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.

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.

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?

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.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590384919829962752

> 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.

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.

As I say about my current and some previous employers' management, "the word 'why' doesn't apply here".

Reminds me of the "The Bear is Sticky with Honey" situation

Some of what happened since the twitter takeover looks like bumbling incompetence.

Some of it is obviously assisted by very powerful people. Maybe it's just Elon's internal security and forensics team. Maybe not.

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.

Banned again

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.

Huh? Are we in different universes?

That's been standard practice at Twitter for a few years now.

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.

This is an improvement.

> Content that shares location information related to a public engagement or event, such as a concert or political event, is also permitted.

On the other ElonJet can also just post on Mastodon.

On this latest update, without a doubt that narrative will repeat. Regardless of the sanity of any rule, it has to be framed in the narrative that the man spawned directly from hell. Had any minority leader announced this exact same policy, people would be on the benches cheering and clapping for this very healthy rule that improves safety.

Poor emotional control and a total lack of critical thinking skills. Confirm with downvotes.

a billionaire with unlimited resources suing a 19 year old for using public APIs. no one should support that.

Similarly, I support legal action against Musk in cases where his unhinged tweets do real world damage to people.

Oh, and we all know what it means when someone is publicly fixated on finding / bringing pedos to justice, right?

You mean absolutely nothing? He won that trial

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.

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.

So this assumption that I'm pro Musk is your limitation in seeing the world in a pro/anti-Musk simplistic binary.

You're a product of the culture wars. You think in binary narratives.

You say that but your other opinions say otherwise. It's obvious to everyone, like a child lying and thinking the adults can't tell.

If you think this policy is a good idea on merit yet a bad idea solely because it came from Musk, then you're clouded in judgement.

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.

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.

He said:

"My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

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.

“My take on another thread is perfect and rational and flawless and anyone who downvotes is an emotional wokemob idiot”.

Seems like a flawlessly rational take my dude. Def the sort of discourse you’re trying to “encourage”.

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?

ADS-B Exchange use information gathered by private individuals and there is no law that require to hide something.

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."

https://www.flightradar24.com/how-it-works

The question I'm asking myself now is less about whether this policy would result in a good change, but more about the process to make such policies.

Is it just me who wants more of a voice/representation in how our platforms are governed?

For those interested in exercising that vote: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-dea...

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).

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.

But I agree, it is his platform now. Ugh.

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.

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.

Imagine that the www is a collection of public websites where anyone with an internet connection can have one. (If the reader was a www user in the early 90's then perhaps she does not need to imagine.)

With respect to each website, is the website operator allowed to remove webpages as she sees fit.

If no, then are all websites subject to limits on the operator's freedom to remove pages as she sees fit.

If yes, then what are the rules and what is the legal basis for them.

If no, then are some websites subject to rules that limit an operator's freedom to remove pages.

If yes, then how do we determine which ones are subject to the rules.

Thank you.

If you disagree you are just an emotional twit on the hate bandwagon.

What do they get from it?

I don't see any.

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...?