one of the big things about mastodon to me is how do you tell someone faking an account from the actual "person" like a journalist. Go to their web page? The profile on their "magazine"/"news site"? Is it unique or is there some way via mastodon to find them?
There's no formal way for consistent verification of a person across activitypub but Mastodon provides a way of verifying ownership of one or multiple webpages by a specific account. If an account has any links in their bio - if those links are accompanied by a checkmark they're the verified owner of that linked page.
Journalists could potentially do this with author pages on their publication's websites if the publication added support. Alternatively many journalists have personal websites/blogs which they may already have verified.
For example, Micah Lee & IGD News have both done this on their Mastodon profiles listed above.
The other approach is just to self-host your own personal single-user instance as Tony Webster has done.
> It's Going Down is a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist + anti-colonial movements across so-called North America. Our mission is to provide a resilient platform to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action.
I think they're pretty cringe and LARPy, but rather doubt they have violated the Twitter TOS in any way. They mostly publish cranky op-eds and overdramatic accounts of political demonstrations.
I don't know what's "cringe" about the excellent "It's Going Down" podcast[0], which opens every episode with a lightning-round of under-reported headlines that answer the question of what, exactly, is "going down."
I think it’s about journalists trying to keep the live location thing going which Twitter tos was updated to ban (reporting someone’s live location on Twitter is considered doxing)
This might be the first post in this thread stating the alleged actual reason for the bans: they posted screenshots of the location tracking or linked to the Mastodon tracker account, breaking the rule against sharing real-time locations. That's the claim at least. Also, Musk states that these bans are not permanent and the accounts will be reinstated: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603591994244071424 He also posted a poll on the suspension time: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073
The recent free speech angle many tech leaders have taken has left a horrible, horrible taste in my mouth. An article comparing trust & safety to "censorship teams" made waves all around twitter last night, including andreessen and musk.
It has nothing to do with speech but everything to do with making sure they know who's in charge. None of them will say anything about this. Despicable.
I guess the question we need to answer is if Twitter is a public square? Or should be? I thin it's no to the first, and maybe to the second.
In any case it's not currently public property, so users don't have a right to be on Twitter.
But is it a place of public accommodation? And if so, how does that bind Twitter? If someone talks enough trash that it's clear they want to start a fight, a bar can kick that person out. No question. But what if they're kicked out unfairly? What is the line the bar can't cross in kicking people out, and is that a suitable line in the sand to use for Twitter? I don't know.
Do we need a cyberspace public square? I think we do. Should it be Twitter? What would that look like? Public-private adventure?
> Do we need a cyberspace public square? I think we do.
Why is the web not that public square? Your website is your own personal space. No one can tell you what to do there. No one can stop you from speaking.
Twitter is not the web. Twitter's website is Musk's personal space. User's have no rights. If you disagree, point to where those rights come from.
A public square is property owned by a government. In the U.S. anyone can place themselves on public property and speak without being inhibited by the government.
That is not true in all countries, and even in the US is not true on private property.
Literally the entire argument musk made for re-allowing a bunch of people who had been banned for calling for LGBT people to be allowed or assaulted, or for more generally being nazi-supporting shitheads, was that twitter is a public square, and that he is a free speech absolutist.
So the problem people are having is that he still gets to come out in public talking about free speech, when that is objectively bullshit, or that any of the changes being made have anything to do with "free speech".
From what I've seen of Twitter screenshots, some of these journalists (such as Drew Harwell) were simply covering the suspension of @joinmastodon (discussion of which is occurring at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34007012).
The list is a lot longer than that. The interesting bit is that this will inevitably end with Elon banning every reporter out there because if he kills an account someone else will get assigned the 'Elon beat' and then as soon as that person pens a word that doesn't suit Elon that account will be gone too.
There's literally millions of places you can go to have conversations while completely ignoring the news, I'm not sure what you feel is missing beyond a vicarious feeling of power.
I definitely would make that case. Lots of news was broken on Twitter over the last years, including some pretty in-depth investigative reporting. Also in places that otherwise would not be figuring very high on the radar. Some of the Ukraine reporting on Twitter is Pulitzer level.
Either you don't actually use the platform and are just repeating things you've heard, or you are being melodramatic. Lots of news gets published first on Twitter. I feel no need to insinuate such assertions.
You know that Twitter has a blocklist that you can control yourself? It's pretty easy to use too, just two clicks and you'll never see an account again. As for where to sign up, typically you go to the website you want to sign up for and then click 'Signup'.
Right now that's the bottom right button when you visit if you are not logged in, it has the text 'sign up' on it to help guide you.
The blocklist isn't a practical solution to GP's problem, and I'm pretty sure (having read other things you've written) that you're smart enough to know this.
There are many journalists on Twitter and they often show up in threads and/or have their comments retweeted. If GP doesn't want to see them (and I can empathize!), they'd have to click through to the profile of every tweet in their feed whose author they don't recognize, check the description to see if they're a journalist and, if so, block them. And they'd need to do this forever, as there will always be unrecognised accounts showing up in the feed.
> Among the reasons given for blocking users from the server are that it is allegedly populated by “click-bait/tabloid journalists” who “can be expected to collect, search through, and misinterpret anything you say with the goal to share this publicly to an as big audience as possible, enabling hate and harassment to any one as long as it gives them clicks [sic].” Others who have blocked the server say that its members are likely to be “surveillance capitalists” or “mainstream propagandists.”
This issue was over-emphasized, probably because it affected reporters and seemed exciting. There is not mass defederating from journa.host. Note that even in that article, it’s only 45 servers defederating a single journalism-oriented server.
Twitter at least made an effort to combat misinformation, while Mastodon apparently doesn't want journalists yet allows antivaxers free reign. Leaving moderation as a free for all is not the sort of platform I'm interested in.
What exactly is Elon's end game for Twitter? Ban all competing companies' accounts? Ban companies that refuse to advertise on it? Ban prominent (non alt-right) journalists? Ban opposing political views? Ban parody/comedy accounts? Ban all people disagreeing with him? Eventually there will be no one left to ban other than Russian bots and the Parler/Truth Social crowd. He could have just bought one of them for a lot cheaper.
This was also true a month ago, but if you work at Twitter you should really start looking for another job.
Have you considered that he and his extremely wealthy and conservative co-investors[1] simply wanted to destroy twitter? Judging by the antipathy some on this forum pour on the site, it seems to have struck a nerve with certain people.
Musk has put $20-$30B of his own money into Twitter, which he got by selling TSLA shares, which in turn cratered the company's share price and the value of the rest of his holdings in it. Overall he has lost 40% of his net worth (like $110 billion) this year, largely due to this single deal. No one wants to destroy anything that badly.
And the funny thing is that he was easily one of the most popular personalities on Twitter even before any of this. He simply had to do...nothing.
This is a lot of money, but consider the sheer power in having the nearest thing to a real-time global communication network by the throat. Facebook is also global, but it's never been associated with breaking news the way Twitter is.
Getting mainstream journalists onto the 21st century equivalent of a news ticker in your pocket was the brilliant strategic move early on; one day it was a website for nerds and weirdos to talk about nothing, but before every TV and print news outlet had a twitter presence and was inviting users to 'join the conversation' and connect with breaking news. It is the equivalent of owning global radio infrastructure a century ago.
What you say and that he presumably has some pride, which must now be bruising, are the only reasons I doubt that it's all intentional. Truly, it's incredible that he could self-own himself to this degree. As you say, he was on top of the world, and now...
The big question is how it all ends. This is full on self-destruct at this point and with an ego that fragile there are all kinds of terrible outcomes possible. Musk should lay off Twitter, spend some time AFK and then focus on Tesla and SpaceX and consider Twitter a giant mistake, hand it off to others to run. Obviously he's never going to follow that advice but I genuinely believe that to be his best course of action at this point.
But remember that Musk very much didn't want to buy twitter. He was forced to, and in the process of doing that, has saddled Twitter with a level of debt it has no prayer of being able to service.
I could totally believe that he would prefer that it died.
I don’t believe he wanted to buy Twitter to begin with but was forced to because he made public statements
Now he says he believes that in free speech but the problem with absolutism is you realize that you box yourself in to a dead end real quick.
Now he says one thing but does another because he said some absolute things and now it’s impossible for him to be consistent. But he can’t retract his absolute statement about free speech because that’s an extremely bad look. Well, someone with charisma could pull it off but Musk is not that man
You’d think someone like Musk would have wised up to absolutes being something only kids do by his age
Only Sith speak in absolutes or something something
Yeah, I think it is important to remember that he tried to back out of the transaction. He might be trying to form a plan (like the 'everything' app angle), but if he had something good, he would have had to been forced.
All it took was a crowd booing him for Musk to get so bent out of shape that he abandoned all pretenses of being in favor of free speech. That must have really hurt his feelings.
Now is the time the "I like Elon because he is a free speech absolutist" crowd will start to gaslight and say that this is good for Twitter and that it was never about free speech for them at all.
The best explanation I have seen to date is that it really was about being able to sell a whole raft of TSLA without cratering the market. That he ended up actually having to buy Twitter was a bit of a complication, the whole 'Champion of Free Speech' thing came later.
This doesn’t make any sense at all. If buying twitter was just a complication, why is he being so active in it? If I found myself accidentally buying a company outside my wheelhouse, I would find some suitable management and not touch it an all. Or make small changes, Berkshire Hathaway style. Not take the helm and for everyone.
If Tesla can't show growth beating market expectations, or if he can't get money out of Twitter, or if the Fed keeps raising rates, he could be forced to sell TSLA shares to deleverage, so the worse the Twitter situation looks, the more investors avoid TSLA, compounding his problems.
I am convinced at this point that the "cloudy head" that Musk reported during his first COVID infection pre-vaccination is an ongoing medical condition, perhaps a mild encephalitis, leading to rash actions because the brain fog renders him incapable of thinking through consequences . https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-musk/e...
I mean, some of the journalists that he's banned tonight are pretty well hated by a lot of people already. A few thousand more trolls and dozen more death threats in their social media isn't really going to move much for them.
It is hard to follow the chains of banning because they happen so fast, but @donie was apparently suspended for posting a quote from LAPD: "LAPD's Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet."
Then @MattBinder posted "uh i just shared this straight news update just posted by @donie and moments later he's suspended" (with a screenshot of that) and got banned himself.
So it's not just links to ElonJet, or links to reporting about that, it's anything Elon related.
Musk is using claims of "doxxing" to garner support for his opposition to ElonJet & his claims of stalking in LA are central to that. Boosting of the LAPD's statement that "No crime reports have been filed" weakens the plausibility of his general campaign against ElonJet, so I'd say that's the specific connection here.
This is the first time I've really truly felt that wow, he's actually going to kill Twitter. When he forces people with an audience to move elsewhere, that audience is gradually going to follow.
If Musk is in a Brewster's Millions scenario, he's doing fantastically well. The rules stipulate that he must not spend his money foolishly, but after spending his money on a leveraged buyout of a company that could reasonably have been worth a particular amount at time of offer, driving down the value of the company with foolish decisions is within the rules.
The question in my mind is will he use his own money to keep Twitter afloat. He drove the advertisers away and threatened to sue them even though Twitter isn't profitable.
I'm always fascinated by this. At this point, every couple of days Musk does something comically awful, and there are posts saying "that's it, I used to like him, but this is too much". Like, _how was all the other stuff_ not sufficient evidence that there was a problem?
A couple of people I know through Twitter said it wasn't going to be so quick even if it would happen eventually. I have to admit that the speed is something I am surprised at, I had Musk figured for more smarts than this.
You should be able to speak your mind and find credible information easily.
Twitter is an open service that’s home to a world of diverse people, perspectives, ideas and information. We’re committed to protecting the health of the public conversation — and we take that commitment seriously.
Account and service integrity
We do our best to keep people with bad intent from creating or maintaining accounts, compromising the accounts of others, or artificially boosting harmful content. This helps us protect the safety, security, and credibility of Twitter accounts.
Had Google had kept Plus running, they’d probably be reaping the rewards right now, being seen as the obvious refuge for disgruntled Twitter users to migrate to instead of what exists now, which is dozens of small, fragmented, networks. Much the same way Reddit provided a natural home for Digg users after the botched v4 release.
Plus was intended to defend against Facebook, but turned out to be more like Twitter without the arbitrary character limit.
Why would anyone want to build a replacement and inherit all that content moderation mess? It's an unsolvable problem, and companies are now steering clear of social media for easier to monetize products.
I get the sense that a lot of these suspensions are due to the moderation teams within twitter being decimated, and instead having all this functionality automated within Twitter.
Maybe. I mean, on my mastodon feed, I have a filter to automatically skip over any mention of 'twitter', 'elon', or 'musk'. I guess they're doing the same thing?
His metamorphosis into Trump is happening really quickly, isn't it?
He clearly has no one close who is willing to be honest with him. Just a bunch of bootlickers (Sacks) and lackeys (Calacanis). He also looked genuinely surprised that he was booed so hard in SF; therefore you will see him lean ever harder to the one audience that will give him the adulation he needs: the authoritarian right.
I agree about the statement of being surrounded by yes-people, but how does getting booed in an SF club (which must be pretty much a badge of honor at this point?) link to the "authoritarian right"? Does that mean that SF is, or Elon at least thinks so, predominantly "authoritarian left"? And how is that any better?
On the whole I think that the language from figures like Elon have indeed become too Infowars-ish, but I dont really see your angle of "not SF equals authoritarian right". At least that's what I got...?
Did you see the clip at all? Elon looks genuinely flummoxed. He has no idea how disliked he is, because, as I said, he's surrounded by sycophantic goons. Getting repeatedly and viciously booed at a Dave Chappelle show -- regardless of where it is -- is incredibly notable. No one on the far left, even in SF, is attending that show; not since Dave forgot what it was like to be on the bottom.
As far as the authoritarian right, who else do you think the Fauci tweet was aimed at? It was aimed at the only audience that remains to give him the attention he wants.
Now ask yourself: who else attacks journalists? Who else acts capriciously and hypocritically while braying about free speech?
How does getting booed at an SF club equal incredibly and generally disliked? I find your extrapolation from an extremely small sample of ~100-300 people to, what quite obviously sounds like, literally 1-10-100 million or more people, very bizarre. How is that logical?
I'm quite neutral to all this political stuff. Instead, it's this mathematical nonsense of extrapolating from extremely small subsets to make extremely general sweeping statements, like "booed (not even universally) at an SF club" => "lots of people dislike Elon", that really gets to me.
Also, Elon has, many times, expressed that he isn't politcally "right" or "left", so to use a very small number (1? <5?) tweets to say that an individual is "authoritarian right" is, IMHO, just the same nonsense as before.
I'll bite. As public evidence shows, the vast majority of SF residents are politically left-leaning and vote Democrat. The Twitter Files just surfaced what was already publicly available. e.g. Employee donations to the political left eclipse anything else.
So, as a figure who has A) been critical of the recent political left and B) has been "sympathetic" to the recent political right, of course will get booed.
That's where my "badge of honor" statement comes from.
Honestly, I think two things: A) This is a total nothingburger, because it was obviously going to happen, and B) This is way more of a poor impression of SF residents by being crybabies at what is meant to be entertainment, than Elon, who didn't get much of a word other than "Hi Dave" before a fight broke out.
This Youtuber Modern Mba did a video on Twitters history. It’s quite informative of all the backstabbing and betrayal that has gone on in the company so far
What I never understood about the “Twitter is a private company” argument is: just because Twitter is legally allowed to do something doesn’t make it moral, and doesn’t mean we should encourage them to do it. Twitter banned a lot of vile people (e.g. Alex Jones, Milo, Trump) which happened to align with popular sentiment but too many times I see legal authority conflated with moral authority.
The GP comment points out that it doesn’t even have direct legal relevance, which is their point. The response about being a private company is related to that, not the question of legality vs. morality, even if it perhaps (by responding to the First Amendment claim) implicitly offer some non-zero value to legality.
I really enjoy watching elon’s billionaire tandian fan club rush onto twitter to defend him. cyan Bannister, Mike Solana, Garry Tan, most of the YC crowd, etc. If I hadn’t met all of these clowns I would assume they were all bots
It’s like being at a donkey show, but instead of the girl sucking the donkey, the vip row is doing it
For the nth time: that's not why people are upset. People are upset because Elon positioned himself as some kind of free speech absolutist and turns out to be a worse dictator than anybody even had predicted.
It's the hypocrisy that does it, not the fact that he runs the place as he sees fit.
I saw this coming a mile away and closed my account on the day before the sale became final. Utterly predictable. More than a decade to build it up and 30 seconds to close it. Too bad.
This was EXACTLY the same case against Twitter though: they are obviously politically bent, but they market themselves as the public square. They pitch over and over that they absolutely don't moderate on the basis of politics. If they simply admitted they're politically-bent, that'd be fine, but they don't. That's what Elon is doing now, that's what Twitter did then.
To be clear I'm not a fan of what Elon is doing either (because he's doing the exact same thing Twitter did: posture as unbiased while obviously being biased), but I also recognize the only thing that's changed here is the direction of the bend.
Twitter was a public square. Right now it is slated to become the Elon adulation machine, which is about as far from a public square as you can be. Twitter as it was was far from perfect, but at least they were trying to ride the line and to find enough middle ground that as long as people behaved they'd be able to post there. The current Twitter isn't even trying.
As for the politics, if Elon is free to do as he pleases (which as far as I'm concerned he is as long as he drops the hypocrisy), so were the previous Twitter owners. You can't have it both ways.
I had a blocklist with > 10K entries and about 12K followers when I quit, Twitter was mostly what you made it. For me it served a lot of purposes and I got a lot of mileage out of it, and even if I disagreed with plenty of people there on plenty of subjects as a rule it worked fine in that capacity.
Twitter banned Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, and a sitting president, and suppressed information about a huge corruption scandal that invoked a presidential candidate that helped elect the worst president in recent history.
If you have been following discussions here you know perfectly well that everyone agrees it's his right to lash out as arbitrarily as he wants. He can zap every journalist! Any politician that has ever irritated him! Comedians whose jokes fail to amuse him! He is perfectly entitled to do that and I have yet to see anyone saying saying he needs to be hauled in front of Congress or whatever.
IT's just amusing to laugh at the wholly predictable revelation that he's a giant hypocrite with the emotional continence of a 6 year old. While a lot of people considered him an asshole, he started the week as the richest man in the world. He looks to be ending it as a punchline.
>Where's all the "private company, they can do what they want" voices now?
Twitter belongs to Elon, so he can do whatever he wants with it. Other people can rightfully call him a hypocrite though.
Hopefully, Twitter's userbase will mostly vanish except for some far-right radicals that love him, and the company will implode, taking Elon's money with it. I'm not so sure, though. The general public usually seems to love being abused by big corporations, but not always.
No, the "leaks" did not reveal that Twitter was moderating on the basis of political opinion. They revealed that right wingers have a larger amount, in absolute terms, of moderation actions leveed against them.
But it could be the case that the side that uses "groomer" as a casual insult, surrounds drag shows armed with AR15s, propagated revenge porn of a political opponent's son, and follows a former President who's openly demanding the suspension of the US Constitution is actually just engaged in more TOS-violating behavior.
It could also not be the case, too, for what it's worth. But we don't know which is true given what's been revealed by the "leaks."
What we do know, for absolute certain, is that Musk's moderation behavior is nowhere remotely close to the free speech/public town square utopia that he pitched to the world. And hey, no one said it needed to be! Well, no one but he.
It actually did not. What it showed was that there was a lot of internal process around the banning of higher profile accounts and that they in fact had standards. If political opinion was the driver Trump would have been banned a lot earlier than he was.
Anybody who's worked content moderation at scale (like, products with 100+M users) would read the description and nod along understandingly. I think they did favor some democratic narratives, but personally I feel like that's the perogative of the company.
That's fair, but even so what I found admirable is mostly the restraint. If it had been me I would have wielded the ban hammer a lot more freely. Ditto HN by the way.
And I'm saying that as the former moderator of a 1M+ active accounts community.
I don't even find it despicable, just sad. I mentioned yesterday how it seemed as if he was on a quest to destroy it, quoting him as saying that the mere existence of social media was inhibiting civilization's conquest of Mars and putting human consciousness at risk.
Perhaps he concluded that he needs to destroy the public square in order to save it. Or that provoking sociocultural instability serves some grand strategic purpose, like Adrian Veidt in Watchmen (which looks more prescient by the day). It's also possible that he's having a psychotic break with or without the aid of very expensive drugs and that other than his brother nobody is in a position to tell the ubermensch with the giant balance sheet that he needs to several days of bed rest.
I mean, unnecessary but funny. I'd like to see how many of them smugly posted "well go create your own Twitter" in the wake of 2016 and again in 2020 over the pandemic coverage. If they're as popular as they seen to think they are, they'll have no problem taking their audience across to a new platform.
Sign up numbers on the instances of mastodon that they've since migrated to would seem to indicate that they are. Some have paused processing registration queues due to the rush.
The readers should be asking “why?” instead of harping.
There was an incident involving Elon’s son X shortly after the airport pickup, and it involved a very threatening stalker wearing mask and black sock-puppets, on one hand is an outline of a gun underneath the hand-sock. He jumped on the hood of the car (a felony in California). The escort driver (bodygaurd?) started filming the stalker, captured and posted his DMV-mandated un-obscured but dealer-issued auto license plate for all to see.
One journalist started doxxing a live location of Elon’s child, which of course all who retweeted got the swift ban hammer.
And @elonjet tracker got suspended for posting live manifest instead of its usual flight path/plan.
And more who retweeted its FAA manifest (but flight plan is ok) got banned as well.
So, there’s more to the story than media are letting on and it is all plainly seen on Twitter.
> And journalists started doxxing Elon, which of course all who retweeted got the swift ban hammer.
A journalist's job is to gather, compile, and publish information regardless of how flattering or unflattering the publication portrays its subject. Much of this information is obtained from public records, leaks, and anonymous insiders. What you call doxxing is investigative reporting.
Whether he comprehends it or not, Musk is repeating his predecessors' tactics during Hunter Biden and Wuhan Lab Theory fiascos. Rather ironic.
Aaron Rupar, Vox https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/twitter-aa...
(Rupar's substack: https://aaronrupar.substack.com/)
Donie O'Sullivan, CNN
Ryan Mac, NYT
Matt Binder, Mashable
Tony Webster, independent FOIA journalist https://mastodon.tonywebster.com/@tony/109520614559984242
Drew Harwell, Washington Post https://mastodon.social/@drewharwell/109520715471703069
Micah Lee, The Intercept https://infosec.exchange/@micahflee/109520666612242764
Keith Olbermann
It's Going Down (IGD_News) https://kolektiva.social/@igd_news