It actually is relevant in this instance.

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.

No, it's broadcasting the movements of a set of aircraft, using publicly available data. There is no information about who is on board those aircraft.

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.

And publicly available satellite imagery can track the movements of your car. Depending on the country you live in, the fact that you own the car is also publicly available information.

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.

Show me how publicly available satellite imagery could offer anywhere close to the same level of tracking that is federally mandated and available for aircraft, and I might take that argument more seriously.

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.

So these "kidnappers" you are talking about are smart enough to create a security risk for a multi-billionaire who can afford any level of security, but at the same time they are too stupid to combine a few pieces of publicly information themselves and would only be dangerous if some teenager on Twitter does it for them?

Publicly available satellite imagery can’t track my car in any meaningful way. At best you’d be able to figure out the color and (rough) size of it if you knew my address.

They might be creating a security risk, but it's a legal security risk and might even be moral too.

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.

> I just wish he'd get back to saving the world and setting up Mars for my kids.

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.

This always was the case and there are zero recorded instances of such so no need to trot out this argument. Musk himself has Tweeted out the location of his child in real time.

Free speech applies to all speech, not just political speech. If you want "free speech as long as it's legal", this should be allowed. If you don't that's also fine, but then you can't cite "free speech" as a reason to reinstate Trump (Which Musk did). Although regardless neither of these is a "free speech" issue (In the constitutional sense) since it's about a corporation banning certain things on its platform, which it's perfectly entitled to do. It's just very clearly shown the hypocrisy with which Musk now runs Twitter.