Twitter can probably not use copyright to fight this, a Tweet probably does not fall under copyright because it is too short, right?
> There is not snapshotting of data - it's simply a URL that renders at request - an HTML iframe.
"Simply a URL", the resource to which it refers being rendered in an iframe, could easily be a snapshot - as it is on other sites. Hence to me this read like a non sequitur.
Heck, even taking a photo of the Mona Lisa is subject to copyright in the U.S under the theory there is creativity in the composition of the photo.
This seems unlikely. Journalists are pragmatists and won't abandon Twitter unless there is an alternative.
Now that Twitter is owned by a known bully (I don't use that word lightly), only the crappiest newspapers would fit that standard.
This seems unlikely.
I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.
There are tons of subreddits that are devoted to catching some person or another with questionable tastes or interests in saying something they shouldn't. In these instances, rather than linking to the post (which may result in a moderator taking it down or the poster realizing how badly they're being dragged), they instead take a screenshot since it's a bulletproof way to retain the content.
It's not very interesting to see an alleged champion of free speech allow speech he likes. It's far more telling to see what he does about speech he dislikes.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter....
When copyright expires in 125 years or whatever if the archive still exists they can publish them again.
Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government.
People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech only applies to government censorship, but they actually sound ignorant of the concept's millennia-long history pre-dating the discovery of America entirely.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
That an action doesn't breach the first amendment to the US constitution doesn't say all that much when it comes to whether it's consistent with the stated ideals of proponents of freedom of speech.
I've never seen this. I have seen people point out that Twitter isn't promoting freedom of speech and the somebody else conflating that with the first amendment of the U.S. constitution though.
[0]https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
The real debate is if society should value free speech.
And they should focus on busting up these trillion dollar monopolies because the amount of propaganda power they wield is unbelievable and should be reeled in for that reason alone. But as long as they're in cahoots with the very regulators that are supposed to care about this, that will never happen.
At least on HN, I’ve never seen this, except as a totem.
It's quite akin to opposing systematic racism from private businesses. You could argue that a private business should have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, and it shouldn't concern any outside parties. But when these actions begin to interfere with the ability of large segments of the population to go grocery shopping, use the toilet, get a job, or get an education, it becomes a larger social issue that is deeply concerning to anyone who believes in the principles that underly a free society.
I disagree. Historically, the only time people were refusing service to anyone, the people being refused service were black. Hippies were sometimes discriminated against. We've come a long way since the 1960s, but there are more than a few politicians/people who want to drag us back into the 1950s.
In Colorado, such an act would be illegal. Which makes many people in today's polarized society extremely angry as they want to discriminate as much as possible.
Rule 20.4 (page 18 of the PDF):
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited
https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/3%20CCR%20708-1.pdf?ruleVers...
These are regulations issued to support the administration of the state government.
Is it though?
Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means...
Certainly in the context of Musk's campaign, neither he nor most of his followers are genuine in their support for "free speech". Musk in particular has been a staunch supporter of censorship in practice, and has only paid lip service to free speech for clicks.
I think it unlikely that Ancient Athens was heavily influenced by US culture on the topic of free speech as an ideal: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/The-Athenian-i...
The idea predates the existence of the US.
> It is thought that the ancient [Athenian democratic principle](hyperlink) of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC.
The hyperlinked page on democratic principle notably has no mention of free speech.
I've replied to a sibling commenter on Athenian "free speech" parallels - much of their association with modern concepts is appropriation.
> The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations. Many countries have constitutional law that protects free speech.
> The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted during the French Revolution in 1789, specifically affirmed freedom of speech as an inalienable right.[7] Adopted in 1791, freedom of speech is a feature of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
Individual rights of expression predate the US and are part of a collection of ideals in a long tradition that finally exploded in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Don't forget how much of a grip the Church had on suppressing books and ideas, including meting out punishment.
The erasing of the history of freedom of speech including, within the US, forgetting the facts within the 20th century where it was primarily conservatives who advocated for suppression and censorship, is a very awful misreading.
Today the Zeitgeist is saying: freedom of speech is a silly American concept, and it's just to defend people on the hard right who should be deplatormed.
False, and false.
No, not at all. There are plenty of countries who go to greater lengths to protect their individual rights without the US even registering as a suggested influence. Most countries which managed to transition away from authoritarian oppressive regimes did grew political antibodies to ensure the right to freely express your ideas without being subjected to persecution as it happened in the not so distant past.
"the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689#Provisions...
Since we can't agree on a definition of "freedom of speech" this doesn't mean much.
In practice it seems to mean something is a "freedom of speech issue" when a speaker wants someone to not face social consequences for some action (For example an Elon Musk fan saying he shouldn't be charged with investor fraud because "freedom of speech"), and when a speaker wants someone to face social consequences they stay conveniently silent. (Say, an Elon Musk fan not complaining when he fires an employee for something they said).
For example, if I'm in line at McDonalds and the cashier tells me that I'm ugly and he hates my family, I should be able to say, "I've changed my mind, I'm not going to eat here". But not being able to apply consequence to speech prohibits me from doing even this simple act.
If they say they hate your family directly to you, sure, don’t eat there. But most speech that people disagree with and try to retaliate against the speaker isn’t on that level - it’s bits of speech taken out of context, indirect expressions of opinion like donations to candidates, etc. People are being manipulated by professional propagandists, and they’re following along enthusiastically. It’s polarizing the country, and it’s actively harmful to the stability of the democracy.
Are you saying that pro propagandists don't have the right to their speech? Is the ability to persuade the problem? It seems like half of the reason why we speak is to persuade.
We both stated in our posts that the reactions must be legal on their own. So lets take illegal actions out of the picture. But if it is legal for me to start a boycott about your product, I think it is problematic to say it is now illegal to do so as a reaction to something you said. If boycotting is so problematic, just make it illegal all up.
The problem with our country isn't the speech. Its the fact that people are easily manipulated with bad data. But I don't see how prohibiting legal actions resulting from free speech is going to be helpful. All you've done is infringed on another "freedom". We should instead just be actively working on better educating people. Critical thinking and logic skills should be fundamental in our education system.
I don't think anyone is proposing making it illegal to boycott, it's just counter to a culture of free speech to try to punish people because you disagree with their opinions. That culture isn't legally protected, except the part where the government can't infringe on it.
And... that's really what it comes down to. Billionaires wanting to keep their profits.
As far as going after a person personally, I don't agree with that, but that's usually not how this plays out. Some idiot says something stupid, then advertisers stop advertising, because they know people like me actually give a shit about this stuff and I can make do without random piece of shit #726 cluttering the floor of my house.
Just not adding punishments to one side while granting money, privilege, and respect to another is the current state of propaganda for folks like Bill Gates.
If you make something that agrees, you'll be showered in funding, attention, and branding, but if you make something that disagrees, you're on your own. It's a retaliation for disagreeing
Going a bit further: not being able to apply consequences to speech is itself curtailing your speech, so you literally can't have one without the other!
No, not really.
Your right to speech isn't infringed if someone does not share your personal opinion. You're always able to express your mind about how profoundly you disagree or how wrong you feel everyone around you is.
What you cannot do is go around strong-arming people to shut up or stop expressing ideas you don't share. That is not a way to protect your right to free speech. That's just fascism 101.
I can't stop others from doing business with you, though I could convince them
Not really.
I have no right to show you the door at the local library or cinema or car wash or local cafe, or at your own home. At most, that lies in the right to property,which only applies to things I personally own. Consequently, in a free and open society "showing someone the door" is a right that's only at the reach of private property owners or people mandated by said owners to manage some aspect of it.
Even then, that right to "show someone the door" because you don't like their opinions is not all powerful and is limited in some jurisdictions which also recognize the right to equality and non-discrimination. Think about it for a second: how can you have a free and open society if you do not have tolerance?
AKA "they make content I don't like."
I intentionally picked obvious example instead of anything nuanced.
Why? Its a private company..
Any legal pretense one could use to deny freedom of speech and expression to a company could also be used to deny any group - political parties, religions, specific races or genders, the press, etc.
E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as a right, but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
It also specifically recognises a bunch more rights associated with media. Some rights protect journalists, such as the right to source confidentiality (which isn't even law in the US, let alone a constitutional right), and the right to elect representatives to their employers'editorial team. On the flipside, there's also rights protecting the public from media interference: regulators have the power (and responsibility) to prevent the consolidation of media ownership, and the media's ownership and sources of income must be made public.
1A on its own does not do this, but AIUI a subsequent amendment (I think one of the reconstruction amendments?) has been interpreted to apply the restrictions in the constitution to state governments as well.
This has been true when 1st Amendment has been passed, but has not been true since SCOTUS ruled that 14th Amendment incorporates 1st Amendment for states. Today, states are just as bound by 1st Amendments as the federal government is.
> but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
That’s interesting, but what does it mean in practice? Can you give me an example of a situation where this right applied in Portugal? I want to know if this would actually protect us Americans from something that the government is currently not prohibited from doing.
You are free to post on your website and Twitter is free to manage their website.
To me the first amendment is much more interesting. Its roots in ancient Greece. Its importance in sustaining a democratic government. The paradoxical nature of trying to extend its reach to private entities...
John Stuart Mill specifically calls this out in the harm principle. From what I've observed, people who invoke "it's freedom of speech philosophy" rarely understand that even as a philosophy, free speech not a blank check to be able to say whatever you want w/o consequence. Or they equate it to freedom of reach.
Private spaces? Nonsense. You can't go in to a restaurant and start ranting about the Jews or whatever, and then say that they're violating the "ideal of free speech" when they kick you out. Free speech means you get to espouse an idea, not force people to hear it.
The disagreement is about whether Twitter is a public or private space. It seems to me to be pretty obviously private, and AFAICT the people who argue that it's public don't have much justification beyond "I want it to be, because I or someone I like got kicked out."
There are laws that try to codify the concepts. The 1st amendment is one of such laws, but it only applies to the US government. It doesn't mean that the concept it is based on is held to the same restrictions.
Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are not you should welcome more government regulation to counter the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than one.
It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always changing times.
It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.
But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich, then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate others into making them more and more.
But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the fact that in either case we let them get away with it and ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the true damning of our society that these people are given all this wealth and power in the first place, and after the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And what they do isn’t pretty at all.
The difference between me, clever socially but idiot as an entrepreneur, and Musk, the definition of asshole but with good instincts, is enough I suppose ?
B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?
I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns out to benefit Elon Musk.
I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.
For the left the common enemy is often greedy exploitative capitalists. For the right it's often socialists and/or communists.
Or people who believe in democracy and voting lately.
Are you just noticing this?
Step two is whining endlessly and loudly. Step three he figures out a way to game government subsidies while whining about government.
Crony capitalism it’s called colloquially.
Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was undermining them.
Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in finance changed to “save”, banks raised rates on savings accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.
Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers most likely to be hurt long term.
So yeah it’s basically division politics. The only reason it works like this is because of memory this is how it works.
NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher and higher wages is what’s creating inflation, and they want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down. Manufacturing consent by repeating “truth”.
Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions. They are protecting the net worth class based system that keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which families thrive or die.
Twitter's legal and human rights teams were more valuable than is commonly understood.
Many of these people have been sitting in prison for two years without being charged with anything, and many of them who have been charged have only been charged with minor misdemeanors. Feel free to go look at ALL the cases, not just the handful cherry-picked by the Ministers of Propaganda.
Additionally, a settlement was reached to literally call himself a founder. At this point it's boring semantics of what "founder" means.
But go ahead and keep trying and failing to poke holes to push your unfounded narrative.
It’s a fact that Musk turned Tesla into what it is today. It’s possible to get that point across without falsely claiming you’re the founder of the company. Words have meanings.
> You are completely incapable of having an honest conversation about this
Yeah only other people have that issue!
But separation agreements need to be signed by both parties, they can't fire you and immediately say "btw no talking bad about us".
If there’s a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of blue heart emojis, I’m not aware of it; it’s not abusive, it’s not hateful conduct, it’s not illegal, and presuming there wasn’t personally identifying information in the screenshot, it’s not private information by Twitter’s own definition as linked above.
If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other tech company, do you really think Twitter would have quickly taken it down? I honestly don’t.
Freedom of speech is different than the first amendment. The first amendment prohibits the government from limiting freedom of speech, but the concept itself is more general than the law.
Leaking a private slack can be political activism for worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether particular tweet was acceptable or not.
Unless she's acting as a "whistleblower", then that argument carries zero weight.
The whole point of free speech ideology is that corporations aren't supposed to be unaccountable judges and executioners, and this should stay up until she is actually convicted of breaking some law.
If Twitter (or Elon as owner of his private company) wants to take down a post that exposes internal dealings then they're completely within their right to do that. But that doesn't relate at all to the other, more important conversation of Twitter limiting certain voices (Trump, et al). Stop mixing the two.
I remember some years back when Microsoft fired an employee for taking pictures of some boxes of brand new Macintosh computers on their campus and publishing it on the internet as a way to lightly smear the company (for using non-MS products apparently). MS was fully within their right to do that and nobody screamed "freedom of speech" back then.
But here a private company is executing its own unilateral judgement by their own clearly biased moderators.
Trying to create vagueness where there is none seems like motivated reasoning
Another ironic thing is the number of people who lectured anyone disagreeing with twitter's content moderation decisions that twitter is a commercial enterprise that can do whatever it pleases (usually this means yielding to activist pressure) and who are now acting indignant when Musk acts like he owns the place (which he does).
I don't know! Probably not. It is all a political struggle and Musk for sure pursues his own goals in it. But if all this results in a twitter that is more interesting, open and less prudish than before, I think it is worth it. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
That being said, I don't disagree with the sentiment here in the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're looking for.
Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.
But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and the heavy handed approach the new management is employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is being done through the normal channels (who's to say there's even someone on the other side of that channel?), while much is being done by direct instruction from the new management.
There are some coarse-grained things that he can do, like fire the the top execs. The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff. He's got to lay off half the company to begin to even get some kind of handle on all of the machinations going on outside of his team's review.
That was completely fake news indspired by a comedian calling himself "Rahul Ligma [Balls]"
You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative. Remember when he pretended he was going to personally review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the details for.
It's not a free speech issue.
Edit: that said, I'm not sure it's been confirmed yet whether the employee just deleted the tweet themself - which would be a very different story.
That's an entirely different issue. The issue at hand here is Twitter removing Twitter internal confidential material that Twitter employees agreed to not publish as a condition of employment.
This is contract law, not free speech law.
If they don't, they have no obligation to remove it.
But banning someone or their Tweets on Twitter for posting an internal corporate communication is wrong (at least, it's not the Twitter I want to see). That's using one's privileged position as steward of a public platform to enforce internal rules in an extraordinary way. If how Twitter moderates users on its platform is a free speech issue (I believe it is), this is just as much of one.
Considering there is already some legal questions being raised about the firings - and I'm not arguing in favor of the merits of those cases - there is some possible scenario where an internal leak may be justified.
Cause if they use the service under a personal agreement with Twitter that is separate from their employment, then removing the Tweet isn't really so actionable under their employment agreement.
I mean, I guess it probably isn't separate, but I'm also not sure why people are so eager to pat Twitter on the back for using their position to control the public communications of employees/former employees.
Their HR and PR people are busy enough today.
This isn’t a broad defense of Musk or Twitter. Just a comment that there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy around any corner.
You have time for the things you really care about.
If you're really a free speech absolutist then this is a violation of that principle (not of a law, but of a principle).
Workers should be able to freely talk about their condition with other workers, both internally and externally to the company. And as an absolutist, then the ability of individuals to freely speak without any chilling effects must take precedence over the companies concerns. The employees are effectively being "cancelled" and much more effectively than the people who most complain about that actually have their ability to speak being impaired.
For example, failing to pay your mortgage is not theft. It is a contract dispute.
If you freely accept payment in exchange for not revealing certain secrets, that does not violate your free speech rights in any way.
I literally wasn't talking about free speech rights.
Yeah, except Musk himself already did that:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
I mean it’s his company he can do as he likes, but that was one of the first things he did after the buyout.
I guess it depends on your definition of corporate wrong-doing. If Elon just looked for all posts that include his name and he's firing everyone who was critical of him, that might stretch the definition for most people. That could even cross over into creepy big-brother like oversight and might dissuade people from working at Elon led companies (or maybe attracts people who want him searching their private messages for references to him).
Everyone who works for Elon, and half the people who don't, how heanages his companies.
I can only imagine how much collateral the banks demanded to fund Musk's boondoggle.
It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.
If you’re a “free speech platform”, who are you to adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is malicious vs a brave whistleblower?
This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with their direction, because right now it appears that this was all about changing the censors, not removing them.
For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for illegally downloading a spreadsheet containing team goals, metrics, and status updates (out of the charges against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to -- the rest were dropped).
Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where that can even be considered a point of debate.
Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where people will misinterpret a statement in the worst possible light just so they can argue against it on the internet.
Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.
And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.
The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.
It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.
That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but it was one of the claims made.
Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.
So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?
Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's also obviously hypocritical given Musk's approach.
Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.
There's a difference between removing a politically neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules and censoring political news which benefit a certain party.
So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content. And the judge would reject the suit and scold Twitter for wasting the courts time, and tell Twitter that if it wants something removed from its own website then it should just remove it.
Generally I think you can only sue the person who violated the NDA, not anyone further down the chain who posted the material. The same is even true for classified info in most cases - the NY Times won a famous Supreme Court cases about that over publishing the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Same principle that protected publishing the Snowden leaks, etc.
> So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content.
is this how it actually works, or is it make a request to the website and sue if request is deemed unduly denied? if the latter, then some Twitter HR/lawyer person can make a request to a Twitter moderation person and the request would be immediately approved. At that point, there's no "difference" in the procedures for internal/external moderation requests.
That's nonsense, because under that interpretation of the law no news agency could ever report anything with anonymous sources, or people "familiar with the situation", because under your definition they are now violating an agreement about which they know nothing.
I think there are a lot of things that are legal that may cause civil penalties. E.g. there's no law banning the dissemination of screenshots of Twitter's internal Slack (so the screenshot is legal speech), but Twitter may have grounds to sue the leaker for breach of a private contract.
"""
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
"""
I don't think it's reasonable to interpret this as referring to any speech which constitutes a civil wrong. There is simply no way for a third party to have the slightest clue based on the content of a tweet whether that tweet causes someone to suffer a loss, or constitutes a breach of contract,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...
The world is full of hypocrisy and Elon has his share. But I don't really care if the guy is a hypocrite; I'd be more interested in discussing if the move is right. If it violated internal company policy, or revealed internal identities or anything of that sort, then maybe it was the right move?
I'm just glad I don't have to make these decisions.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
Extreme cases i.e. leaked passwords are under hacked materials policy.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info... https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
The employees probably sign NDAs. It's only a civil suit, but I think that would still fall outside the realm of what he's been preaching. Note, I'm not taking his side or anyone else's.
It is usually illegal or in breach of contract to share internal company communications. This isn't the "gotcha" you're looking for.
Twitter is using a privileged position to protect it's own IP. It's fine for a company to do, but just doesn't really sit with "we're just running a public square for the good of the world"
This is why hate speech I think is a much more controversial topic than copyright.
This is, to me, more like your neighbor ripping down your derogatory sign about them because he doesn't like what it says, and the neighbor happens to also be your boss and landlord.
Same Twitter employee today (November 4): furiously posting on Twitter about having gotten fired from Twitter.
Karma?
Ref:
Is it because people feel special advertising that they're part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers? Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would still be true.
Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be completely insufferable performance artists.
IYKYK.
Everyone: what about our freedom of speech?
Enforcers: those are our rules
New Boss: You're playing by my rules now
Ex-enforcers: what bout our freedom of speech?
New Boss: Welcome to your machine
Somehow the notion of rights is being misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear.
You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / they cannot be required to enable your opinion.
he is, as we speak—and will continue to prove in the future—that “the censors” have been correct all along, social spaces of a certain number of people, if you don’t want the visitors to flee en masse, will need moderation to keep things from breaking down.
The outcry is real. Many many bot networks create massive amounts of cry content.
substitute "richest" for "most powerful" and it gets worse
I guess it is just a numbers game, but this whole page is one of the more unintelligent threads on HN I have ever seen.
...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context.
Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To really document the heck out of how insane those years were.
escalator
My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.
Here is what happened, the documents gets split into 5000 tweets. Twitter will randomly include one tweet in a feed and someone will respond. For example one person said what npr is calling to overthrow the government because the specific text has a reference to that.
Didn't see any unAmerican comments. Saw comments like tweeting 5000 tweets is a stupid thing to do.
Not sure if nutjob should be used in 2022 to label someone you disagree with as having mental issues. Mental illness is a serious issue and using it a weapon is not something to be casually used
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-react-to-np...
Obligatory Mitch Hedberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHopAo_Ohy0
Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad comment on the state of affairs we live in now.
I know I used the formal capitalization of the specific site BuzzFeed, but it is a pretty good phrase if used as buzz feed. "Journalists" that try to make a story out of "what's the buzz" is more of the underlying point. That's just an aggregator. There's not complexity to the story that a journalist has pulled together. There's no getting a feel for the person being interviewed to feel if they might have more info to be pulled out to expand the story.
Having said that, there is a time and a place to a feel for the buzz, and places like BuzzFeed are perfectly adequate at doing that. But to confuse a buzz feed as a piece of news/journalism is just insulting to journalism.
He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet. They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.
When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things.
If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement, I would delete it too.
It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them". And that is me being euphemistic about it.
Who decides what is „news” and what is „fake-news” ? (Few PC ppl in big corpos?).
Why sayin that „sure you can say what you want, but you have to defend your words” is so controversial ?
Are ppl afraid of being proven wrong or look stupid ?
Censorship at its best. Not optimistic about Twitter and where it's heading to.
Always a lot of assumptions in the comments of every Twitter story I have read over the last week or so… and so far most of the assumptions tend to be pretty wrong when the dust settles.
Smart journalists destroy their own relevancy? Barely anybody reads their articles, that's why they post and link to it from Twitter. And thereby grow a personal audience they can take to any other newspaper.
It is a bit frustrating how people refuse to understand the difference between "you can't speak this because we don't like what you said" and "you can't post internal company privileged information while being employee at the same company". Supporting freedom of speech doesn't mean Musk would endorse anybody doing anything, including divulging company's internal communications publicly (and without permission from people whose communications are getting revealed, probably).
> then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
That has long been the case, Twitter was removing and blocking messages (and people) for much less reasonable causes than leaking private communications of Twitter employees.
This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.