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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

And in the 3 minute call where he popped onto a Twitter space tonight, he now says doxxing is zero tolerance and journalists aren't above the rules. But the alleged "doxxing" was the journalist doing nothing more than linking to the @elonjet account.

@elonjet can be found on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@elonjet

Incredibly, links to Mastodon instances are now flagged as a safety risk on Twitter.

Video of the Twitter spaces meeting, until this link gets removed: https://twitter.com/ForeverEversley/status/16036127708929187...

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Honestly, I was on the side that expected Twitter to get better (like pg), and have mostly not been against any of what he's done until now, but this seems like a bad decision all around.

I assume he got emotional because his child was involved, then did this in a fit of rage, and is now unable to admit that he was wrong. There is no way you can look at this and say what he did was right, no matter what political stance you have.

A newly created rule, the violation of which isn't clear either.

I suppose this is unavoidable if you give one person complete control over a platform. Perhaps it should be illegal for big social media platforms to have a shareholder with over 50% of the voting power.

I have no expectations around whether Twitter gets better or worse. The incentives have not changed, and the incentives point in the direction of the likes of the New York Times or Fox News.

But it isn't obvious that this decision is bad. What is quite clear he has changed his mind on pure free speech - which, realistically, was widely predicted. This isn't a political exercise though, he's just booting a few journalists in a hasty, poorly planned but ultimately not unreasonable policy. There is no ideology that requires a geo-fix on Elon's jet.

Although I'll postfix that all with "yet". People were claiming Alex Jones was the end of it relatively recently, and that story ended with the US president being booted off for partisan reasons.

> partisan reasons

Care to substantiate this?

The reason Trump was booted was his role in supporting and promoting Jan. 6th. The whole thing started as a rally put on by Trump.

In their original post on his suspension they didn't think they had a good argument for suspending Trump based on the current situation. They had to resort to a hyper-partisan reading of "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." [0] for example, rather than an appeal to something more reasonably interpreted as dangerous.

Then the so-called "Twitter Files" [1] provide confirmation of what we already sort-of knew that the inside of Twitter was a highly partisan environment creating internal pressures to boot Trump for political reasons, looking for excuses and testing attempts blindly. Note that the process outlined to ban him was to keep testing tweets, the policy team returned "no violation", then they tried the next tweet. Then eventually the executive got impatient and seem to have overruled the process to get him kicked off.

Compared to that, what Musk is doing is rather mundane and palatable. It is more or less up front that he doesn't like the journalists targeting his affairs, and isn't politically motivated or likely to be meaningful.

It has been a couple of years now, there was a big investigation that turned up nothing. Trump is running for president again the usual way and just launched an NFT token so it is pretty clear he wasn't seriously plotting a revolution. Their interpretation of Jan 6 was wrong, partisan and material.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515?cxt...

I somewhat agree with you, if we're defining 'political reasons' as 'not liking violent interference in presidential elections'.

They did bend their own rules. But not because they are all card carrying Democrats. They did it because they couldn't stand having the person that very obviously instigated Jan 6th on the platform anymore.

It took a mob (following, supporting, assembled, and whipped up by Trump) storming the capital building to get them to boot Trump. I don't see how you get from there to 'political differences'. If that was the case he would have been gone much sooner.

Problem was that he didn't do it (entirely) by tweet. So they found an excuse. That much is true.

He has been shadowbanning all sorts of people. Ukrainian war reporters, financial reporters, all sorts of stuff. This is just an upgrade to actual suspending accounts from what he has been doing the last 10 days.

I thought he went off the rails back when he started banning satire accounts that bought a blue checkmark. That felt like a pretty clear admission that he was wrong about the blue checkmark but didn't want to admit it.

> Incredibly, links to Mastodon instances are now flagged as a safety risk on Twitter.

Isn't that considered to be anticompetitive behaviour, what with Twitter being the dominant player in the microblogging space and all?

Not only was the space removed, but in fact, the entire Spaces feature has been removed from Twitter.

Whoa wtf. I don't "wtf" a lot on HN but I had not noticed the whole spaces tab disappeared in the iOS app without an app update. A WTF both on the decision to remove it and that it can be removed without having to update the app.

Many apps have lots of feature flags that can be turned on and off based on what the API says.

Also used for things like A/B testing.

Ah, I developed an Android app back in 2012 with explicitly no permission to access the internet, so I think my app development experience was quite limited :-) Thanks for the heads up on how that works now.

Mastodon’s Twitter account has also been banned.

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