Elon’s Commitment to Free Speech Rapidly Replaced by His Commitment to Hypocrisy | Hacker News Reader

Elon’s Commitment to Free Speech Rapidly Replaced by His Commitment to Hypocrisy

techdirt.com

93 pointselorant39 comments

Twitter is going to implode soon, and take Tesla down with it. It’s gonna be interesting to watch…

That would be hugely disappointing for all the people calling out Elon Musk as a scammer for his Tesla work for many years now. I'm sure those people would rather see Tesla go down due to its failures, rather than because of Twitter.

> I'm sure those people would rather see Tesla go down due to its failures, not because of Twitter.

Tesla's most important failure is Musk. That's why TSLA shareholders are trying hard to oust him.

I get your point, but on the other hand, Musk (and his hyping/scamming) is the only reason why anyone even knows about Tesla. Were it not for him, Tesla would just be one of many (tens?) of struggling car makers. So sure, Elon Musk has been very bad for Tesla, but before that he was very good for Tesla's valuation.

His hyping/scamming: is it good for Tesla, or is it bad for everyone else though?

True, but that's in the past. If Telsa wants to flourish into the future, it will be without Musk. He did his part, and made himself billions in the process - from a Tesla perspective its time to move on.

Self-driving scam aside, people do seem to like their Tesla cars.

Those who paid for a Cybertruck pre-order, or a Tesla Semi pre-order, aren't enjoying them.

EDIT: Quick google says Tesla took 1.5M Cybertruck pre-orders. Assuming each costs $100k, how much is that? People get riled up with SBF, but this guy is on another league.

Cybertruck preorders cost $100, not $100K.

Got it, he only swindled $150M then. Thanks for confirming.

Interesting prediction. Got any shorts or are you just going to watch?

Twitter is extremely hard to short right now…

Of course they don't. People predict the end of social media sites all the time and nothing ever happens. Anyone on reddit around the Ellen Pao saga will remember the whole site was predicted to die and be replaced with Voat shortly. You'd go on reddit and the whole of /r/all and most sub front pages was just posts about how reddit was dead. Nothing happened. Then there was the youtube Google+ comments and redesign drama. Nothing happened.

Things are even less dramatic on Twitter, you can go on the app now and it looks pretty much exactly like it did last year.

Yeah same thing with digg. People kept saying after v4 they were going to tank.

Sadly just watching, as Twitter is no longer publicly traded.

But Tesla isn't, which is what the OP also has certainty about.

> Twitter is going to implode soon.

Sure. Real soon, this time!™ Like it was supposed to implode immediately last month, yet it didn't and nothing happened.

So once again, what we are seeing here is a manufactured storm in a tea cup peddled by emotional techies defending the lack of enforcement of illegal content like child exploitation and CP being spread on Twitter for years.

I guess those angry about that can find such content very easily on federated social networks. Not on Twitter this time.

Musk's most recent verifiable act related to child exploitation enforcement on Twitter was disbanding the council responsible for it. Other than what he has claimed in his tweets, what reason do you have to think there have been other changes to enforcing that content on twitter that have made it more effective?

The council of which you speak was apparently ineffective enough to get themselves fired, so I don't know how you'd measure that.

What is measurable is the amount of staff that was working and is currently working the problem. From all reports I’ve seen, it’s less.

You must be in management.

They didn't crash but they may have murdered their ad revenue and brand based on external reporting. The hasty Twitter Blue launch was a disaster.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitters-advertising-truth-hurt...

I’m really surprised so many on hacker news seem to buy into the mainstream media narrative on Elon.

At the very least I’d encourage everyone to check out his twitter and see his explanations and then decide for yourself: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies

Btw I’m not even an Elon fan. I just got whiplash from the media turning on him so fast so I started checking things out for myself.

Yeah what I gathered from this is that the banned journalists were posting his real time location which is against the Twitter ToS, unsurprisingly they get banned and write a report about how they were banned for criticism.

You gathered incorrectly. Not a single journalist posted Elon’s real-time location.

> real-time location

I'm led to believe that these are called "assassination coordinates" now, by Elon himself.

Elon flies in Gulfstream G650ER jet. As required by the FAA, it is equipped with an ADS-B transponder which broadcasts its position in the clear. Just as traveling on public roads means that you are visible and observable to the public, flying via public roads does not guarantee total privacy - the service that @elonjet was using is maintained by private volunteers, who use their personal network of SDR receivers to spot and aggregate flight data.

"Real time location" means the real time landing of an aircraft at an airport. I don't think people who fly in private aircraft should have a reasonable expectation of complete privacy if they're using public airspace and safety systems maintained by public authorities. If government officials / air force one can cope with being tracked by radio transponders transmitting in the clear, I don't know why Elon expects he can do any better.

The incident Elon purports to have taken issue was forty miles away from an airport days after his jet had last been spotted by @elonjet.

> Btw I’m not even an Elon fan. I just got whiplash from the media turning on him so fast so I started checking things out for myself.

It was just as predictable to see who was going to be crowned the new villain of the month after Trump and it became Musk after he bought Twitter. As soon as he did that, then came the media working overtime on peddling a narrative of an imminent Twitter apocalypse that didn't happen.

Enforcing the ToS on all accounts and banning and deranking scam bots, etc is all I am seeing rather than before, illegal CP content and scam bots running rampant and were left ignored by the executives. People complaining about Twitter now should have left years ago before Musk bought it, but still tolerated the outrage, scam bots and CP for years.

As you said, the best thing to do is to check the sources yourself and not blindly listen to the single narrative peddled by the mainstream media.

I’m sorry, but u were tripping over CP and scam bots before? I’ve never seen CP on Twitter, am I outside the norm? Have you seen any reported evidence of these reductions or is this all anecdotal? I’d love to read a report on this as people keep repeating it without evidence.

> I’m sorry, but u were tripping over CP and scam bots before? I’ve never seen CP on Twitter, am I outside the norm?

Brands [0], governments [1] and victims [2] see this differently and Twitter failed to remove such content.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-brands-blast-tw...

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...

[2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/twitter...

Sorry, as someone who did research, can you explain to me why @crimethinc and @chadloder were banned? I knew anarchist and left-wing activists (real left-wing, not liberals) were targeted before, especially those espousing autodefense and armed security, but those two are really tame (and are innocent children compared to some jan6 activists).

The whole thing with Musk's wild flapping back and forth and massive value destruction is entertaining schadenfreude, but I don't think anyone is really surprised that his ego has been bruised repeatedly over the last year and he's trying to create himself a reality where he's the smartest guy in the room again.

I don't know exactly what happens when someone on the narcissist spectrum starts feeling the world turning against them, but I imagine that the humility required to reboot his relationship with the world is out of reach. He's a human, worked hard, had some lucky breaks and good fortune, and now he's completely out of his depth.

My prediction for the next year is that twitter slowly bleeds users, ends up a shell of itself and virtually everyone who was previously interesting to follow there moves _somewhere_ else. As a follow-on, the world moving on from the last decade of social media will in retrospect be seen as a Good Thing and we'll all be better for it.

Reportedly twitter has more real users now than it’s ever had.

I’ve haven’t seen those reports and a quick Google didn’t return them either. Would love a link.

He probably meant charts Elon shared himself (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596718851097755648). For what it's worth SimilarWeb estimates roughly the same number of visits (user sessions) in Sep/Oct/Nov:

Sep: 6.8B

Oct: 7.0B

Nov: 6.8B

What's needed, I think, is for some other service to have its Big Break moment. Right now people still talk about Twitter because sometimes things actually happen on Twitter. In between the vast oceans of inanity there's occasional real breaking news or genuine insights. Sometimes, it's an actual trend (as opposed to things that journalists hope will be trends).

None of that has yet broken out on Mastodon. It could, and if it does, people might say, "I'll spend more of my valuable waking hours on that application rather than this one." That is the one thing that genuinely cuts into Twitter's enormous incumbent advantage: the more people go elsewhere, the more people it encourages.

The gradual outflow of celebrities could lead to that thing. Right now I'm seeing a fair bit of inertia: as bad as Musk is, they want to continue doing whatever the hell it was they were doing on Twitter. They don't want to re-build it from scratch on a new site (and Musk sure isn't gonna make it easy for them). They worked hard to get the followers they've got.

Wasn’t Kiwifarms taken offline for doxxing and cyberstalking people only a few months ago? How is this any different?

Everybody knows the answer to that one.

Don't say the name, he's probably the type who views any attention as positive.

(Speaking as a member of the "dirtbag left", one thing I cannot abide is folks who dish it out but can't take it, especially if your guy's name sounds like it's describing a body spray they'd give slaves in lieu of a shower back during apartheid)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com