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.