Elon Tries (Badly) To Defend The Banning Of Journalists As Twitter Starts Blocking Links & Mentions Of Mastodon

Content Moderation

from the do-I-sense-some-worry? dept

Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It’s how it always goes.

Remember Parler? They promised that they would moderate “based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States” (a nonsensical statement for a variety of reasons, including that the FCC does not regulate websites). Then, as soon as people started abusing that on the site, they suddenly came out with, um, new rules, including no “posting pictures of your fecal matter.”

Or how about Gettr? Founded by a former Trump spokesperson, and funded by a sketchy Chinese billionaire, it promised to be a “free speech” haven. Then it had to ban a bunch of white nationalists for, you know, doing white nationalist shit. Then, suddenly, it started banning anyone who mentioned that the sketchy billionaire funder might actually be a Chinese spy.

And then there’s Truth Social. It’s also supposed to be all about free speech, right? That’s what its pitch man, Donald Trump, keeps insisting. Except, an actual study that compared its content moderation to other sites found that Truth Social’s moderation was far more aggressive and arbitrary than any other site. Among the forbidden things to “truth” about on Truth Social? Any talk of the Congressional hearings on January 6th. Much freedom. Very speech.

So, look, it’s no surprise that Musk was never actually going to be able to live up to his notoriously fickle word regarding “free speech” on Twitter. I mean, we wrote many, many articles highlighting all of this.

But, really, it would be nice if he didn’t then insult everyone’s intelligence about this and pretend that he’s still taking some principled righteous stand. It would be nice if he admitted that “oh shit, maybe content moderation is trickier than I thought” and maybe, just maybe, “Twitter actually had a really strong and thoughtful trust & safety team that actually worked extremely hard to be as permissive as possible, while still maintaining a website that users and advertisers liked.” But that would require an actual ability to look inward and recognize mistakes, which is not one of Elon’s strongsuits.

So, last night, after banning a ton of journalist accounts on Twitter, Elon and his Trust & Safety VP, Ella Irwin, tried to defend the decision. But they did so badly. Irwin pushed out a bullshit statement to the media:

“Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Irwin said. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

Yeah… that’s not what people are complaining about. They weren’t saying journalists should get special treatment for breaking the rules. They’re asking how the fuck did what these journalists posted break the rules?

Eventually Musk jumped on Twitter, of course, and like Irwin, tried to pretend that they were just making sure the rules applied equally to journalists as to everyone else. Except… that was always the case? The issue was that yesterday, they created new laughably stupid rules to ban an account tweeting publicly available information regarding Elon Musk’s jet. Then Musk took it further and claimed that this (again) publicly available information was “assassination coordinates.”

Well, except for a few minor details. First, he just fucking changed the terms of service to shut down the jet tracker, and made them so broad and vague that tons of tweets would violate the rule — including anyone using Twitter’s built-in location indicator to tweet a photo of someone else. Second, the location of his plane is public information. It’s not “assassination coordinates.” If Musk is worried about getting assassinated, hiding this account isn’t going to help, because the assassin will just go straight to the ADS-B source and get the data anyway. Third, I get that Musk claims his child was in a car that was attacked the other night, but there remain some open questions about that story. For example, the location where it occurred, as deduced by BellingCat, was not close to any airport.

Given that, it’s not at all clear how this is connected to the jet tracking service.

Furthermore, the LAPD put out a statement on this:

LAPD’s Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet.

Which, you know, seems notable. Because if a stalker actually went after him, you’d think that rather than just posting about it on social media, he might contact the police?

But, most importantly, none of the journalists in question actually posted “real time” assassination coordinates for Musk. They had posted about this whole story having to do with content moderation decisions made by Musk. Hell, one of the journalists, Donie Sullivan, got banned for tweeting that LAPD statement.

So, yeah, it’s not about “equal treatment” for journalists. It’s about coming up with bullshit arbitrary rules that just so happen to ban the journalists who have been calling out all the dumb shit Elon has been doing. Which, you know, was the kinda thing Elon insisted was the big problem under the last regime, and insisted he was brought in to solve.

From there it got even worse. A bunch of journalists, including a few of those who were banned (who, for unclear reasons were still able to log into Twitter Spaces, the real-time audio chat feature of Twitter) began discussing all of this, and Elon Musk showed up to… well… not quite defend himself? But, uh, to do whatever this was:

It starts with (banned) Washington Post journalist Drew Harwell asking a pretty good journalistic question:

One, I don’t think anyone in this room supports stalking. I’m sorry to hear about what happened with your family. Do you have evidence connecting the incident in LA with this flight tracking data? And separately, if this is an important enough issue to you, why not enact the rule change on Twitter and give accounts like Jack Sweeney’s, time to respond to, like you said, a slight delay in providing the data? Why say last month that you would support keeping his account online for free speech and then immediately suspend not just his account, but journalists reporting on it?

Unfortunately, before Elon could say anything, another reporter, Katie Notopoulos from Buzzfeed (who started the Twitter Space) jumped in with, perhaps, a less well composed question (this isn’t criticism — coming up with questions on the spot is difficult — but I do wonder what would have happened if Musk had been allowed to respond directly to Drew’s question).

Elon, thank you for joining, I am hoping that you can give a little more context about what has happened in the last few hours with a handful of journalists being banned?

Elon then says a lot of nonsense, basically just that “doxing is bad and anyone who has been threatened should agree with this policy.”

Well, as I’m sure everyone who’s been doxed would agree, showing real-time information about somebody’s location is inappropriate. And I think everyone would not like that to be done to them. And there’s not going to be any distinction in the future between so-called journalists and regular people. Everyone is going to be treated the same—no special treatment. You dox, you get suspended. End of story.

And ban evasion or trying to be clever about it, like “Oh, I posted a link — to the real-time information,” that’s obviously something trying to evade the meaning, that’s no different from actually showing real-time information.

I mean, a lot of this is kind of infuriating. Because many of the bans that happened in the last regime, and which Musk got so mad about, were also about putting people in danger. And Musk seems singularly concerned only when he’s the target. Over the weekend, he posted some incredibly misleading bullshit about his former head of trust & safety, Yoel Roth, taking an old tweet and a clip from his dissertation and acting as if both said the literal opposite of what Roth was saying in them (in both cases, Yoel was actually highlighting issues regarding keeping children safe from predators, and Elon and legions of his fans pretended he was doing the opposite, which is just trash). Following that, a large news organization that I will not name posted a very clear description of Yoel’s home, and tweeted out a link with those details. That tweet still is on Twitter today, and Yoel and his family had to flee their home after receiving very credible threats.

Again, I repeat, the tweet that identified his home is still on Twitter today. And Elon has done nothing about it.

So spare me the claim that this is about “inappropriate” sharing of information. None of the information the journalists shared was inappropriate, and Musk himself has contributed to threats on people’s lives.

As for the whole ban evasion thing, well, that’s also nonsense, but there’s more. Notopoulos asked another question:

When you’re saying, ‘posting a link to it,’ I mean, some of the people like Drew and Ryan Mac from The New York Times, who were banned, they were reporting on it in the course of pretty normal journalistic endeavors. You consider that like a tricky attempted ban evasion?

To which Musk responded:

You show the link to the real-time information – ban evasion, obviously.

So, again, that’s not at all what “ban evasion” means. The ban was on the information. Not a link to an account. Or a reporter talking about an article that links to an account. Or a reporter talking about a police report that very loosely kinda connects to the account.

And, again, banning links to the media was the thing that I thought Musk and his fans were completely up in arms about regarding the ban on the link to the NY Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Remember? It was like a week ago that it was a “huge reveal” by Elon Musk and his handpicked reporters, who apparently revealed what was the crime of the century and possibly treason when Twitter banned a link over worries of harm. Drew Harwell, finally getting a chance to ask a question, got into this slightly awkward exchange where the two seem to be talking about different things, but Drew is making the point comparing it to the NY Post thing:

Drew: You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true. I never posted your address.

Elon: You posted a link to the address.

Drew: In the course of reporting about ElonJet, we posted links to ElonJet, which are now banned on Twitter. Twitter also marks even the Instagram and Mastodon accounts of ElonJet as harmful. We have to acknowledge, using the exact same link-blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden-New York Post story in 2020. So what is different here?

Elon: It’s not more acceptable for you than it is for me. It’s the same thing.

Drew: So it’s unacceptable what you’re doing?

Elon: No. You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That’s it.

And with that “end of story” he left the chat abruptly, even as others started asking more questions.

So that whole exchange makes no sense. They’re clearly talking past each other, and Elon is so focused on the “journalists doxing!” that he can’t even seem to comprehend what Drew is actually asking him there, which is comparing it to the NY Post thing.

And, of course, it also seems relevant to the January 6th/Donald Trump decision, which Musk has also roundly criticized. One of Musk’s buddies, Jason Calacanis, was also in the space defending Musk, and I only heard bits and pieces of it because (1) Twitter Spaces kept kicking me out and (2) before the Space ended, Twitter took all of Spaces offline, meaning that the recording isn’t available (Musk is claiming on Twitter that it’s a newly discovered bug, though tons of people are assuming, as people will do, that Musk pulled the plug to get the journalists to stop talking about him).

However, on Twitter, Calacanis tweeted what he insisted was a simple message:

It’s just so obvious to everyone: don’t dox or stalk anyone.

Someone will get hurt or worse.

💕Be good to each other💕

If you are splitting hairs on the definition of these words, or claiming it’s public information, you’re missing the basic human concept here: people’s safety.

But, again, this brings us right back around to the top of the story. “It’s just so obvious” is a traditional part of this content moderation learning curve. It always seems so obvious that, “sure, this speech is legal, but man, it seems so bad, we gotta take it down.” In this case, it’s “don’t stalk the billionaire CEO” (which, yeah, don’t do that shit).

But this is how content moderation works. There’s a reason the role is called “Trust & Safety” because you’re trying to weigh different tradeoffs to make things trustworthy and safe. But Musk hasn’t been doing that. He seems only focused on his own safety.

And Calacanis’s claim that people are “missing the basic human concept here: people’s safety” well… that brings me to January 6th and Twitter’s decision to ban Trump. Because, you know, as Twitter explained publicly at the time and was re-revealed recently in Musk’s “Twitter Files,” this was exactly the debate that went on inside Twitter among its executives and trust & safety bosses.

They looked at the riot at the Capitol where people literally died, and which the then President seemed reluctant to call off, realized that there was no guarantee he wouldn’t organize a follow up, decided that “people’s safety” mattered here, and made the hard call to ban Trump. To protect people’s safety.

Now, you can criticize that decision. You can offer alternative arguments for it. But there was a rationale for it, and it’s the exact same one Musk and his team are now using to justify these bans. But we’re not seeing the screaming and gnashing about how this is “against free speech” or whatever from Musk and his supporters. We’re not likely to see Musk have Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss do a breathless expose on his internal DMs while all this went down.

That’s what’s hypocritical here.

(And we won’t even get into Musk going back on his other promise that they wouldn’t do suspensions any more, just decreased “reach” for the “bad or negative” tweets).

Every website that has third party content has to do moderation. Every one. It’s how it works. And every website has the right to moderate how they want. That’s part of their editorial discretion.

Musk absolutely can make bad decisions. Just like the previous Twitter could (and did). But it would be nice if they fucking realized that they’re doing the same damn thing, but on a much flimsier basis, and backed by utter and complete nonsense.

I asked Calacanis about the “public safety” issue and the Trump decision on Twitter, and got… a strange response.

In response he says:

I am a fan of using the blocking and mute tools for almost everything you don’t like at this joint.

Which, when you think about it, is a weird fucking response. After all, he was just going on and on about how it was righteous to ban a bunch of journalists because of “people’s safety.” But also that these problems can be solved by muting and blocking? So either he thinks Musk should have just muted and blocked all these reporters… or… what? It also does not actually respond to the question.

And, once again, we’re back to the same damn thing with content moderation at scale. Every decision has tons of tradeoffs. People are always going to be upset. But there are principled ways of doing it, and non-principled ways of doing it. And Elon/Jason are showing their lack of principles. They’re only trying to protect themselves, and seem to feel everyone else should just use “mute” and “block.”

Oh, and finally….

This post went on way longer than I initially intended it to, but there is an important postscript here. Last night, when we wrote about the banning of the @JoinMastodon account on Twitter, I actually downplayed the idea that it was about Team Musk being scared of a rapidly growing competitor. I was pretty sure it was because of the link to the @ElonJet account that was now working on Mastodon. And, that’s certainly the excuse that Musk and friends are still giving.

Buuuuut… there are reasons to believe it’s a bit more than that. Because as the evening wore on, Twitter basically started banning all links to any Mastodon server they could find. A bunch of people started posting examples. Some screenshots:

Those were just a few of many, many examples that can be found on both Twitter and Mastodon of Twitter effectively blocking any links to more high profile Mastodon servers (it appears that smaller or individual instances are still making it through).

Even more ridiculous, they’re banning people from updating their profiles with Mastodon addresses.

See that screenshot? It says “Account update failed: Description is considered malware.”

So, yeah, they’re now saying that if you put your Mastodon bio in your profile, it’s malware. Given that, it’s a little difficult to believe that this is all just about “public safety” regarding Elon stalkers, and not, perhaps, a little anti-competitive behavior on the part of an increasingly desperate Elon Musk.

Way to support free speech.

Filed Under: content moderation, elon musk, elonjet, jason calacanis, journalists, links, mastodon, public safety, yoel roth
Companies: twitter