The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law — or regulate data brokers. And while there’s a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2)because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts of sensitive citizen data from data brokers without having to get a pesky warrant.
The end result has been just a parade of dangerous scandals in which dodgy companies hoover up oceans of sensitive user data, then sell access to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together. Given foreign intelligence can easily buy this data, our corruption poses a severe national security threat; but instead of fixing it, Congress likes to distract folks with endless hysteria about a single app: TikTok.
“The latest Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill contains a pointed amendment within it—the government is making it much more difficult to monitor and track private aircraft travel. The new law passed last week will almost exclusively benefit the nation’s wealthiest flyers and obscure public attempts to hold them accountable for their disproportionate carbon emissions.”
The new law lets private jet owners censor most meaningful travel details (call signs, flight numbers, travel patterns) through a new application process in which they claim the data must remain confidential due to ambiguous “safety or security” needs. Folks over at Bluesky dug into the specific language of the reauthorization bill and found it was inserted by Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas.
Jack Sweeney, the jet tracking student who made Elon Musk cry like a baby, says the law won’t completely block the tracking of jets, given they can still glean a lot of detail from general contextual clues. But it’s still amusing how quickly and easily Congress is able to shore up lax U.S. privacy safeguards when it’s to the specific benefit of the rich.
The thing is, letting dodgy, unregulated data brokers monetize everybody’s sensitive movement and behavior data harms poor people, rich people, and everybody in between. Right now most members of Congress view these privacy issues as somebody else’s problem, but at some point there’s going to be an unprecedented privacy scandal tied to data brokers that shatters that delusion in very painful ways.
The government has repeatedly made the choice to prioritize making money over consumer and market health, public safety, and national security. And eventually, an event is going to come along that makes the kind of scandals we’ve seen so far (from stalkers abusing cellular location data to right wing activists abusing abortion clinic visitor data to send targeted misinformation) look like a grade school picnic.
Ever since he first started to make moves to purchase Twitter, Elon Musk has framed his interest in “rigorously adhering to” principles of free speech. As we’ve noted, you have to be ridiculously gullible to believe that’s true, given Elon’s long history of suppressing speech, but a new book about Elon’s purchase suggests that from the very start a major motivation in the purchase, was to silence accounts he disliked.
According to an excerpt of a new book by reporter Kurt Wagner about the purchase (and called out by the SF Chronicle), Elon had reached out to then Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to ask him to remove student Jack Sweeney’s ElonJet account (which publicly tracks the location of Elon’s private plane). It was only when Agrawal refused, that Elon started buying up shares in the site.
The excerpt slips in that point in a discussion about how Jack Dorsey arranged what turned out to be a disastrous meeting between Agrawal and Musk early in the process:
The day after, Dorsey sent Musk a private message in hopes of setting up a call with Parag Agrawal, whom Dorsey had hand-picked as his own replacement as CEO a few months earlier. “I want to make sure Parag is doing everything possible to build towards your goals until close,” Dorsey wrote to Musk. “He is really great at getting things done when tasked with specific direction.”
Dorsey drew up an agenda that included problems Twitter was working on, short-term action items and long-term priorities. He sent it to Musk for review, along with a Google Meet link. “Getting this nailed will increase velocity,” Dorsey wrote. He was clearly hoping his new pick for owner would like his old pick for CEO.
This was probably wishful thinking. Musk was already peeved with Agrawal, with whom he’d had a terse text exchange weeks earlier after Agrawal chastised Musk for some of his tweets. Musk had also unsuccessfully petitioned Agrawal to remove a Twitter account that was tracking his private plane; the billionaire started buying Twitter shares shortly after Agrawal denied his request.
In other words, for all his posturing about the need to purchase the site to support free speech, it appears that at least one major catalyzing moment was Twitter’s refusal to shut down an account Elon hated.
As we’ve pointed out again and again, historically, Twitter was pretty committed to setting rules and trying to enforce them with its moderation policies, and refusing to take down accounts unless they violated the rules. Sometimes this created somewhat ridiculous scenarios, but at least there were principles behind it. Nowadays, the principles seem to revolve entirely around Elon’s whims.
The case study of Sweeney’s ElonJet account seems to perfectly encapsulate all that. It was widely known that Elon had offered Sweeney $5k to take the account down. Sweeney had counter-offered $50k. That was in the fall of 2021. Given the timing of this latest report, it appears that Elon’s next move was to try to pressure Agrawal to take down the account. Agrawal rightly refused, because it did not violate the rules.
It was at that point he started to buy up shares, and to present himself (originally) as an activist investor. Eventually that shifted into his plan to buy the entire site outright, which he claimed was to support free speech, even though now it appears he was focused on removing ElonJet.
At one point, Elon had claimed that he would keep the ElonJet account up:
But, also, as we now know, three weeks after that tweet, he had his brand new trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, tell the trust & safety team to filter ElonJet heavily using the company’s “Visibility Filter” (VF) tool, which many people claim is “shadowbanning”):
Less than two weeks later, he banned the account outright, claiming (ridiculously) that the account was “doxxing” him and publishing “assassination coordinates.”
At this point it should have been abundantly clear that Musk was never interested in free speech on Twitter (now ExTwitter), but it’s fascinating to learn that one of the motivating factors in buying the site originally — even as he pretended it was about free speech — was really to silence a teenager’s account.
You may recall that last year, after directly promising that he’d leave up the ElonJet account, which reveals public information regarding the flights of Elon Musk’s private plane, he changed his mind and banned it, along with any reporter who even mentioned the existence of the account anywhere, claiming it was “doxxing.”
A bunch of Elon’s biggest fans suddenly became huge believers that revealing publicly available information about a plane, which does not identify who is on the plane, or give anyone any access to the plane itself, was “doxxing.” It was not.
As everyone other than Elon’s sycophantic fans realized how ridiculous this was, Elon made up a story about how a car carrying his young son was attacked and somehow that was the fault of ElonJet. Later reporting showed this was all nonsense. The supposed confrontation happened a day after the last post from the ElonJet account and 26 miles away from the airport, meaning the account had nothing to do with any of it. Later police reporting suggested the incident was created by Musk’s own security team, not the other individual.
Anyway, it became clear that Musk had a very unique definition of “doxxing,” which was simply revealing information about Elon Musk that Elon Musk doesn’t like. Elon has had little concern about revealing info on others, such as a former top employee of Elon’s, whose home information was posted to Twitter and kept up while Elon posted blatant lies to egg on attacks.
That takes us to late last week, when Elon hopped in a Tesla to livestream a test drive of the latest version of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving,” which has never been full self driving at all (even in the livestream). The grainy footage does not speak well to Musk’s livestreaming ambitions for exTwitter, and left many who follow Musk’s antics supremely unimpressed.
However, at about 27 minutes, Elon tried to bring back a bad joke from a few weeks ago, said he’d punch in Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto home address and have the car drive to it. He admits he doesn’t actually know the address (which is… not what he’d suggested a few weeks ago), and asked Google where Zuck lived.
How it comes about is that he’s sitting there parked, talking things over with a colleague, and Elon says that maybe he’ll just put in the address for Tesla’s HQ (technically Tesla’s “official” HQ is in Texas after Elon “left” California in a huff during the pandemic, but a few months back the company shifted most things back to California, which they justify by saying California is the company’s “engineering headquarters.”).
Musk’s colleague cracks some mumbled joke about going “to the fight,” leading Musk to laugh uproariously at what must be the funniest joke he’s ever heard, and asks “where does he live?” in reference to Zuckerberg. They joke back and forth a bit about knocking on his door and inquiring if Zuckerberg would like to “engage in hand to hand combat,” which, again, is the same joke Musk made a few weeks ago.
But then he searches the address on Google and and you can see it pretty clearly on the screen. Then Elon, appears to have a moment of realization that maybe that’s worse than, you know, ElonJet, so he (in typical Elon fashion) makes up some justification for it:
So now we’re… ha ha ha ha ha… at least going to where Google says, you know, Zuckerberg lives… You know, I don’t think… this can’t be considered doxxing if we just Googled it. So. Um. [Loooooooong pause.] So now we’ll just see the drive to where Google thinks he lives.
After a short drive, during which you can see where they’re driving, they get to a house and Elon insists it’s probably not Zuck’s house because he can’t see any security, and so they leave, as Elon again jokes about how Zuck said “name the date” for a fight and Elon says “how about now?”
Either way, the exact meaning of doxxing is certainly disputed. But if you think that ElonJet (revealing public flight info) is doxxing, then you have to think that showing the address Google told you is Zuckerberg’s house is also doxxing. The excuse that “if it’s on Google it’s not” doesn’t make much sense, given that ElonJet info is… also available via Google.
I know, I know, at this point, Elon’s fans will insist that Elon must be right because Elon is always right. But it’s worth highlighting how Elon’s entire schtick is blatant hypocrisy, in which he’ll come up with excuses for suppressing those he dislikes, while insisting that it’s not wrong when he or his friends do it.
Last week when Elon Musk banned the ElonJet account, then banned a bunch of reporters for talking about it, and then insisted that they had tweeted out his “assassination coordinates” leading to a crazed stalker to jump on a car with his child in it, some were… skeptical. I wasn’t sure it made sense to weigh in on the details of the “stalker” situation without more info, though it never made sense that a stalker would find the jet tweets particularly useful — especially when flying into an airport as massive as LAX.
That said, reporters Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell, both excellent tech reporters who were both suspended from Musk’s Twitter over the last few days, have a more complete story of the stalker, including talking to the guy. And it’s pretty damn clear that it has literally nothing to do with the ElonJet account, which did not dox him, nor help the crazed guy.
A confrontation between a member of Elon Musk’s security team and an alleged stalker that Musk blamed on a Twitter account that tracked his jet took place at a gas station 26 miles from Los Angeles International Airport and 23 hours after the @ElonJet account had last located the jet’s whereabouts.
The guy in question, definitely seems troubled. But there’s little indication he was actually a “stalker.” It even sounds entirely possible that he, in a troubled state, just happened into the same gas station as Elon’s security. Lorenz and Harwell tracked down the car’s owner (probably because Musk, uh, doxed the license plate by revealing it on Twitter). The car had been rented out via the car-sharing service Turo, and the owner revealed who had rented it.
The car’s renter, Brandon Collado, confirmed in interviews with The Post that he was the person shown in the video. He also provided The Post with videos he shot of Musk’s security guard that matched the one Musk had posted to Twitter.
In his conversations with The Post, Collado acknowledged he has an interest in Musk and the mother of two of Musk’s children, the musician known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher. Boucher lives in a house near the gas station.
In his communications with The Post, Collado, who said he was a driver for Uber Eats, also made several bizarre and unsupported claims, including that he believed Boucher was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts; that Musk was monitoring his real-time location; and that Musk could control Uber Eats to block him from receiving delivery orders. He said he was in Boucher’s neighborhood to work for Uber Eats.
I’m not sure I’d take the “interest” in Musk and Grimes as particularly confirmed, given that he was making “several bizarre and unsupported claims” during the conversation. It really does seem like he’s just a guy who needs help who happened into the parking lot of the gas station at a coincidental time, not because of any stalking.
The incident took place at the gas station on Tuesday, Dec. 13, approximately 15 minutes before the station closed, according to its manager, Daniel Santiago, who was working that night. Santiago said he was surprised when the car Collado was driving pulled into the Arco station and into the space next to Santiago’s car, which is not a normal location for a customer to park.
He said the incident was caught on the gas station’s security camera and that footage had been turned over to the South Pasadena police on Thursday.
According to the video of the incident that Musk posted, the member of Musk’s security team confronted Collado sitting in the car wearing gloves and a hood. “Yeah, pretty sure. Got you,” the Musk security team member can be heard saying on the video.
Perhaps he is a stalker, but either way, there’s basically zero evidence to suggest any of this has to do with the ElonJet account, or “assassination coordinates.”
And, of course, when Lorenz tweeted at Musk to see if he’d answer the email questions she and Harwell had sent him, Elon’s response was… to ban her from Twitter.
Musk later reversed the ban, though Drew remains suspended unless he removes a tweet that does not dox him or even point to a live ElonJet account (and which actually cites me).
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.
“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.
Oh, Elon. Following on yesterday’s nonsense in banning the ElonJet account that robotically posted the public information regarding Elon’s private plane flights, and then trying to justify it later (after initially promising to keep the account alive to demonstrate his “commitment to free speech”), it appears that Elon’s commitment to free speech continues to dwindle.
This afternoon it showed itself in the form of banning the @JoinMastodon account, which is the official account of the Mastodon federated, open source, social media network that has been growing by leaps and bounds, mostly from people exiting Twitter.
Its crime? From the Internet Archive, it appears that its last tweet was… to let people know that the @ElonJet account exists on Mastodon:
Just earlier this week, in a Twitter spaces, Elon mocked Mastodon by claiming that people weren’t going there because “no one’s listening,” implying that the audience is too small. I’ll just note that, personally, I’ve found the opposite to be true. The engagement on Mastodon has been a lot more interesting and valuable than on Twitter of late.
Now, we’re the first to admit that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and that it’s important to give the benefit of the doubt to mistakes. But, seriously, how does one explain this?
The Mastodon account did not violate even the new policy. I guess, if you did a really, really strained reading of the new policy, by linking to the ElonJet account on Mastodon, it was, in some twisted way, linking to travel routes, and that’s banned? That’s the best explanation for this. But… it’s still not a good one.
And it definitely does not show a commitment to free speech.
Then, of course, there are the worst explanations for this, which is that Musk actually is nervous about how much Mastodon is growing. As impulsive as Musk appears to be, I actually doubt that’s why this happened at all. But it still looks pretty, pretty bad.
But, yeah. Every social media network needs some form of content moderation. It’s not about “censorship,” as some people keep claiming. But how that moderation plays out is very much dependent on who is in control over the site. And sometimes it may be a hypocritical billionaire surrounded by sycophants with no real commitment to anything other than himself.
Anyway, I’ve been hanging out at Mastodon myself, and it’s been great. Come follow me there. I’m hoping to have some more posts soon about some of what I’ve learned while there.
Hilarious Update: A few minutes ago, the @ElonJet account returned to Twitter, but that came about 20 minutes after Elon himself justified the ban, saying it violated the company’s (new) doxxing policies (see the original update to this story at the bottom. Hilarious Update 2: And, a couple hours later, the account was suspended a second time. Anyway, in the meantime, the original post is here:
Earlier this week, we wrote about how Elon Musk had secretly applied the strongest visibility filter (what some people insist on calling “shadowbanning”) to the ElonJet account on Twitter (which automatically noted where Elon’s private plane was flying), which he had promised not to ban due to his apparent “commitment to free speech.”
The guy behind ElonJet had revealed, based on a Twitter insider whistleblower that new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin had demanded the heaviest “visibility filter” be applied to ElonJet (VF stands for “visibility filter.”)
On Wednesday morning, despite all of this the @ElonJet account was suspended:
Later in the day, the guy behind it, Jack Sweeney, announced that all of his accounts, including his personal account had been banned as well:
Over on Mastodon, Sweeney shared the message Twitter sent him to explain why he was banned. It… seems like made up bullshit.
If you can’t see that it says:
Your account, JxckSweeney has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.
Specifically, for:
Violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam.
Now, as with any content moderation decision, we do like to keep reminding people that decisions are often made for reasons that aren’t entirely public or clear. So perhaps there’s some other explanation for this. Or it was a mistake. Or somehow Elon’s big new plans to stop spam (which banned tons of legitimate accounts earlier this week) are responsible for this.
But, on the whole, it once again raises some pretty obvious concerns about how the “new management” is handling these kinds of things — and the pure hypocrisy of Elon.
Indeed, the fact that anyone linking to the ElonJet account on Facebook or Instagram are being warned that it “may be unsafe” indicates that this is deliberate suppression:
Of course, all this has done in practice is call way, way, way more attention to Elon’s hypocrisy on this topic. Tons of major media publications are covering the story. And even the “Community Notes” feature, which Elon keeps talking up and renamed from the former “Birdwatch” has now attached a note on Elon’s old tweet promising not to remove the account:
So, hey, when do we get the “Twitter Files” with the internal discussion on this removal? C’mon Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Do some real reporting for once.
Update: So… apparently yesterday, Elon’s Twitter quietly updated its policy against sharing or private info to explicitly block sharing live location info:
It does not appear this policy is particularly well thought out, as it would appear to ban any tweet of anyone’s live information. So, reporting on the location of, say, the President. Or posting a selfie with some friends. Or, just noting that you saw so-and-so at this or that location. All now violates Twitter’s policies. Oh yeah, also, Twitter’s built in functionality that allows users to post their own location.
In the old days, at least, policy changes like this would have a team of people thinking through the consequences. But these days, it seems to just be based on Elon’s whims and little else.
So, yeah, I wrote a big long thing debunking the first round of the “Twitter Files” but there’s no way I’m going to make myself do more of that for every stupid thread of the “Twitter Files” being tweeted out. Just know that, having read all of the released “Twitter Files” threads so far, they are all just as ridiculous as the first one. They are all written by people who appear to have (1) no idea what they’re looking at (2) no interest in talking to anyone who does understand it and (3) no concern about presenting them in an extremely misleading light in an effort to push a narrative that is not even remotely supported by what they’re sharing.
So far, to anyone who actually has been following the trust & safety / content moderation space over the last five to ten years, what the actual files have shown is a supremely competent trust & safety team, that was put in an impossible position, and actually bent over backwards to try to be thoughtful and careful about their decision making, rather than ad hoc and emotionally driven. Over and over and over again, the files seem to show not (as a bunch of people insisted) a bunch of “woke” ideologues suppressing opposing ideologies, but (as we’ve highlighted) a careful, thoughtful team, trying only to figure out the best way to stop assholes from being assholes — and doing so by trying to follow the rules they had set for themselves, though (as ALWAYS is the case in trust & safety) realizing that assholes are always evolving and policies sometimes have to change to evolve with the latest variant of asshole.
I did want to call out, though, that one of the ridiculously laughable “big reveals,” this time from Bari Weiss, was the well known fact that Twitter would “deboost” some users from trending and algorithms, and have them appear lower in replies. That wasn’t new. The company announced it. It was covered in detail in the media.
Much of the controversy last week was over the term “shadowban.” A lot of people insist that it has always meant any effort to limit the visibility of a user. But… that’s wrong. Historically, the term was really only used to mean a very particular type of limited visibility: one where those hit with it (trolls, spammers) could post, and think they’re posting normally, but only they could see their own posts.
The problem is that, as with so many things, a bunch of Trumpist grifters took a word that meant something real, and turned it into any kind of de-amplification. That happened in 2018 when Trump flipped out about a Twitter bug that accidentally downranked a bunch of people, including but not limited to some prominent Republicans in search results. Back in 2018, I wrote about how that was the wrong use of the word. Soon after, Twitter came out with its own explainer, which also clearly defined the original meaning of shadowbanning and said “that’s not what we do,” but explained (again pretty clearly) that tweets do get ranked and can be minimized in the algorithm, search, and replies. But those who follow them will still see them (unlike in a shadowban).
So much of the “controversy” over this was focused on the fact that a bunch of people only learned about the term “shadowban” from the misrepresented story in 2018, and none of them bothered to educate themselves in the half-decade since then. Now, language changes over time, so you can argue that the new definition of shadowbanning is how it’s commonly used today (though, I’m not convinced that’s true). However, even then you can’t say that Twitter somehow “misled” people, because (again) it very clearly stated which definition it was using and at the same time explained that users could get downranked in the algorithm and search.
But Bari Weiss misleadingly presented these features, which internally Twitter referred to as “visibility filters,” as Twitter lying about not shadowbanning. But… that’s wrong. And it’s obviously wrong to anyone who bothered to read what has already been publicly stated quite clearly.
Elon himself seemed to make a big deal out of this, and even falsely claimed that Weiss showed that this tool was only used against conservatives (it wasn’t and she showed nothing at all to support that). But the really bizarre part in all of this is Elon himself has claimed that he wants to do the same thing as his grand solution to content moderation, saying the company’s “new” policy “is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” and that “negative” tweets “will be max deboosted.”
Except… as noted, that wasn’t a new policy at all. It was the old policy, which Twitter had been very public about. So it seems particularly disingenuous to claim that the old Twitter was doing something nefarious when it’s literally (1) the same thing they talked about publicly and (2) the same thing Elon says is his own brilliant solution.
But the story gets even dumber. You see, one of the Twitter accounts that Elon absolutely hates is the “@ElonJet” account that tracks where Elon’s private jet is flying based on public data. Elon has long hated this account, and once offered the guy behind it $5k to take it down. Last month, he also claimed that he would leave the account up to prove his “commitment to free speech.”
However, Jack Sweeney, the guy behind the account, has now revealed via leak from a Twitter employee that just a few days before Bari Weiss’s “big reveal” about the “evil old Twitter shadowbanning,” Twitter’s new trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, demanded that the Elonjet account be, well, max deboosted (in Elon’s terminology). In internal Twitter terminology it was “apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.” “VF” standing for “visibility filter.”
Here’s the thread from Sweeney:
So, uh, yeah. Based on all that, as reported by the Daily Beast, it sure looks like Musk absolutely knew that this tool was already available to Twitter, and used it against an account he didn’t like.
And while it’s only a single line screenshot, and perhaps there is more context, I’ll just note how different that appears from the screenshots being revealed in the official “Twitter files,” in which there don’t seem to be random “suppress this account!” commands like what we see from Irwin above, but rather open discussions about “does this violate the rules?” and pushback from other employees to make sure that they’re being as fair and reasonable as possible.
We keep pointing out that Elon seems to be on the path of reinventing every innovation Twitter already had done, but doing it much, much worse, but this one seems particularly nefarious. Because just as he’s trying to whip everyone up into a frenzy by (misleadingly) claiming that this evil tool was secret and used to silence people not for rules violations, but personal whims… he was apparently using the very same tool based on his personal whims and feelings.
