The sad part is I’m sure Elon can bury this guy in fees even if the lawsuit is ultimately ruled as entirely without merit.
Given my real name — which is available on Twitter — my home address is not difficult to obtain from online, public, governmental real estate records.
Despite the fact that the information is public, it would still be doxxing — not to mention inappropriate, violating, and frightening — if someone decided to dig up that address and post it to a broad audience on Twitter that would have otherwise been unaware of it. This is even more true if that audience is hostile, and my information is being posted in an attempt to harass and/or intimidate.
If you want to expand the definition of the word doxxing then that's fine but you'll have to have that conversation all by yourself.
I'll just use this one:
"Doxing" is a neologism. It originates from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation "docs" (for "documents") and refers to "compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone".Essentially, doxing is revealing and publicizing the records of an individual, which were previously private or difficult to obtain. "
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
So this isn't doxing, since the information isn't private and it isn't difficult to obtain.
> Doxing or doxxing (originally spelled in 1337 as d0xing) is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregration of this information from public source or record databases and social media websites (like Facebook), as well as the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means such as hacking and social engineering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
So this is doxxing, and you dishonestly cherry-picked an incomplete definition. In case any confusion remains, here’s the Oxford Languages’ definition:
> search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
Posting your home address which you've kept out of the public eye is doxing, posting the whereabouts of any aircraft that broadcasts that information to all receivers is not. That's why you can find this information all over the internet, the only place where you currently can't find Musk's jet is on Twitter. And that's before we get into his free-speech arguments which apparently were a bit inconsistent.
Or would you like to accuse the FAA of doxing as well?
I don't see how it's any different from a public figure saying they'll be attending any public event.
I know people wish this weren't the case, but your address isn't exactly private information. Anyone can find it easily for anyone else.
So the bar for doxing is definitely a low one, but in this particular case it isn't met. I can see why Musk is irritated that that account exists, even more so because it didn't go away at the first request by someone as powerful as him, and that makes it personal. See the whole saga with that diver for a typical response. But that doesn't mean that the person manning that account is doing something illegal and that is the bar which Elon Musk himself set not all that long ago, and which is what makes this news.
If he had been a bit smarter about this he would have just said: "I'm irritated by you, this is my site and you're gone". That would be that. But now there are all these logical pretzels why this is illegal and all that other stuff that people - and Musk - do on twitter is not because 'free speech'. The two are incompatible, and he knows it.
And in the case of Musk, secondary issues arise, such as the fact that in the US lawsuits can be commenced for almost any reason, and how Musk's tremendous wealth, power, and social influence allows him to hold others hostage to his whims and malleable ethical positions.
The main criterium for Twitter rules changes appears to be whether or not Elon is personally inconvenienced. Which is fine by me but then he should drop the 'free speech' act and stop pretending that he understands the degree to which the former team managed to eke out the closest workable compromise on uniting free speech whilst still having a legal and functional website. That coin does not seem to have dropped yet.
Principles such as absolute free speech only mean something if you uphold them even if you are personally inconvenienced.
> Every person who, with intent to place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family, by means of an electronic communication device, and without consent of the other person, and for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment, by a third party, electronically distributes, publishes, e-mails, hyperlinks, or makes available for downloading, personal identifying information, including, but not limited to, a digital image of another person, or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person, which would be likely to incite or produce that unlawful action, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail, by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
This is not how law works.
This would cover LibsOfTikTok, but not ElonJet
If they published personal information the person didn't want put in the public eye, that would be a very different story.
> LoTT re-uploads video content
This is not at all what LoTT does. That's what the LoTT TikTok did, but it was banned on TikTok. Current things that LoTT twitter account is posting about are:
- Yoel Roth
- A drag queen event at the white house
- A number of videos and images of drag queens that were not posted by the performer
- Taylor Lorenz
- etc.
"re-uploading content users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing" is a misrepresentation of the account.
Taylor Lorenz doxxed LoTT (not even debatable here with the article even being edited to remove some of the doxxed links). Speaking about this and the public journalist who did it to you certainly seems appropriate.
As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
> Over the 3-year study period, a total of 204 gender affirmation surgical cases were identified: 177 chest/top and 27 genital/bottom surgeries (Table 1). Most cases were masculinizing chest reconstructions 177/204 (86.8%) with 65/177 (36.7%) of those patients being less than 18 years of age.
> The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9000168/pdf/jcm...
Whether or not they are newsworthy or appropriate, information about Roth and Lorenz clearly isn't "video content the users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing". If you want to change your argument, feel free, but don't accuse me of misrepresentation and then lie.
Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
> As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
No I was not. A hysterectomy is not a chest surgery, and the hospital doesn't provide them to children (https://archive.vn/7R44e). The hospital may provide some services to children, but hysterectomies aren't one of them. Again, do not misrepresent my comments.
I'm a bit confused by this.
I have just checked Libs of Tiktok's Twitter feed and only found two tweets referencing Yoel Roth, one bemoaning the fact that LoTT is receiving threats and that if it were Roth it'd be national news[1], and another[2] from November the 4th flagging a tweet to him and wondering why it is still up.
Where is LoTT doxxing Roth?
As to the stuff circulating about Roth, it was all public to begin with, right? I certainly don't wish any threats to come his way but that's threats and harassment, not doxxing. Maybe I missed something.
[1] https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602978234345431040
[2] https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1588338910815342592
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602188311099019265
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602179892346585090
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1602147621698957312
And more, all recent. You're correct, I guess that I should have said "harass" not doxx, but yeah there's tons of stuff LoTT is doing to stoke harassment at Roth (like imply he's a groomer: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1601778632552484865)
Still, no one should be in fear because of their legal speech - that makes it unfree - whether that's Roth or LoTT or Musk or anyone else, but I don't see that those tweets would be liable for that.
It doesn't exactly take amazing Google fu to find infinite examples of straight women talking about how men holding babies are hot: https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=men+holding+babies+se...
I don't know if the tweet qualifies as harassment, but it's certainly making entirely baseless allegations that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types.
Roth has a lot of tweets that would provide context that invites raised eyebrows, especially given his PhD dissertation, and his behaviour as head of Trust and Safety, where he suppressed the #groomer hashtag, and given an overall context where people of Roth's political persuasion are hyping up drag queens dancing for children and he's actively suppressing criticism of it. That's so easy to explain.
I also might add that women have a biological urge to give birth and take into account the male's skills as a father. To say that (some or all) gay guys have this may be true but it seems a stretch, and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM? At the very least, his tweets are utterly stupid and reckless. If a headteacher tweets "wow, women are hot but women holding babies, extra hot!" wouldn't you pause? How about if he tweets out from his main account "I have a secret dirty twitter account", you wouldn't raise an eyebrow? Please.
As to "that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types", firstly, that could be said of anything, though we do have another spectrum, running from (to a reasonable person) non-threatening through marking out undesirables to directly threatening. The marking can lead to actual threatening situations, like before a genocide, but they also overlap with valid criticism, and since we're not in a genocide situation I struggle to see how the tweets in question reach that bar. Find something that says "we should kill paedos" from LoTT and you'll have a much stronger case, otherwise you've taken up a position where you're arguing against someone who's against paedophilia, simply because they're a political opponent. That's how this endless cycle continues.
> and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM?
At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
What a strange way to misinterpret something long winded. Should I have written more for you, or do you think that your preconceived notions would render that effort as moot as it is now?
> At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
b) He was writing about letting underage children onto Grindr for some nebulous reasons around that time:
> accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
I can think of better ways for teenagers to connect than a hookup app. Can't you?
c) American date format is idiotic, I'm not interested enough to decode them all, perhaps you could do it for me as you're so precise with what others have written.
>a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements', so you will have to check this for yourself.
What’s wrong with Twitter? Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat... Mastodon?
You know, social networks that aren’t hookup apps for over 18s. Just a thought.
> I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements'
His pronouncements count as his pronouncements. Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you. This seems like a fairly basic point. If you're living in a small town, you're not going to be able to easily find other queer people near you on any of those apps.
But why do you think that teens will be magically be safer on Snapchat or other such apps? This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
>Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
Because they're not full of men explicitly looking for hookups.
> This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
Yes, it's not that Roth was making an argument indistinguishable from what a paedophile might write, nor that if he'd said it about heterosexual children and Tinder the same logic would apply, it must be that everyone against him is bigoted!
You already tried that earlier on in the thread and it sounded just as desperately idiotic then given that it required completely missing the example given of the headteacher, or just noticing what is obvious.
Rather than seeing bigotry where it's convenient - or claiming you see it - try reading the arguments put to you and coming up with something that is cogent.
> > Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
> In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
It's not, but again, if it's inconvenient to answer then don't.
> Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you.
Users on all those apps have bios and can share their preferences and location, all the apps have search. You managed to meet people with less apps, less people on the internet, worse search etc. If there's a real need for this, someone can build it. As Roth himself points out, there probably isn't, but then he skips on to letting children into Grindr formally. Is noticing non sequiturs also bigotry? Do let me know.
The irony here is that you seem to basically agree with Roth. That is, you are fine with gay teens meeting each other via apps, but think that these apps should be age appropriate. For some reason you seem to think that Grindr is super scary, even though people do the exact same stuff on it (chat and share photos) that they do on Snapchat, Insta, or any number of other apps used by teens. An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting, would probably be *safer* than many existing apps. Snapchat, for example, will happily let you send nudes or other explicit imagery that can could quite easily be automatically blocked in the majority of cases.
By the way, if you think that Snapchat isn't full of 'men explicitly looking for hookups', I have news for you...
There are lots of blokes who like porn on Twitter and on Pornhub but to say that they're the same because of that would be an enormous stretch.
> An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting,
No, Roth suggested that Grindr allow minors and be made age appropriate, without giving any details of how that would work. Those two things, like Twitter and Pornhub, are not the same thing.
> If you’re correct that Snapchat etc. can be used to search for nearby queer people in the same way as Grindr,
Again, not the same. You can find what you want via search but apps like Grindr and Tinder are optimised for meeting people nearby for hookups and dating.
> that only goes to undermine your argument that teens will somehow be safer on one than the other
What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr? If you're on Grindr, can others find you too, and is that easier than on Twitter?
Sure, he didn’t give any details of how it would work, but it’s not that hard to imagine what kind of changes you’d make (e.g. automatic blocking of explicit images, stricter moderation of language on profiles…). This was just one paragraph of a thesis, so I’m not sure what your point is re the lack of details.
> apps like Grindr and Tinder are optimised for meeting people nearby for hookups and dating.
Yes! That was exactly my point. Gay teens want to date just like straight teens do, but it’s less easy for them to find suitable people on regular social networks.
>You can find what you want via search [on Snap]
What makes you so sure? I assume you don’t spend your free time searching for gay teenagers in your neighborhood on Snapchat, so what is your basis for this assertion?
> What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr?
I don’t know about twitter, but it’s certainly pretty high on Snapchat or Insta. A restricted version of Grindr could potentially impose much stricter limits on under 18s interacting with adults than any of the major social networks do.
A thesis isn't somewhere anyone worries about needing to cut words to fit a limit, quite the opposite, and yet he leaves us hanging with something that sounds questionable. Much like his tweets, that one about getting a crying infant mixed up with the sound of porn comes to mind. Defending that is not a hill I'd like to die on.
> > You can find what you want via search [on Snap]
> What makes you so sure?
Roth says so:
> While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat.
There's a reason why the majority of young gays are using those instead, just as the rest of us use general networks too.
> > What is the likelihood of finding an adult gay man looking for a hookup on Twitter vs Grindr?
> I don’t know about twitter, but it’s certainly pretty high on Snapchat or Insta.
It seems the search works okay then. What is the relative chance you'll find a teenager vs an adult when searching for a teenager? (On a service that is for general users vs one stocked with over 18s)
> A restricted version of Grindr
Just why? If I knew some straight kids that were finding it hard to date, my advice to them would not be "hey, perhaps you should try adult hookup apps", or upon finding out that children like to sneak into adult spaces "you know what, we should just make it safer for them". No, they should stay out of adult spaces and adults that argue for their introduction should be questioned as to what on Earth they are thinking.
"You know that place where guys and gals go to meet?"
"Like clubs?"
"Yeah. You know that sometimes there's underage girls there"
"Of course. Got to be careful."
"You know what we should do to keep them safe, let them in!"
Try saying that amongst any group of blokes I know and you'll get called a paedo immediately. Maybe jokingly, maybe not, but no one's writing a thesis about it and expecting to get away with it. Except for academics, apparently.
The thesis wasn’t about creating dating apps for queer teenagers, so that’s why he doesn’t say much on the subject. Remember that this paragraph was picked out by people desperately trolling for anything that could be used to smear him. You seem to suggest at several points that this thesis is entirely about young queer people (“no-one’s writing a thesis about it”), but you’ve been misled on that point.
The rest of your post is frankly too much of a mess of mischaracterization to respond to. (To take only the most egregious example, I think you must recognize that Roth does not say that Snapchat is good for finding other queer people in one’s local area in the section you quote.) You’re becoming so oddly insistent on Snapchat’s utility as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app that you’re even undermining your own implied conspiracy theory. Why would Roth even care about luring young gay guys onto Grindr if he can find legions of them in his neighborhood on Snap? Snap already allows under 18s.
In my analogy, Roth is arguing that we allow children into adult nightclubs because they sneak in, not that we have separate clubs for them.
And it's I, not Roth, who already argued for "youth clubs". To quote myself “If there's a real need for this, someone can build it.” He makes no such pronouncement.
There's only 3 choices for where to put young people:
1. general apps
2. adult-only apps
3. youth-only apps
He made the case for 2, I'm anti-2 and suggest 1 or 3. Very simple, try to keep up.
> The thesis wasn’t about creating dating apps for queer teenagers, so that’s why he doesn’t say much on the subject.
I don't care. He writes just enough to be questionable and not enough to be defensible.
> You seem to suggest at several points that this thesis is entirely about young queer people (“no-one’s writing a thesis about it”), but you’ve been misled on that point.
As I wrote above, I have a copy of the thesis, I haven't been misled, you've just continued to display a wilful inability to read my comments.
> The rest of your post is frankly too much of a mess of mischaracterization to respond to.
And yet you do. This will be fun and ironic.
> You’re becoming so oddly insistent on Snapchat’s utility as as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app
That's weird because I've barely mentioned Snapchat. I've mentioned it once myself, and as a general app, not as "as a location-aware queer hookup/dating app". You have have mentioned it 10 times. Hence, every other time I've mentioned it has been quoting you.
Do you actually read the responses you get?
> you’re even undermining your own implied conspiracy theory
We're talking about Roth, a single person, there cannot be a conspiracy. I can see now why you reacted so strangely to the use of "pronouncement". Please, pick up a dictionary and use it.
> Why would Roth even care about luring young gay guys onto Grindr if he can find legions of them in his neighborhood on Snap?
I can think of several reasons why someone sexually interested in under 18s would want that:
- convenience
- self selection by the target demographic
- plausible deniability
- grooming
More difficult on a general app. In addition, when he was in charge of moderating a general app, he suppressed use of the word groomer. So many strange coincidences.
But that would be to miss the point as badly as you are wont to do. The point is, it seems perfectly reasonable to question his pronouncements and behaviour.
Great, so you can see its utility for queer teenagers then (who as a general rule are likely to be sexually interested in people around their own age).
I can also see the sexual utility for underage girls and boys if they let underage girls and boys into nightclubs but I wouldn't advocate that as nightclubs are adult spaces. Same goes for Grindr and Tinder et al.
Is what you're proposing a common position amongst gay men?
>Is what you're proposing a common position amongst gay men?
What is it that you take me to be proposing? Also, whatever it is, how would I know if it's a common position among gay men?
Or is it that you're just dogwhistling "Are all gay men pedos?" – in which case, the answer is no.
"While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults."[1]
[1] https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=377...
There’s a reason gays use Grindr, because they have a sexual preference and want to meet others with that sexual preference for sex. If they wanted to just chat they could go on Twitter and, you know, chat with anyone - gay or not - because it’s general purpose. Is it difficult to find gay people on Twitter?
If some bloke starts writing that we should let young girls on Tinder because they already use it and, god forbid they could just use Twitter for a chat, it’s too general purpose, they need a hookup app for interaction, feel free to label him a paedo too because that’s what it sounds like.
Sweeney isn't on the same level at all. He's tracking jets. Airports are full of security. The last time Internet posts led to an attack on an airplane was never, unless we're counting al-Qaeda's private message infrastructure.
Was this the case with the stalker? From what I can tell the airplane landed the day before, and I haven't seen any evidence that the incident occurred near the airport.
really didn't expect my initial comment to lead to a shitstorm...
The other person claimed that doxxing wasn't illegal, and therefore implied that it was OK.
Which is why I asked them if they are OK with being doxxed themselves.
If they disagree, and say that they do not support doxxing, then yes I completely agree.
But they would have to take back their previous statement to make that claim.
All they got to do is say that they oppose doxxing.
I think that is a perfectly reasonable and allowed question to ask them, given that the thread is about doxxing.
Btw, do you personally oppose doxxing and/or information that someone has posted publicly, jacquesm?
Because you, jacquesm, have not made your stance clear on that topic.
We've had to ask you this more than once:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629700 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21499309 (Nov 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342820 (March 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14610460 (June 2017)
I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps up, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Twitter may be a private entity but the lawsuit is clearly meant to stifle the distribution of public information. Now that he owns one of the largest social media platforms used to distribute stuff like CALFire emergency announcements, that jet information is not only already public but arguably that information is now in the public interest
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pu...
Unfortunately this means enterprising billionaires might be able to forum shop the SLAPP lawsuit to states where it’s less likely to bite them later.
IANAL and genuinely curious, how much further can Musk shop around? To the state Sweeney’s corp is in (if he has one)? Does some random court in Kansas or whatever have the jurisdiction to slap a meaningful injunction against someone who’s never stepped in the state? I doubt Musk would be able to actually recover any funds that way but again IANAL and I’m curious. Can he make this federal?
Musk is literally trying to sue a twenty year old college student. Might as well try bleeding a rock. Is Musk so out of touch that he really thinks that he can get anything but a pyrrhic victory?
Again, I’m asking about the jurisdiction which decides whether Sweeney will have anti-slapp to defend him. If so, Musk’s case can get dismissed with prejudice at the first hearing and the courts in some states will even fine him for wasting everyone’s time.
Getting sued by Musk will hopefully be a less giant pain in the ass than without an anti-SLAPP statue. But it still could be quite painful. And just the threat of the lawsuit is pain on its own and may have a chilling effect on both the target and others.
Yeah, ouch. I had thought the legal process could be terminated sooner but the defendant in the first case study Hill v. Heslep et al still had over $100k in legal fees (which they were awarded after winning the anti-SLAPP motion), though that seems to have had a complicated second prong due to California’s new revenge porn laws.
I hope Sweeney opens up a legal defense fund and Streisands Musk to victory.
It would be a worthy cause, a very high profile case, and (depending on the jurisdiction) a not-insignificant chance of recovering fees. I'd be willing to bet Sweeney won't have to front the cash for his defense. But, again, if he does, it's a pot I'd throw some money into.
That’s pretty monstrous.
If there is a kidnapping or murder down the line, your money will have helped enable it.
Donating to a doxxer with the knowledge that their work has already played a role in leading a stalker to the target’s young child is monstrous. Full stop.
To my knowledge most cars don’t have tail numbers, and don’t register their flight plan with the FAA, so I don’t really understand the connection you’re drawing.
* The discussion is in a thread about SLAPP, with the point of contention being that Elon is suing to intimidate rather than for damages
* Elon has, in the past, implicitly and explicitly demonstrated approval of such activities
* It is unclear whether the information led to the attack
That, plus that fact that the money is not going to run the account directly, but pay for legal fees in the court case.
There's a lot of discussion here on all these topics. Ignoring them completely and jumping immediately to a conclusion that lets you call someone a horrible person is not reasonable or responding in good faith. You can make your point and disagree without lowering the quality of discussion.
If any of {"the information is public/protected under the First Amendment", "Elon is suing to harass this person", "Elon is just straight up lying about the incident", "the attack has nothing to do with the account", "this is something Elon actually said he supports in the past"} are true the point being made changes dramatically. I don't think any of them have been settled at all. I'm sure 'AlchemistCamp has opinions on them as do I but in situations like these it's generally appropriate to make comments taking this uncertainty into account. Like, it could even be a curious comment, "it seems like this person's account is actively harming Elon's family, why would you possibly want to send money to fund it?", but as it stands right now it just jumps immediately into making the conversation worse.
On the flip side, I feel the problems in my comment, which I freely accept (…though not as bad faith), do not actually significantly alter its meaning. Nor do I think it ignores surrounding context like the comment I replied to did. My point was "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person's actions" and I wrote "I think your comment is bad because you jumped to a conclusion which let you dunk on this person" and I feel that this is something a reasonable person could end up doing, even if it's obviously not correct. Perhaps I'm missing what led you to focus on that part in particular, rather than the rest of the comment, where I feel the meat of it lies?
1) Contrary to your initial claims, I made an ethical criticism of a a behavior not a person (and even explicitly clarified this in a sibling comment)
2) The discussion about SLAPP was an off-topic tangent to the primary conversation of the account suspension and the security risks the anti-doxxing rule addressed
Bringing the discussion from the tangent thread to the primary topic is an improvement, not a worsening of the discussion.
3) Your implication that I “cruised over the entire” context of the thread of more than 1000 others comments to make snap posting is false on two counts. There were fewer than 1000 comments at the time and I actually had read over a hundred and already commented elsewhere first.
4) My position isn’t even close to extreme. Funding someone who is regularly de-anonymizing and broadcasting people’s real-time location coordinates against their wishes, despite being fully aware that doing so presents a security risk is morally reprehensible to many, many people—an important bit of context you yourself seem to have worked hard “to ignore”, in your own terminology.
You’ve made repeated made long-winded, meandering complaints about my critical 3-sentence comment, but at the least you’ll have to grant my comment didn’t make untrue assumptions about the other poster’s process of reading the thread, their frame of mind, their good faith in approaching the discussion, their reasoning process or their opinions.
I criticized only the specific course of action the commenter said they were planning.
Actually, if you came into the comment thread where a dozen people were already discussing this possibility, and just left a reply to one of the comments of something along the lines of "oh I guess Google thinks social is too hard, they want to focus on Android now"…that's kind of weird, right? This thread was operating under the assumption that Elon was basically lying, and trying to intimidate the ElonJet guy. The person who was going to fund him was clearly doing it because he thought he was giving money to the little guy standing up to the SLAPP abuser. When I said you waltzed in it's that you just came with "I believe every single word from Elon's side of the story and this happens to mean that you are funding a terrible thing". That was not the assumption that this thread was operating under. You can disagree with that assumption but you didn't go "guys why do you even think this is a SLAPP lawsuit?", you went "why are you funding a doxxer who might murder children". How is this an improvement to the discussion?
Objection, Your Honor, assumes facts not in evidence.
This knowledge doesn't exist. It's asserted without evidence.
I disagree with all of your factual assumptions, so I then disagree with your moral conclusion.
You can call me monstrous if you want. I frankly don’t care about your opinion of me at all. I’m happy to discuss my moral framework with you if you want, but we’re so far apart on the factual basis that I don’t think it’d be worth the time.
Tracking the movements of wealthy targets in real time has zero value in terms of political freedoms. It’s primarily of use to kidnappers and other criminals. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a security risk.
I mentioned factual disagreement, and those still exist. Without conceding any of those, this is our moral and philosophical disagreement. I don’t think the power of the state should bar all speech that you personally decide has 0 political value.
I think the first amendment rightly tolerates speech, even speech that many people strongly disagree with. I think the government should be extremely hesitant about telling people they can’t speak because their words have “zero political value”.
And I would vigorously oppose a party who is attempting to use the government to punish someone for speaking.
Look, if Elon Musk brings an action that alleges very clear defamation, or if he shows that Sweeney was actively inciting harassment I’d consider otherwise. But if the legal action is only for the actions publicly alleged (posting flight information), that’s simply protected speech by the first amendment. A lawsuit to suppress clearly protected speech is legal thuggery, and I would vigorously oppose that lawsuit.
In much the same way I’ve donated to the ACLU who has stood up for the rights of people I despise to speak.
I get where you’re coming from, though. Replace “Elon’s location data” with “Elon is horrible” or “we should tax billionaires at 99%” and I’d also support the right to broadcast it far and wide.
As is absolutely you right! And, were this more private data (like the location of his car being published), I’d be much closer to agreeing with you position.
I think the SCOTUS position on “reasonable expectation of privacy” is not great for taking into account the way our panopticon is able to process so much data that used to be public, but hard to gather at scale.
I’d be pretty willing to be convinced that we should have a serious discussion on the merits and drawbacks of significantly expanding privacy rights, to make some of that illegal.
That being said, the movements of airplanes are inherently public information right now, and already public “at scale”, so I just don’t see a world where I’d agree that aircraft movements should be a part of that framework.
> the belief that the US 1st amendment actually does protect it.
This is a less subjective claim, and is just not accurate. The first amendment absolutely allows someone to publish that information. It’s published publicly by the government! The first amendment absolutely unambiguously protects that information currently.
Musk needs to go after the stalker. He deserves a good SLAPP'ing. Fuck billionaires trying to buy their way to immunity to the consequences of their own daft behavior.
Let me be more specific:
What does your comment mean, with regards to the context it is in? What specific things make what you are contending true?
"Courts struck down anti-SLAPP laws in Washington and Minnesota, and Washington enacted an updated law
Courts in Washington and Minnesota struck down their states’ anti-SLAPP laws, finding them unconstitutional under their respective state constitutions. As discussed above, however, Washington enacted an updated anti-SLAPP law in 2021 that addressed the concerns of the state supreme court.
In 2016, a Minnesota appellate court similarly found that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional, finding that the law “deprive[s] the non-moving party of the right to a jury trial by requiring a court to make pretrial factual findings to determine whether the moving party is immune from liability.” Mobile Diagnostic Imaging v. Hooten, 889 N.W.2d 27, 35 (Minn. Ct. App. 2016). The following year, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed, finding that state’s anti-SLAPP law unconstitutional as applied to claims alleging torts because it requires a district court to make pretrial factual finding in violation of the plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury under the Minnesota constitution. Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minn., 895 N.W.2d 623, 637–38 (Minn. 2017). These decisions raise concerns that courts in other states that recognize a plaintiff’s right to a trial by jury may follow suit."
From that, I don't know that it's reasonable to conclude that "they likely can't protect Sweeney at all", but IANAL.
The only bad faith argument here is claiming publishing publicly available information is somehow endangerment.
What where the causes? How can we prevent this from happening again? What do other high profile perons do to prevent this from happening?
Elon loves to shove himself front and center into the public eye and to stoke a fanbase. Large groups of people inevitably contain some crazy ones. Obsessive para-social relations often lead to unhinged fans stalking or harassing the targets of their obsession. This is so common it has a term coined by Eminem: "Stan".
> How can we prevent this from happening again?
Celebrities are often stalked not just by fans but by reporters. Princess Di was arguably put in a situation by photographers which led to a car crash and her death. It appears the solutions are either:
(1) Don't be famous, or be the type of famous person that has a low profile (there are a lot of them)
(2) If you are a billionaire then you can afford a security detail -- get one
(3) Support real mental health efforts and legislation which funds support for people with mental health issues, instead of sticking them in prison or making them live on the street
The only defense against stalkers is to avoid being stalked or to physically prevent them from stalking you. What is your solution?
Elon's case isn't exactly average even among the ultra-rich.
Not defending the ban, but the context is a bit more complex than posting something off of a public site onto twitter.
To me it doesn't just feel like extortion, it straight up is extortion.
https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker#toggle-gdp...
Edit: looked this up apparently Elon offered him 5k which he rejected and asked 50k instead. So I guess neither have the moral high ground.
So Elonjet taking the information publicly available, sharing it, and people "harassing" Elon is similar enough.
Again, before Elon bought twitter the narative was that twitter as a private platform could ban anyone they wanted for no reason at all, so if that logic was reasonable then it should be reasonable now.
This is incorrect.
Good that cars dont do it unlike private jets!
That would be terrible for privacy... /s
Early Onstar vehicles are trivial to disable and later ones can still be disabled by removing the radio transceiver. The vehicle operates normally without it, unlike a Tesla.
The only things that won't work with no cell connection while you are in the car are things like spotify app in the car (but you can still use spotify through the car bluetooth connected to your phone, if you preloaded the songs on your phone) or being able to see live stats of the car in your phone app.
https://twitter.com/dataracer117/status/1519167734910619649?...
But when it starts getting that close to kids, maybe you'd start to take it more seriously too.
I have kids. This whole thing is stupid. Elon is a hypocrite.
Everyone he targets his army at gets thousands of death threats each. And Elon has a very, very, long list of past targets.
If Elon wants the death threats to stop he should stop instigating them against others.
You can't, yet you defend literal death threats just because you don't like the target.
If your response is that it doesn't qualify, neither does reporting information about his private jet.
The leson here is more general - having a platform should be seen as a big responsibility where great care must be taken to prevent one's actions from having unintended consequences.
Also he is protected by an army of lawyers so he can smoke some weed and tweet that he thinks that you @memish is a pedophile or Hunter Biden friend or MAGA supporter or whatever. And you'll get tons of death treats as result.
This is of course entirely separate from whether such info was used against Musk or his family, or whether such a possibility is sufficient grounds for attempting to silence those who make it easily accessible (it's still accessible thanks to ADS-B for anyone with basic technical skills and cares enough).
Step 2. Copy one of the tail numbers from the first result: “N628TS, N272BG, N502SX”
Step 3. Paste one of the tail numbers into any one of the flight tracker apps.
If your stalkers can’t even figure that out, you don’t have to worry about them. Otherwise… it’ll take them an extra 45 seconds compared to finding the ElonJet twitter account.
Edit: for bonus points Google “site:faa.gov elon musk registration”. First result is N628TS: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
The first blocks it from showing up on sites like flightradar24 which filters out LADD aircraft.
The second makes it so you can't go from tail number to tracking the aircraft once the ICAO has changed and ADSB Exchange doesn't manually update their database of which pseudonymous ICAO numbers are connected to which tail numbers.
All those FAA rules do is mask it in their own public data set that they make available. Anyone with their own data set (aka an SDR at SMO if they’re trying to stalk Musk) like ADSBExchange is not required to mask that data and any law trying force them would run afoul of the first amendment and compromise aviation, since ADS-B makes flight safer for hundreds of thousands of pilots.
However on your second point you seem to be confusing two different things. There's two different systems that you're lumping together as one. The one you're talking about is LADD. Discussed here: https://www.faa.gov/pilots/ladd
FAA even caveats themselves:
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
Now to your point, you're incorrect. PIA, as mentioned in that quote by the FAA, literally changes the aircraft's ICAO number to a new number and delists it from public registries. Using an SDR or the data from ADSB Exchange only gets you that psuedonomynous ID. Once that's changed again you have to stalk someone by following them to the airport and align the takeoff time of when you know they left with the new ICAO number. That's the ethically/morally/legally quesitonable aspect about all of this.
More here on PIA: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
> In order to mitigate these concerns, FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO aircraft address program with the objective of improving the privacy of aircraft operators in today's ADS-B environment by limiting the extent to which the aircraft can be quickly and easily identified by non-U.S. government entities, while ensuring there is no adverse effect on ATC services.
Maaaybe it’s more ethically/morally questionable [1] but I don’t think it’s a legal issue. Reading more on the PIA, it still require the owner to have their own operational security. Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
[1] or in this case Musk’s actions on Twitter are less ethically/morally/legally questionable?
> Like you said it’s pseudoanonymous and I can’t find any obligations it places on third parties. Nothing stops someone putting a camera on top of their hangar pointed at SMO’s runways and correlate the tail number to ADS-B.
That's true, but that falls into the stalking or doxxing category and Twitter already had long standing terms of service statements against doxxing, even before Elon bought Twitter, even if it's not illegal (which I still have open questions about).
Musk can do whatever he wants on twitter and IANAL so what do I know, but between the public interest argument and the public availability of the information, I don’t think Musk has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That said, anyone using the information to follow him around or harass him is liable to get prosecuted.
There is nothing legally questionable about this. What part of "no expectation of privacy" do you not understand?
I was simply replying to a comment that inferred the only way flight info was useful for a stalker was if you planned on stalking them in another plane... which is obviously incorrect.
When you press the record button, it dumps the past 10 mins of video from 4 external cameras onto the drive. When the car is fully stopped, you can either watch the video on the screen inside the car or unplug the drive and watch it on your laptop or on any other device that can read from usb/external drives.
There is also an automatic (aka sentry) mode that triggers dumping a video by any nearby action, but that's only when the car is parked and left unattended.
[0]. Assuming the allegations about it happening are true.
ElonJet didn’t tweet anything on the day this incident occurred, so that part is false too.
In Los Angeles there are hundreds of private flights per day, and wealthy people pay for hangar space. It may well be possible to stalk someone this way, but I don't think it's such a foregone conclusion.
It's also conceivable that a very wealthy person with a flair for hype and dramatic gestures would stage an event as a demonstration or object lesson; we know of celebrities who have done just that is a misguided attempt to solicit public sympathy.
I am not suggesting this has happened; it's just one of numerous possibilities, and I point it out to point out that it's no more irrational than other plausible allegations.
Zero sympathy here. I'm actually more upset that there appears to be a "hush hush, pay to anonymize" program, and that it isn't rolled out as a default. Billionaires do not deserve exclusions from the baseline risk profiles everyone else endures.
> Elon Musk realizes real-time location and telemetry reporting on a car is bad for privacy.
Surprise!
He had a hard-on for the @elonjets account well before this alleged incident.
Law enforcement says NO! In the distance
Guess that's that.
Welcome to being a trackable number Elon. Remember, it's all in the public interest. Also, It's funny how billionaire's pander to this type of surveillance in the Board Room, but suddenly start trying to throw off the bit/yoke when it starts to inconvenience them personally once somebody is sufficiently motivated to start leveraging the data trail they all are instrumental in maintaining.
Gotta love the self-referential inconsistency.
And I think Lil Nas X can handle his own.
color me skeptical this is the actual story. he’s been very annoyed by that account for years
So not sure how Musk thinks it's related.
Not promoting speech that may be harmful to tens of thousands of already marginalized people = Woke Mind Virus
Unless you mean specifically targeting people, in which case, twitter and other places don’t allow this.
Doxing someone is a real tangible harm with very likely dangerous outcomes. Having an opinion is not.
Libs of tiktok doesnt make claims, they merely repost material created by their opposition. There's no issue with Boston children's hospital advertising their services, but apparently it becomes a problem when libsoftiktok does the same?
By the way if I'm not mistaken it was a repost of an advertisement for either puberty blockers or gender related surgery for minors. Like, what are you saying, only the "right" people should be allowed to repost such material?
Correct on both counts. Neither account should be banned or punished
Of course it’s also within Musks rights to ban one and not the other, just because. But he’s also taken a very public position on free speech wrt Twitter so I think it’s reasonable to point out when those standards are applied inconsistently, and also challenge people who are trying to draw arbitrary lines to defend him.
That seems unrelated.
From the paper: "The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. "
The specific claims of surgeries being performed at the specific hospital, most relevantly, which was the specific thing that motivated the bomb threats.
> It's well-documented that children are being subjected to 'gender-affirming' drugs and surgeries.
Its well-documented that a small numbet of children with identified needs are prescribed puberty blockers, and that this is extremely significant in reducing suicide rates; its well documented that even smaller number of teens get hormone treatments to promote puberty of the gender of identity, and that a positively miniscule number of teens get (mostly) top or mor rarely) bottom surgery, as well.
> We'll likely look back on this as a huge medical scandal, just as we do for the frontal lobotomy craze.
It’s more likely that we’ll look at the drive promoted largely on the basis of religious conservatism to impose ascribed gender over gender identity and deny such care, with clear evidence that doing so is killing people, as a medical scandal, similar to all the other times care was denied or known harmful interventions were applied systematically to a targeted marginalized community.
Please see their rebuttal to what the transactivists are claiming: https://www.libsoftiktok.com/p/boston-childrens-hospital-sup...
> It’s more likely that we’ll look at the drive promoted largely on the basis of religious conservatism to impose ascribed gender over gender identity and deny such care, with clear evidence that doing so is killing people, as a medical scandal, similar to all the other times care was denied or known harmful interventions were applied systematically to a targeted marginalized community.
Unlikely, especially with the rise in outspoken detransitioners who have been caught up in this gender madness, and whistleblowing medical staff. They have first-hand experience of how harmful these medical interventions are - and people are listening.
Some European health systems have already massively walked back their 'gender-affirming' care for children.
Detransitioners are rare among those who have transitioned, and of detransitioners, most of tjkse that are public about their views most support trans rights and access to gender affirming care. The propaganda narrative that you are being sold with outspoken detransitioners is, like everything else about trans issues from the same media channels that isn’t an outright lie, a distortiom.
> They have first-hand experience of how harmful these medical interventions are
The data shows that they are overwhelming helpful. You are, when the individuals in question aren’t lying about the specific cases, still just being sold isolated anecdotes with no perspective on relation to the normal experience, designed as emotional manipulation by professional propagandists, to get you to support a campaign of death (both through neglect and more actively) for trans people.
> Some European health systems have already massively walked back their 'gender-affirming' care for children.
Yes, and so have some American ones, as the consequence if an international political movement actively seeking the elimination of trans people, by death if necessary—and this walk-back absolutely, provably contributes to deaths.
So is Elon Musk.
If someone actually attacks you based upon that location, now it is tangible harm. It's too easy to conflate the two.
It's not even theoretical harm. It's not harm.
You are not entitled to privacy when owning and operating a jet in public airspace.
> He had also joined several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including “Terminate The Republican Party;” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans;” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”
I'm all for people toning things down. But the entire online ecosystem seems to be full of various factions warring against each other with extreme rhetoric. Even the discussion of extreme rhetoric is filled with extreme rhetoric ("These people are going to get someone killed!"), which can (and is) used to justify all sorts of bad things.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/14/homepage2/james-hodgkinson-pr...
It’s not like people who apt to deeply believe radical ideas once their source becomes censored they just stop there. Human beings don’t work like that.
I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.
They radicalized millions of people via their speech, which is the correct level of abstraction. Whether it was offline or online speech is a distinction without a difference.
> There will always be insane people in this world.
Mono-causal explanations are factually wrong. The Dylan Roofs of the world clearly have severe mental health problems, combined with being radicalized online by other people's speech. It's the union of all these factors that causes the observed outcome.
> I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.
Well, it's harder to make a case for libsoftiktok than places like 4chan. I think it's reasonable to say that 4chan et al. have literally caused people to die via mass shootings.
Me suppressing my personal information is protecting my physical safety. You suppressing your personal information is an unacceptable breach of free expression.
Me revealing your personal information is transparency in the public interest. You revealing my personal information is doxxing and puts my life in danger.
@pmarca
some people's personal information is in the public interest, like Al Gore's electric bill or how often he and John Kerry fly to climate conferences, and POTUS's also, yet the secret service keeps his travel plans obscure to protect him.
many attacks may be consequent, and many are not; much of life is stochastic.
so I don't get your point. I think Musk is sincerely trying to make twitter more free speechy than the previous administration, and I think he's sincerely grappling with issues at the margins. I don't think this silly twitter bot's POV is no longer being heard.
Elons Jet, by law, must openly broadcast, over the radio waves, location and route while operating. There is a legal right to publish that information. If he doesn’t want people to know his location, he can avoid traveling on the one private jet linked to him. But that’s not what he’s doing.
His child being followed by someone wanting to meet him has literally nothing to do with the location of his jet.
This is an emotional reaction to a situation that only affects him.
"Pursuing legal action against Sweeney"? Not criminal action against the stalker?
No video, not with all the cameras?
Proof that alleged stalker got the information from that Twitter account, and not FlightRadar24, or even the FAA?
Yeah, I would be unsurprised if it turned out that this was all just horse manure to try to provide cover for his decision.
For all the drama Elon is creating he has refused to register a complaint with the police. He is going after everyone but the process server.
It only takes one lunatic to care about "nobody" and you can have a fatal outcome. The criminal registry is filled with lunatics such as domestic violence perpetrators or stalkers that found out personal information about a nobody and acted violently on it.
You might be star stuck and a deep believer of Elon the new Saint, but the original comment is pointing out the hypocrisy and danger of one person deciding on whose information we can spread based on augmenting it in the framework of "free speech"; but then essentially boggling it down to naive notion like you stated:
"nobodies" - who cares about them? It's about popularity and favoritism (free speech is the rhetoric)
Why does this even need to be said?
Such as the wave of attacks on drag events.
- he recognizes that it’s reasonable to take actions if an account *might* influence his real life.
— he mocks others and declares they’re unreasonable when they ask twitter for help.
- sometimes he even escalates the threats towards others, portrays them as hysterical and starts ranting about town-squares and woke cancel culture.
Censorship is almost always counter-productive and every time it fails it just escalates. Eventually we'll be doing night raids on people's homes over tweets like the UK.
The costs are far too high for very little benefit. Just look at the moral and cultural compromises taken by the US/Canada/UK in Afghanistan/Iraq/globally to crush Islamic terrorism by force. It generated as many problems as it helped, at a very high cost of tons of freedoms for the western public (not just people in the middle east). Now we're on Part 2 of "compromise freedoms for the greater good". No thanks.
Let's not group mean tweets and mass shootings under the same umbrella
Like the term "verbal violence" - what a way to conflate meanings to a misleading extent.
What this means in practice is "speech that powerful, privileged, unaccountable people, who think they are worthy of controlling the thoughts of everyone else, deem to be 'harmful', based on their vague feelings and biases."
The owner of @ElonJet account de-anonymized the info and bragged about it on Twitter.
Now Elon is suing him and people who helped him to obtain that no-longer-public information.
First result: https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
It’s owned by FALCON LANDING LLC located at 1 Rocket Rd. I mean… come on.
Witness protection programs need to hire this guy, he has a gift.
...in February.
A few months ago Elon was. Remember when everything that isn't illegal was going to be allowed on Twitter?
>Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
From https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603181423787380737
You can see Twitter's full policy here: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...
A hypothetical account that broadcasted the location of marginalized people in real time would not be allowed, is my understanding.
I think it would be good if we could get past the "your team vs my team" thing and talk about the best set of speech principles overall.
Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.
Agreed.
>Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.
I agree, but the previous admin was not even trying to meet the "public and applied consistently" standard (see Twitter Files). So I'm hopeful that there will still be improvement in the long run. Hopefully this is a teachable moment for Elon.
Where it might become more problematic would be if the account included inciting language with the information ("here is a homeless shelter, go and mob it"; "Elon's about to land in CDG, who wants to stage a riot"). But I think it's clear that that's not what this account is doing - it's just giving information out that already exists.
And for what it's worth, it's not just Musk who gets this treatment. Most British political events of the last few years have involved journalists excitedly gathering around flightradar24 and watching some poor minister's plane as they make their way back to London to get fired, hand in their resignation, etc. That's essentially the same thing that this Twitter feed is doing (albeit usually more focused on the event rather than 24/7 tracking of one vehicle), but it's not considered a security risk because it honestly isn't. I mean, when the Queen died, Huw Edwards did the same thing for the Princes' plane, and he'll probably win a BAFTA for it...
In all fairness, I have some sympathy towards Musk, as it sounds like he's dealing with the shock of his child being stalked. That's going to evoke a strong emotional reaction, and I can completely understand why he'd want to shut this sort of thing down. But that doesn't make it useful (the information is still public, and anyone motivated enough to track Musk down IRL doesn't need Twitter to find it), nor does it change the hypocrisy of the situation. It seems like he's just lashing out at the wrong person, and making decisions over things that he can control.
If this is true at all. What other evidence is there besides his word? Which, in my book, is not very trustworthy.
"[Elon] added that any account revealing people's real-time locations will be suspended "as it is a physical safety violation"."
That account is still online, well and doing it. As others have pointed out, as long as the people that are affected are not Elon Musk, then it seems like for Elon Musk it is mostly fine.
If the New York Times writes an article criticizing someone, and then a crazy person shoots that someone, is the NYT now required to stop writing articles criticizing people? If not, then why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?
U.S. case law sets the bar for incitement really high precisely so you don't have prosecutors trying to silence newspapers in the way I described above. Some people have argued that Twitter should adopt a lower bar in order to prevent harm, but I've never heard anyone describe a coherent principle that wouldn't also allow the NYT to be banned as I described above.
Humans can tell the difference between news that sometimes has negative side effects, and singling out people for harassment. If humans can tell that difference, so can rules - society isn’t math, the rules don’t have to be equations.
Elon Musk aggressively criticized Yoel Roth, forcing him to flee his home in fear for his life.
Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz published the full name and address of the (previously anonymous) LibsOfTikTok writer Chaya Raichik, forcing Chaya to flee her home in fear for her life[1].
Most people think that one of these two events is okay, and the other one is very bad.
[1] https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1516279523049889797
Many humans can though. There's a very big group of people that think every corrupt politician should be investigated. This type of thinking is not equally prevalent amongst all sides of the political spectrum. It is prevalent amongst all extremist forms though, but that probably has to do with the type of person that becomes extremist in the first place.
They weren’t the same action.
The first difference that comes to mind is that the elon situation is an unaccountable individual billionaire, where the nyt is a group of journalists / editors. Dozens of people vetted the choice to publish her name - nobody can vet or check who elon decides to go after next. Plenty of more nuanced takes about the twitter files and roth have been published and didn’t result in angry mobs thinking he’s a pedophile - because those takes were checked by editors and a well established code of ethics.
Elon attacking roth is in many ways the same as what libs of tiktok is doing. Using a huge platform to point an angry mob in someone’s direction, while claiming innocence of the resulting harm. Where revealing libs of tt’s identity is an act of holding power accountable - you wield the power of the mob? The public deserve to know who you are. Elon attacking roth, is… what? Roth has no power anymore, isn’t causing ongoing harm, at this point criticizing him seems indistinguishable from trying to sell elon’s public on the righteousness of his twitter takeover.
What “sides” are those? I’m on the side of “billionaires are too powerful”, “journalism is generally pretty useful”, and “don’t send angry mobs at people for living their lives and having opinions”. Liberal agenda gone mad over here :)
He posted a real-time photo of X at twitter HQ like two weeks ago. And then a picture of him getting his badge.
Should Elon suspend his own account for doing that?
Also what sides? Elon jet wasn’t political afaik.
In the current political climate, anything that isn't political but does something one side of the spectrum dislikes, automatically becomes political. Elon has turned quite extremely and vocally to the right. So people on the right will view ElonJet as an attack on the right. Unfortunately, that's just how it goes.
These days you can't even write anything objectively anymore. You'll always end at a conclusion that one side will interpret as being against them and then attack you for it.
Slight tangent, but it's especially visible in people who support stuff they're actually not in favor of, just because the perceived 'other side' dislikes it. I've seen people who live environmentally conscious support farmers in the Netherlands, just because the farmers were protesting the current government. Dutch farmers have a huge impact on the Dutch environment and supporting them is the opposite of being environmentally conscious. Yet, people think that the enemy of their enemy must be their friend and the other way around.
Location tracking can be dangerous to rich people because they are a target. Most people are not targets and therefore really would have significant extra risk from being tracked, although obviously no one enjoys being tracked.
Harmful speech is much more impactful to minority groups than it is to the rich. The rich can chose to live in a bubble, they can move around the globe to avoid the issues and they can hire security. Normal people can't so easily escape the consequences of society becoming hostile towards them due to widespread hate speech.
LibsOfTikTok has called out doctors using their names, photos, and their place of work. Isn't that effectively revealing the location they will be at most days? Is it any less likely that a crazy person will wait outside those medical facilities to attack a doctor than it is that a crazy person will wait outside an airport for Musk? Isn't what LibsOfTikTok is doing even more dangerous considering they intentionally frame these doctors as a threat while ElonJet is purely informational?
So I'm not allowed to post a group picture of my Meetup anymore? Yeah, that sounds like the kind of social media which makes money.
>It's different when I do it!
There is no gain from censorship besides a limited set of cases, most of which are illegal but obviously some cases beyond that. Still very very far from the level of censorship being pushed by the Reddit/Twitter crowd these days (‘misinformation’ being bannable is a cancer on society).
He unbanned Taleb Kweli, who was banned for using twitter to stalk, harass, and organise mobs against a woman he didn't like.
His campaign against Yoel Roth has resulted in Roth and his family having to flee their house.
He's very, very happy with threats, including death threats if they are people that he doesn't like.
'Supports' does a lot of work in his post, 'mingles with' or 'enjoys the content of' is closer to the truth. Philosophical alignment with that kind of characters betrays contempt for certain groups.
For second point: https_//www.thefader_com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-talib-kweli-twitter-ban
A few boos are enough to make him re-platform a dude with that kind of public record? It shows brittle spirit, as his friend Dave Chappelle would say.
For third point: https_//nymag_com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-smears-former-twitter-executive-yoel-roth.html
This one is the one that's serious, this kind of thing could amount to stochastic terrorism, but no one cares, because he's rich beyond measure, and that makes people excuse his every indiscretion.
It was a cursory google search, and while the burden of proof is on the one making the statements, it costs little to check it yourself.
It definitely isn't a good look for him, and while looks aren't that important, it does paint a picture of a man that has principles only outwardly, a man that is petty, and a man that thinks the world bends to his very word. It doesn't matter, though, the title 'billionaire' tells us that much, and grants him those powers.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1592655096252608513
https://www.thefader.com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-talib-kweli-tw...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-smears-for...
Are you trying to make it harder to view the supposed sources? Is that because they don't support your point as well as you claim they do?
Accusation
> He's very, very happy with threats, including death threats if they are people that he doesn't like.
Prior three sentences
> He supports LibsofTikTok, which has resulting in whole hospitals being shut down by terrorists.
> He unbanned Taleb Kweli, who was banned for using twitter to stalk, harass, and organise mobs against a woman he didn't like.
> His campaign against Yoel Roth has resulted in Roth and his family having to flee their house.
?????
Deciding on one vs another often comes to what is perceived the most pressing matter at the moment. The long term consequences are often not taken enough into consideration.
Of course actually trying to put it in practice immediately falls apart, but that's not the point.
Nobody on the malicious side of the "malicious or stupid?" scale actually wants everyone to have unfettered freedom of speech (see: republican outrage at LGBTQ rights, people teaching/learning about systemic racism ('CRT'), drag queen story time, republican school districts banning books for some recent examples). They just want to be able to cry "muh free speech" to silence criticism of anything they say.
This is less of a free speech issue, and more of a "what should government employees be paid to do" issue.
It's the difference between a gutter punk wearing a swastika, and a cop on duty wearing a swastika. The constitution prohibits the government from making a law regarding the gutter punk. But while the cop is on duty, they're an employee of the state, and it's perfectly reasonable for voters to say "we don't want to pay government employees to do that".
(Reminder that when use of racial slurs increased on Twitter, Elon took action to stop it.)
Oh, wait...
I'm pretty sure that doxxing is not allowed on HN, Reddit, and other platforms, including the D language forums. I'm good with that.
Evidence so far is that he’s not principled enough to do so. “Free speech absolutism” just meant he didn’t give a fuck as long as he wasn’t the one at risk. I don’t think that will change, but I’d love to be wrong.
You can already see this lack of empathy at work in how he's trying to claw back severance he owes Twitter's ex-employees.
In this case, it seems to be more about serving his self-interest. What do you think he might have learned beyond that?
Slurs don't qualify for protection under this operationalization, because they intimidate the listener without providing any information content.
Same goes for protesting a talk so loudly that the speaker is drowned out, or doxxing.
If your speech serves only to intimidate others into silence, I don't think it should be protected.
Curious to hear everyone's objections to this high-level approach. (Note: I would want to add a bunch of clarifying details before making this Twitter's official policy, but it seems more interesting to provide those details in response to objections, instead of writing a long boring comment.)
Anyway to me it's similar to saying "violence is bad," yet we probably both believe people should be allowed to emoloy violence when violence is being done to them.
I think similarly applies to hate speech. If a nazi shows up to campus to deliver their message of hate, it's ethical to drown them out and prevent any spread of the hateful message.
"But both sides but hypocrisy but free speech"
Imo tolerance is not a universal ethical position but instead a peace treaty. Peace treaties should not be suicidal. If you make a peace treaty with someone and they attack, you should abandon the treaty.
Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence. They don't have a place in civil society, civil society should not allow this sort of speech or behavior in it. Someone who is saying these sorts of things is telling you clear as day that they don't tolerate some part of you. So why should you tolerate them? They've abandoned the treaty.
What that doesn't mean is that civil society should go out of their way to hunt and kill anybody that likes to say slurs: that's the opposite of a peace treaty. More like they should be rejected utterly from participating until they're willing to again subscribe to a peace treaty (by being civil, not attacking people).
Deplatforming vocal racists is thus ethical. Their language is attack on civility and our ability to maintain peaceful society.
It's an important distinction.
Yep, there's an important parallel.
I think a good frame is "protected speech". If someone says something to try & intimidate you, and you respond by trying to intimidate them, then nothing said by either party should be considered "protected" -- Twitter admins should feel free to delete the entire exchange.
I don't think a policy of "intimidating speech for self-defense is protected" is workable, because people will intimidate others and claim it was in response to something the person said to intimidate them, and adjudicating such claims gets messy. If you want to say something nasty to someone else because they were nasty to you, go ahead. Just don't expect your rejoinder to be protected.
>Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence.
I don't think we should use the word "violence" this way, because reserving the word "violence" for physical harm helps us avoid upward spirals of antagonism.
It's good if a conflict stays in the realm of words and doesn't go beyond that. Calling speech "violence" blurs the boundary between those domains.
Thus we grant that there's at least one case where speech could be considered violence, can we not consider others that might be involved in causal chains of physical harm?
The general air of racist rhetoric in the usa meant that black people were effectively dehumanized which meant that calls for lynching led to actual lynchings. With this context I feel it's reasonable to call the use of a racial slur, "violence". I should hope it's obvious I don't believe it's as harmful a form of violence as physically harming someone. We use the word violence to describe many remarkably different in nature things, so I don't think we risk devaluing the word.
As a reductio ad absurdum, suppose you and I are medical researchers. We're trying to figure out the best way to treat Disease D. You favor Treatment A, I favor Treatment B. We participate in a public debate defending our respective preferences. Suppose as more data comes in, it becomes abundantly obvious that Treatment B works way better, and Treatment A actually exacerbates Disease D. I acknowledge that reasonable people could've favored Treatment A at the time we had our debate, and you acknowledge that the new data favors Treatment B. Nonetheless, some people in the audience of our debate felt you were persuasive, used Treatment A on their patients, and their patients died. Does that make you a murderer?
The scenario can be progressively modified: Maybe there was recent research showing Treatment B worsens Disease D, but you hadn't read it yet. Maybe you made a mistake in your statistical calculations. Maybe we decide you are a murderer, in which case no one wants to debate medical questions anymore lest they be declared a murderer, and the medical field languishes instead of developing new best practices.
>I should hope it's obvious I don't believe it's as harmful a form of violence as physically harming someone.
To play devil's advocate -- it wasn't obvious to me, and I think people with less context will find it even less obvious. So from the exact point of view you're arguing for -- creating a causal chain to physical harm -- I'd say overusing the word "violence" does have the potential to create harm, through the escalation of antagonism as I described previously.
(BTW, although I think you're mistaken about the use of the word "violence", I would consider your claim to be protected speech, and don't think censorship of your claim is justified -- e.g. if the HN moderator stepped in and deleted your comment, I'd call that an overreach.)
>We use the word violence to describe many remarkably different in nature things
I haven't noticed this.
Would you describe the gassing and burning of humans in the Holocaust as violence? Would you describe Will Smith slapping Chris Rock as violence? I think of those as almost unimaginably different in nature, but both forms of violence. The gap between a racial slur as violence, and Will Smith's slap as violence, is mundane in comparison. What do you think?
> , in which case no one wants to debate medical questions anymore lest they be declared a murderer, and the medical field languishes instead of developing new best practices.
In your example isn't the question going to be less "why did doctor X and Doctor Y hold positions they had in some debate" and more "Why wasn't it abundantly clear to all that T-A exacerbates D-D to the point of killing patients?" I don't think in this scenario the speech would be at issue at all... I'm trying to participate in good faith by encompassing the entire metaphor but I'm just stuck on that basically. Is this a real world example you're paraphrasing? I'd like to read about it.
> I'd say overusing the word "violence" does have the potential to create harm, through the escalation of antagonism as I described previously.
Well, context, I don't believe violence is inherently bad, in many forms. Elsewhere I note that tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. If the Proud Boys show up to town so as to kick around protestors, I believe it's ethical to use physical violence in return. The point for me is to show that the intent of racists is to do violence, they're normalizing the dehumanization, they're working towards their goal of physical forms of violence, and it should be seen as such and met as such. "But if you never lynch, where's the violence? These Proud Boys don't want black people killed, just the races separate! Peace, at last." Segregation required violence to enforce - the violence was there in the rare times black students tried to enter white schools, or use white water fountains etc. Just because most "complied" doesn't mean the violent enforcement structure isn't in place. Though reading that you're probably throwing your hands up, "everything is violence then!" No, just more things than I think people acknowledge readily.
> (BTW, although I think you're mistaken about the use of the word "violence", I would consider your claim to be protected speech, and don't think censorship of your claim is justified -- e.g. if the HN moderator stepped in and deleted your comment, I'd call that an overreach.)
I mean, I would be very confused if either of our comments got deleted, we're not violating the TOS and from my own value standpoint neither of us are trying to do harm.
I agree with your first argument but not your second. Yes, it's a form of attack. But rather than saying it is simply never allowed (which could be used by politicians to punish criticism) I argue that that the freedom to attack goes both ways and that people should be allowed to exercise self-defense rather than the issue being ceded to some monopolistic higher authority.
By this standard the speech of people booing Musk in a stadium the other day was not protected and they could be subject to legal sanction. I doubt this was what you had in mind.
The question I'm trying to answer: Suppose a large group of hecklers attend a public lecture. They disrupt the lecture and prevent the audience from hearing the speaker's message. Is there a sense that they are interrupting the lecturer's exercise of free speech? Or alternatively, is it the case that anyone who scolds them is interfering with the hecklers' right of free speech? (Does the scold also have a right to free speech? How deep does this rabbit hole go?) I think it's possible to thread this needle by defining the thing we want as "transmission of information", and the thing we don't want as "intimidation".
You could argue that boos are also transmission of information. I saw a short clip of the boo thing and it didn't seem like they were loud or numerous enough to overwhelm what was spoken into the microphone. So based on my current operationalization, those boos basically qualify as protected speech.
If audience members preplanned a large disruption which made it impossible to hear anything Elon said, that would be anti-free-speech according to my current operationalization. It intimidates and prevents information transmission.
I still have to think about the case where they spontaneously disrupt the event, unintentionally making it impossible for him to speak. It seems analogous to the case where people are killed because they're in a big crowd where everyone is squeezed into a tiny space.
And so on and so forth. It happened with parody, it happens with this and it’ll happen with something else in the future. The goalposts keep moving. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except people keep trying to tell me they don’t exist.
How come this is only an issue now that Musk is throwing a tantrum? It's not like his situation is unique, the location data of every aircraft is broadcast and published in the same manner.
As I understand it...?
A) A guy who has a bot that shares public information on Twitter has been banned, sounds like that is free speech being suppressed, not that Twitter is under any obligation to support free speech, as we have been reminded many many times by people who wanted to suppress other speech
B) There is a different guy (?) who allegedly obstructed a vehicle containing Elon Musk's child and climbed on its hood, is this a speech issue? Or assault? Asking that question mostly in earnest
C) InternetGuysRabbleRabbleRabbleAngerPolitical
At the end of the that’s the only thing that matters.
It would appear, based on empirical evidence, that in practice everyone agrees with this point. That may count as mission success for those many people.
Was free speech absolutism ever something Musk put on the table? The issue that Musk is addressing is Twitter's systemic suppression of right-wing political speech.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
Musk repeatedly said that his aim is to allow anything that's legal. He even promised not to ban this specific account:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_au...
But even if he was, one tweet isn't really much of a commitment. People throw out tweets they don't mean all the time. 140 characters isn't enough to lay out an ideological position. Running a company like twitter is a bit more serious - they can't moderate just based on interpretations of what Elon tweets. And they were never going to.
Although if he was committing to keeping the plane account around he is definitely didn't think that through.
You can sue anyone for anything. If you're going to say that only illegal things don't belong, you should wait for the legal system to produce a judgment.
> But even if he was, one tweet isn't really much of a commitment. People throw out tweets they don't mean all the time.
He's said it multiple times. If you don't mean it, how about you just don't say it?
> Running a company like twitter is a bit more serious - they can't moderate just based on interpretations of what Elon tweets. And they were never going to.
Except so far that's exactly what is happening. Musk promised "free speech", so far everything indicates that in reality what we get is "Elon rules". In the end it's simply about what he wants, nothing more.
Mind, I fully agree he's got the right to do anything he wants. It's his site now. I'm just pointing out the inconsistency.
And as a non-US citizen, I don't care one iota about where the US billionaires are flying, for better or for worse those US billionaires don't influence my life too much. But I do care about censorship when it comes to US politics because those US politicians decide about the status of big boom-boom military stuff in my country, stuff that is employed in killing people (this recent video [1] was filmed about 20 km from the town where I grew up as a kid). The latest Twitter seems to really have changed its stance when it comes to fighting censorship in US politics. As such, I applaud Musk on this.
[1] https://twitter.com/elenaevdokimov7/status/16015871425760706...
The minute someone gets shot on a congressional baseball outing, shit hits the fan. A few school children get shot every few months...thoughts and prayers.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zygg/twitter-bans-elon-mus...
"Sweeney has been using sites such as ADS-B Exchange to track the movements of private jets blogging to celebrities, tech billionaires, and Russian oligarchs for years now. By law, the movement of these plans is publicly available information. “This account has every right to post jet whereabouts, ADS-B data is public, every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, Even AF1 (@AirForceTrack) Twitter policy states data found on other sites is allowed to be shared here as well,” the account’s pinned tweet read before it was banned."
Without getting into the weeds on this specific issue, the idea that any public information being republished on social media can’t have safety consequences is absurd. If, for example, the information about where someone lives is buried on a buggy government website, packaging it up and broadcasting it onto Twitter to millions of people is a very meaningful event that has safety consequences to the person involved.
If Musk doesn't want to get tracked, he can take a regular airplane like other people, or maybe borrow a plane from someone he knows, and not use one that's registered to his business.
I’m not sure you’ll find many who agree with you in this definition. The natural followup to “not meant to be public” is “meant by who?” Oftentimes people are doxxed through collation of various public records, kept and published by the government. I’m thinking things like phone books, arrest records, property transfer records, business registration, WHOIS registration, and many more. Then there’s times when the victim themselves didn’t realize they were leaking information. Even seemingly innocuous photos can be used by determined individuals to get a precise location [1]. I realize this falls under “unintentional” by your definition but would it be fair to say the person doxxed themselves in this case? I don’t think so.
To me the essence of doxxing is putting together otherwise disparate info into an easily sharable package. Something which raises the profile of the individual datapoints and their relation to each other until finding the victims information is trivial for anyone with a basic search.
1: See GeoWizards fantastic series doing exactly this: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...
Bottom line is: there is no justifiable reason to publish real-time location info of somebody against his wishes other than to harm him.
The real issue here is people believing 'do unto others' is even remotely a concern for people in a position of power.
Everyone on the planet has a legitimate interest in knowing what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth. Thus, talking about where he is must be protected as free speech.
Whether you agree with that or not, until very recently, Elon suggested that he did.
Where is the real-time data on Putin & Biden's whereabouts then?
> what Elon will do next with his obscene wealth
What does that has anything to do with his location?
> free speech
Talking about and inviting others to do harm could very well be free speech, but that doesn't make the ones doing it less of a--holes.
His location is a hint to who he's talking to and what he's doing.
There has been no invitations to do harm. It's not about who's an asshole or not - it's about who's a hypocrite on free speech.
Google Maps is tracking me every day and I have no problem with it. But it would certainly piss me off if that info was fed into a dedicated social media account.
This data is not from the FAA, but from ADSBExchange, which crowdsources the data.
Sure, I get that Musk and his plane are probably inseparable, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
I have absolutely no problem with a website like Twitter banning free speech like "where's musk's plane," since it is his website and he can do what he wants. As long as it isn't the government forcing a private party to say or not say something, then meh I don't really mind. In fact, I think Musk's comment about "as long as it isn't real-time location" is a pretty decent compromise.
I do wish he wouldn't be such a hypocrite about it, and I definitely wish people would stop acting like he is some free-speech absolutist hero, which he is definitely not.
> document for sharing
Google "Docs"-ing.
Now I get it.
There are countless videos of people screaming in fast food restaurants. If someone recognizes that area, looks up public addresses in the vicinity, and finds a name match, from there you can easily get a phone number, work place, etc.
Doxxing is less about information acquisition and more about intentions and location in which it’s shared. Angry mob posting online about some evil person in a video and you find the target’s address just by looking up their license plate? Most communities will ban you for doxxing if you post that info.
I know where 14 Premiership managers (and could probably have a good guess at ~150 Premiership players) are going to be on Boxing Day, with exact locations for a specific time range. Is that doxxing them?
[0] It sucks that personal private planes are even a thing, but that's a different issue.
As someone pointed out over in Fedi-land, this would be broad enough to cover sports fixtures because you know where players are going to be (live location) and you know how they're likely going to get there (coach from local hotels if you're a UK footballer).
But that's not what was said - there was no exception carved out for that.
The solution to people knowing the location of your private plane is really simple: Don't own a private plane. Most of us are already doing it.
That is of course the better solution. There's something perverse about the entire concept of a private plane.
Still, as much as I dislike his descent into madness, I do understand Musk's safety concerns here.
The information published is not constant: it is published only when a plane takes off or lands.
The information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
> the information is not a person's whereabouts - it is that of a vehicle
So would you be comfortable with someone publishing the location of your car every time you get in your car?
Of course the location of your car isn't public, only its ownership. But the location of your house is. So what if someone publishes every time someone enters or leaves your home? I think that would be a pretty dramatic violation of privacy.
> It could be argued that taking a flight in a private jet is just as much an example of what you term a public event as being at a sports event is, since private jets are required by law to broadcast their exact id and location whenever they are in flight.
No, because nobody is flying jets for an audience outside that jet. Except maybe at air shows and the like. It's the audience that makes it a public event, not the fact that it happens outside and is not secret.
That would be a pretty stupid argument to make. Is it one you are seriously putting forward?
Cars are required to carry license plates, that doesn't mean that using a crowdsourced license plate reader to track and publish the live location of the car isn't a massive invasion of privacy.
Please stop arguing for legitimizing surveillance because you hate some rich white guy.
I think there are reasons why we should allow aggregating and publishing plane location data, (though a time delay does seem reasonable.) Those reasons have nothing to do the data being "already public" and are based on the value transparency and accountability outweighing the loss of privacy.
However, when people argue that the loss of privacy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, they help undermine expectations of privacy in other areas.
> Musk has also apparently requested, via the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), that his plane not be tracked on third-party sites like FlightAware ... “This aircraft is on the the FAA blocklist meaning it is not allowed to be displayed to the general public,” a FlightAware spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “This is something that all 3rd party trackers do usually follow as a list is sent out every month."
> ADS-B Out transmits flight data directly from the aircraft to internet vendors not participating in the LADD program. Non-participating internet vendors collect and post all ADS-B Out flight data on the internet. To address ADS-B Out privacy concerns, the FAA has initiated the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program to improve the privacy of eligible aircraft.
ADSBExchange does not participate in the program that the blocklist is part of. They even cover this on their homepage
> First and foremost ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!
ADSB Exchange can't get around ICAO anonymizing just by looking at the transponder data.
> Elon uses the FAA PIA privacy program for a private plane ID. When using a PIA address, the owner is anon and private, not public. Sweeney’s workaround is (likely) to spot a (rare) ICAO plane resembling Musk’s & noting the private code.
You can no longer claim it's public. It was de-anonymized in some way.
It's no longer a case of reposting public information but someone going considerable lengths to post this information.
The @ElonJet guy even bragged about it:
> Elon got PIA but I've already identified it!
Registered owner: FALCON LANDING LLC at 1 Rocket Rd, Hawthorne, CA.
Google Maps known businesses at 1 Rocket Rd: SpaceX and Onsite Dental (huh?)
That’s not how you do anonymous.
> "These privacy mitigation programs are effective for real-time operations but do not guarantee absolute privacy," an FAA spokesperson said. "A flight can still be tracked in other ways such as a Freedom of Information Act request, www.LiveATC.com, ADSB Exchange, or a frequently departed airport."
His plane registration is not anonymized and is well-known[1].
1. https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
Jack Sweeney's actions to deanonymize the plane clearly allowed the situation in which Musk's two year-old child was followed and the vehicle they were travelling in was ambushed. If the deanonymisation that Jack Sweeney is said to be doing can even be seen as a protected form of free speech, it should still be open to critique over the plausible threat it poses to lives.
Can I find this in the Twitter TOS?
Also, this application of the rules is completely in line with original policy about inciting harm, and as a private company, Twitter is well within their right to deplatform users that don't follow their rules.
What seems capricious to many right now might actually be even-handed enforcement of pre-existing rules towards people that had gotten used to special treatment. And if it's not even-handed I don't see how anything has changed from before, where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed.
"where some people were given a free pass from the rules while others weren't -- the only difference is who is blessed and who is cursed."
Whataboutism.
There are written rules about inciting harassment and posting private information/locations without express approval. Ignorance of the rules shouldn't excuse people from following the rules.
It's not whataboutism to point out that these policies existed previously, and that if there are any differences at all it's that the rules weren't always applied for this violation previously. The fact is, certain Twitter accounts used to get a free pass -- I feel like the modern adage "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" applies.
(Do I believe what I'm saying? Basically, it's one way of looking at things and I think that while this interpretation of the rules and their application is unproven and counter-narrative it is a viable argument that I expect Twitter to make as the new moderation team grows.)
Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number.
I know nothing about this, but was a rabbit hole to explore.
The tail number for his plane is well known. If you put that N-number into an ICAO conversion script (https://www.avionictools.com/icao.php), you get the same Hex number that you see from adsbexchange.com. From what I can tell, the script is using an algorithm and not doing a DB lookup. So, just based on the tail number, you could figure out the canonical ICAO code for the plane.
The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
In order to address this privacy shortcoming, the PIA program exists. This would change the ICAO for the plane to be disconnected from the tail number. But from the tracking website, it seems like the ICAO number for his plane hasn’t been changed/anonymized(?!?). So either, they haven’t actually gotten the new ICAO number installed (after 10-ish months), or the plane isn’t eligible to be part of the program. PIA requires the plane to only fly domestically and have the right kind of transmitter. If the plane flys internationally, it can’t have an anonymized ICAO number.
See: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
Otherwise, I don’t see how anyone could track this particular plane if it did have a PIA ICAO identifier and you only knew the tail number.
Like I said, I don’t know very much about this, but it is a fascinating rabbit hole. Anyone want to correct where I went wrong?
I'm not sure that it does at this very moment, but public statements by Sweeny himself said that it did indeed have a PIA ICAO number and that Sweeny de-anonymized it. It's possible Elon stopped using it because of that de-anonymizing.
> The strange thing is that adsbexchange also lists the plane as being part of the LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) program (but I don’t know the source of this annotation). AFAICT, LADD limits public display of information, but only for data distributed from the FAA. Crowd sourced data isn’t limited (nor could it be).
Yes LADD is a different system and you're not required to follow it as a data provider. FlightRadar24 for example follows it and does not list any LADD aircraft as they use FAA's data feed which requires as it's terms of use that you follow the LADD program.
I read that too, but haven’t been able to find any source that wasn’t Sweeny on that. Without another source, I’m more inclined to believe that the plane is part of LADD, but not PIA (or isn’t anymore). And that the plane from the Sweeney tweet from February 2022 may have been another plane entirely. Maybe Musk’s plane was enrolled at one point, but it honestly doesn’t make much sense to me to have a plane enrolled in PIA.
I mean, if I had a private plane, I’d like to keep the option of flying it internationally, which you couldn’t do with an anonymized ICAO (again, according to my limited reading).
Also, given the limited number of PIA planes, it would be trivial to look for ICAO numbers that disappeared at one airport and then for a new private ICAO number to appear at the same airport. The system only makes sense from a privacy perspective if you don’t have continuous monitoring of the ADS-B transponders. As things currently exist, with a small number of PIA planes, it would be obvious to find new codes.
Even if you have PIA though, I don't thing you're restricted from flying internationally. I don't see any comment on the PIA page that says you can't fly internationally with it. Wouldn't you just revert to your original ICAO when doing international trips?
The FAA site made it seem like changing the codes was a non-trivial “process” that wouldn’t want to do regularly. You’d have to reprogram the transponder back to your canonical code, because other countries don’t have access to the private PIA conversion lookup tables. The private ICAO numbers might also conflict with other countries “number space”.
Maybe this is an easy thing, but most changes in aviation don’t seem “quick”.
It could be a procedural thing where after switching, the FAA won’t recognise your canonical one? That’s seems a little strange, though.
Imagine it were your child. Can you honestly say you wouldn’t change any opinions or practices when it came to personal security?
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.
And remember, my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said it's just as legal for Musk to kick anybody he wants out of his new club house and even be a hypocrite about it.
I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids. As a social media icon he's basically worthless to the world.
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.
Given he had no problem calling a random person a “pedo” knowing it would cause harassment, I’m going to go with “no.”
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.
That is pretty literal
In such a case: "Died in front of me" would be accurate. "Died in my arms" is a lie.
If Lucy pulls away the football 27 times, you aren't required to go running at it the 28th.
But I expect there's something particularly poignant about the moment of death.
So to me, Musk's inaccuracy about that detail is very significant.
It was relevant to an election Biden was about to become the President. The hookers and meth was there to entertain the more base urges of audience.
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'm grateful I was spared from H. Biden wang.
Links? You mean a picture of an https addresses that leads to a deleted tweet.
> Biden wasn’t part of federal government then FYI.
Sure but he had connections, and way to pull those images. See twit #8.
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.
So a picture of a link, of a deleted tweet, you have to access via Internet Archive, that's also deleted.
You know links are usually click and go, not transcribe, click, go back, go to Internet Archive and try there. Then do some internet sleuthing.
Still this isn't a case of they posted links to materials. Anyone that wants to find them needs to invest some effort to actually find them.
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?
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.
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.
The fact that Musk previously said he wouldn’t ban the account, then changed his mind (apparently after a personal incident) just shows Musk changed his mind, is all.
It certainly demonstrates he didn’t think through his previous decision, suggesting it was a spontaneous comment and not a rigorous policy. Which is worrying, because publishers such as Twitter need to have a consistent and coherent moderation policy.
But it’s still relevant if we’re to decide which position we agree with, and whether Musk was “right” previously or now.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af
That Musk 'changed his mind' on the one thing that he said would set Twitter apart from 'the rest' is where I have a problem: this is a matter of principle so dear that it should override his personal affairs because that is what he is on the record about. If Musk's principles only hold water as long as he isn't personally affected then I'm fine with that but then he should get off his high horse and stop pretending.
Twitter before Musk was not perfect, but it was perfectly usable (even if they got stuff wrong every now and then, and in those cases they usually - but not always - eventually corrected themselves). What is on display right now is capriciousness of an entirely different degree.
There is about how you know which link to follow.
So Twitter is now unusable because elonjet has been banned? Social media companies change their policies all the time. You don't have to agree with the decision but holding it up as something so consequential is just silly.
Assuming what he said about his son being accosted is true, how could he not change his mind? Should he really not stop something that threatened his kids life because of a promise he made to internet strangers?
If he simply bans those who would cause him (or people he likes) harm but continue to allow and encourage "free speech" for those who would cause harm to others then that seems a bit hypocritical.
This includes criticizing him in various ways.
Say what you will about pre-Elon Twitter; I never heard about anyone getting their account banned for saying bad things about Dorsey.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
I don't think anyone would really care about this had he not made purchasing Twitter all about trying to save us from the evil Twitter censorship demons.
Free speech only counts when it's speech, sharing opinions and such, however controversial.
Petty "I'll share your itinerary" is hardly speech, let alone opinion.
We need to be careful about not (unintentionally) spreading misinformation.
(Your objection to Elon is correct of course.)
That won’t stop me saying he’s a hypocrite for doing so. Does he feel so strongly about accounts doxxing “the libs?”
But no matter how you slice it, this account (and it's owner's personal account) were targeted purely because they irked Musk, and he has given zero indication that he plans to enforce this rule for basically any other account.
But Musk owns Twitter and he can pick and choose what accounts he wants to allow.
I guess it is akin to me removing unwanted comments on my blog. His site, his rules, policies and ToS.
Musk had no problem insinuating that Yoel Roth was a pedophile (as is Musk's style), reportedly forcing Roth into hiding.
Does Musk recognize the ramifications of what he was doing in either case? No. At any rate, it's pretty clear that the "threats to personal safety" is a mask, he clearly is fine with doxxing and threatening other people's public safety... as long as he is the aggressor, not the victim.
Especially when it's not even accurate and misunderstood:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Maybe he should just buy another jet or two, make sure the other jet(s) are in regular use (maybe shuttling SpaceX/Tesla/Twitter/etc employees around), and make sure he regularly swaps which one he is personally using. Extremely expensive solution, but not beyond his budget.
Or maybe he should just buy himself a private jet chartering firm. An even more expensive solution, but he can probably afford that too.
Only through a manual process that sounds like it can take a month or so to complete.
Perhaps, in future, this could be solved with technology that automates generation/randomisation of PIAs, much like MAC addresses on phones and laptops are randomised to prevent tracking?
Next-generation ADS-B transponders could communicate with the FAA (or appropriate local authority) via satellite or mobile network to generate/request a new, random PIA before every flight.
A small risk, and something that could be mitigated, but still there nonetheless.
The proposals to encrypt ADS-B data, being driven by corporations and wealthy individuals, are more risky in that they add key management to the mix and make it much more likely that something will go wrong and cause widespread ATC failures or aircraft going dark on ATC displays and in collision avoidance systems at critical moments. Especially as there'll be a mix of encrypted/non-encrypted transponders for decades to come.
There is also an argument for some sort of cryptographic signing of ADS-B messages in order to prevent spoofing.
Is all of this really necessary when billionaires have other means at their disposal to avoid scrutiny? Why add risk and complexity to a critical system just to make their lives easier?
Spoofing is not really a useful attack vector, for various reasons. In any case it's also not something that can easily be retrofitted for the same reasons, in that it takes decades to update these systems.
I can go on one of those websites, see all those flights, but I have no idea who the belong to or who's on board.
That changes once someone specifically links a private jet to someone.
Within the EU I'd be interested in the ramifications with regards to the GDPR.
the linking is done simply by looking up who the plane is registered to, and that is also public information.
you can of course always go the other way, look who owns a plane, and the go to flight information from there.
there is nothing private about any of the information used in the process.
I would ponder the GDPR's definition of personal data before making such definitive claim.
https://dataprivacymanager.net/who-does-the-eu-gdpr-apply-to...
No.
That's not true.
Another impulsive act despite other forces forming negative business opinions of all his impulsive actions.
He will be laughed out of court by any judge.
https://www.google.com/search?q=a835af
And if you don't have the registration that one more search. All of this information is public and that goes for pretty much all aircraft.
If the bar is 'low end stalkers that don't have internet' then yes, it will make a difference.
No way
/s
Hypocrisy
BUT he also built churches and schools in the poor neighborhood he grew up in.
So he did some really terrible things and was overall a terrible person, BUT he also did some really good things.
[1] https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start...
All evidence points to him liking to sire and not to father.
No really, what makes you believe this?
Some additional info: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/14/elonjet...
> On Wednesday evening, the account was briefly restored, with Twitter outlining new rules seemingly designed to prevent Sweeney from posting the real-time locations of planes used by Musk and other public figures as long as he included a slight delay. Sweeney, over Twitter, asked Musk how long he’d have to delay the data to comply.
> But Wednesday evening, Musk threatened to escalate the conflict against Sweeney, saying a car carrying Musk’s son, X Æ A-12, had been “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles, implying without providing evidence that location data had been a factor in the purported episode. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” Musk tweeted.
> Sweeney, 20, shared publicly available information about Musk’s flights, not his family members or his cars. The records stopped and ended at airports, and Musk has provided no further detail as to what legal basis Musk would cite in a lawsuit.
I heard that he gave his child a strange name, but... that is just something else.
On topic: I don't see how a flight location could be shown to cause that event. If I told you that I was arriving somewhere at LAX at around 0900 could you find me?
Especially since it is claimed the @elonjet account hadn't tweeted for 48 hours before the incident - difficult indeed to claim causation.
Maybe he should stop phoning home
1. This has nothing to do with the location of his private jet.
2. You can't do whatever you want, even to protect your family. Elon has a lot of power, he can't be allowed to abuse it because some guy decided to stalk him.
I am sure this will fly below the radar, however, once again shows there is no consistent moderation policy across Twitter. So far it seems Musk will only respond if it affects his own family.
Allegedly he had the chance to buy it for £50,000. It might have been more value for money than Twitter.
The slight of hand here is to conflate the car and the plane and the dates. This allows his followers to push a “it was for his child’s safety!” argument, in which yet again Elon Musk uses his children as a prop to avoid critical examination of his new story. Which, as you and others point out, falls apart due to the timing of the last tweet and the purported incident.
Also Musk isn't really trustworthy so unless this is confirmed by am independent third party there is no reason to believe the guy that moves tens of thousands of dollars to harass rescue personnel.
Even if Musk is not lying there still isn't a connection.
Edit: apparently the last data published from the elonjet account is from December 12th. Making this even more ridiculous. Not sure what I expected.
Also, his plane's data is still out there, for free.
Musk considers harm to anyone's family other than his to be necessary for Twitter revenue.
> organizations who supported harm to my family
A significant problem in Twitter and social media in general. Musk seeks to protect himself, while opening the floodgates on others for his version of "free speech" by unbanning accounts previously flagged as abusive.
A hypocrite by definition.
"Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.
Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family."
Make that what you will.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944