the account had not tweeted out Musk's location after Dec 12th.
The 'won't somebody think of the children' argument doesn't play nice with 'free speech as long as it is legal'.
If Musk is so concerned about his children's privacy and safety then maybe he should stop tweeting out their whereabouts in real time himself?
The “speech” you speak of is automated broadcasting the movements of wealthy people in real-time. The primary group of people who have use for that information is kidnappers.
There’s zero connection between this “speech” and political freedoms.
Similarly, there’s a huge difference between you sharing you or your family’s location on social media occasionally on your own terms vs strangers tracking and sharing it regularly.
No, it's broadcasting the movements of a set of aircraft, using publicly available data. There is no information about who is on board those aircraft.
Nobody has any right to privacy regarding the flight movements of their aircraft, and indeed any idea in that light is antithetical to the entire principal of air traffic control and safe air travel. The idea that people would not be able to track his aircraft if this account is gone is ludicrous, as there are both other flight tracking websites, the ability in some areas to get full flight plans, and even if you're a stalker the ability to just listen into ATC radio near the routes his aircraft use.
You even have spotters who spend all their days at airports logging all aircraft and posting the results online, as they've done for decades, so there's no way for aircraft movements to remain secret for long.
By buying private jets and choosing to use them exclusively, Musk himself gave up his right to any privacy when flying on them. He has other options, such as flying commercially or chartering aircraft, as others in his position have done, but has chosen not to use them. He's now trying to change the rules for everyone else to carve out an exception for himself and other super wealthy individuals.
It's rank hypocrisy and bullying and I'm amazed so many people on HN are supporting him in this, and choosing to believe him rather than reading up on how open this data already is.
And publicly available satellite imagery can track the movements of your car. Depending on the country you live in, the fact that you own the car is also publicly available information.
That doesn’t mean somebody putting those pieces of information together and regularly tweeting your movements isn’t creating a security risk for you. The choice that you make to buy a car or drive it in public also doesn’t mean that you have to welcome automated stalking.
So these "kidnappers" you are talking about are smart enough to create a security risk for a multi-billionaire who can afford any level of security, but at the same time they are too stupid to combine a few pieces of publicly information themselves and would only be dangerous if some teenager on Twitter does it for them?
Show me how publicly available satellite imagery could offer anywhere close to the same level of tracking that is federally mandated and available for aircraft, and I might take that argument more seriously.
This account wasn't even 'putting those pieces of information together', he was tweeting it directly from ADSB Exchange, one of a number of collators of ADS-B Out data.
Aircraft movements are not private and haven't been for decades. If you want privacy in your air travel, don't fly everywhere on 1-3 well known private jets.
Publicly available satellite imagery can’t track my car in any meaningful way. At best you’d be able to figure out the color and (rough) size of it if you knew my address.
> I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids.
That was never going to happen. It's just a way to get people to work their asses off to further his real goal, to amass as much wealth as possible. Ironically, buying Twitter may well end up undoing that.
This always was the case and there are zero recorded instances of such so no need to trot out this argument. Musk himself has Tweeted out the location of his child in real time.
Free speech applies to all speech, not just political speech. If you want "free speech as long as it's legal", this should be allowed. If you don't that's also fine, but then you can't cite "free speech" as a reason to reinstate Trump (Which Musk did). Although regardless neither of these is a "free speech" issue (In the constitutional sense) since it's about a corporation banning certain things on its platform, which it's perfectly entitled to do. It's just very clearly shown the hypocrisy with which Musk now runs Twitter.
It's interesting because Elon agrees with free speech restrictions only when he or his own children are affected, but not others. Case in point, this one + alex jones' controversy ('My firstborn child died in my arms'). Meanwhile, he fired the entire child abuse monitoring section.
So you think he has good reasons for going back on what he claimed was his free speech position. Fair enough. It doesn't mean he hasn't gone back on what he said though, and it definitely fits with previous observations that he doesn't actually care at all about free speech and just does whatever he feels like that day.
Nobody is a true free speech absolutist; and Musk least of all[0]. There are always limits to speech.
Things like libel, threats, blackmail, etc are also speech, and yet banned or restricted in some way. Social media are doing a lot of work exploring the edge cases of these, and it's possible laws need to be updated to account for the results.
[0] Years ago Musk cancelled a Tesla order from a critic. On Twitter, it didn't take him long to ban a lot of satirical accounts.
I agree with you, but I believe it is the case that Elon has previously described himself as a free speech absolutist, so this whole episode is exhibit 487 in the case for Elon having no idea what he's talking about.
Not even sure I fully trust Musk on this, after he lied about holding his child that died; when it turned out the mother did and it was SIDS related, he's got form on using his children to manipulate the outside world.
Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.
> Not under the "always assume best intentions" principle, I have read similar descriptions from people that were near someone dying without actually physically holding them.
In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.
Since I onow people whos children actually did die in their very arms, using such a dramatic experience and be untruthful about it is simply dispicable. Especially since having your child die in front of you doesn't need any further dramatization at all.
That’s not relevant to whether he’s a hypocrite. All that’s relevant is “would he have done the same thing if it was someone else’s location being tweeted out?”
Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”
He'd say "one two gerbil gerbil fourteen spiders singin' to me" if it would affect the stock price of anything he's planning on buying or selling, or harming something that cuts into his earnings.
Previous strategy to appeal to tech was to pick last week's top post on /r/iamverysmart and state it as his philosophy.
Current strategy now that tech has soured on him the past few years, is transitioning to parroting fascist dogwhistles.
In two years he buys Whole Foods and will be ranting about holistic lifestyle chakra healing.
If you're the richest person in the world, you're going to have to expect that weirdos are going to follow you around. Many employ private security details. That's just how things are.
>A masked stalker, dressed all in black, was following his young child in car thinking it was him.
I mean, maybe?
I don't see a masked stalker doing much of anything in that video. In fact, the masked stalked in the car seems afraid of the person doing the filming (a security guard?). Certainly not showing much aggression. The claim is that this person then got out of the car and jumped on the hood of Elon's car preventing it from moving, but that wasn't caught on video?
What does this have to do with tracking his plane using public data? This is not about tracking his, or Grimes' or any other ex's car; not even about stalking them.
Did you actually read the files? They don't have any naked Hunter Biden pics (thank God).
It's mostly about Twitter fabrication of Hunter Biden was hacked (discovered during laptop dissembly) and the connections between federal government and Twitter's staff.
I meant Elon commissioned posts that Matt Taibi posted. Links to Hunter’s pics were among them. If you are curious it was Tweet 8. Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
> Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.
Yeah, obviously those pictures and associated tweets are deleted. That is why we are here. However, those are archived in WaybackMachine(archive.org). Copy/paste those links there.
I heard some people walked in to a big building in DC after Trump tweeted which later got him banned. Imagine if it was your building! Or does free speech only apply to things Elon likes?
Of course an event like this would cause me to rethink my position. But I don't think I would wait until it actually happened to my child.
People have been raising these kinds of concerns to free speech absolutists like Musk for a while, but until it impacts him they are theoretical concerns that aren't as important as his principles.
If he uses this personal experience as an opportunity to empathize with others and reconsider how Twitter handles speech which is legal but poses a safety risk to an individual or group then that is commendable.
Or, if he maintained his commitment to free speech in the face of personal danger to his family I would respect such a principled stance.
However, if he only bans those who might cause him (or people he likes) harm while allowing and even encouraging those who use free speech to incite harm against others then that seems hypocritical.
citizens deserve equal protection under the law. there's nothing special about his kid (or him). if anything, information about public figures, when in public, deserves less shielding.
And also at this point it's allegedly inciting violence, so his position might even be consistent given changing circumstances. Whether it actually is incitement is still debatable but a person of principle can still change their position without it being a flip flop. If Musk is taking legal action at least there is corresponding litigation for the account suspension for some sort of due process and objectivity.
Imagine it were your child. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t change any opinions or practices when it came to personal security?