Many people have been trying to get the point across that legal, unlimited free speech can put people in harm's way. Elon is happy to say that he's willing to trade harm to those people for his free speech principles, but as soon as his family is the one facing the repercussions, he's happy to change policy and sue.
My attacks on you are consequence culture. Your attacks on me are stochastic terrorism.
Me suppressing my personal information is protecting my physical safety. You suppressing your personal information is an unacceptable breach of free expression.
Me revealing your personal information is transparency in the public interest. You revealing my personal information is doxxing and puts my life in danger.
In other words you’re just repeating that sticks and stones may break bones but words will never hurt. Hardly a well established / obvious statement, and one that’s covered in early grade school discourse
Often that's exactly what it is. People coming to your (or your relatives) homes, people physically attacking others at workplaces and restaurants. People setting up fires and behaving violently to not allow somebody they disagree with speak to those who want to listen to them. We have seen many examples. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen.
You can take it any way you like. If you're not interested in hearing, I'm not interested in wasting time collecting the data, only for you to dismiss it with some lame excuse, it's just be a complete waste of time for me - it's impossible to convince a person that decided upfront not to be convinced.
Tim Pool is swatted regularly for example. Tucker Carlson had to move after his home was attacked. There was an attack on Brett Kavanaugh. There’s a lot of such stories.
In this particular case, there was an attempt at terrorizing Elon IRL. So why shouldn't attacks on him therefore count as "stochastic terrorism", insofar as "stochastic terrorism" is a meaningful concept?
That's a terrible premise to start a conversation on HN. Let's not use extreme concepts invented by ideologues + controversial figures being petty as the basis for thought experiments.
Stochastic terrorism may be an extreme concept invented by ideologues, but the fact remains that if you have a big platform and you criticize someone harshly, that might cause crazies in your audience to go after them. So as a society we should figure out what is and isn't acceptable behavior here, and invent rules to apply universally and impartially.
You can't censor your way out of this problem regardless. People will still post Elon's flights details elsewhere.
Censorship is almost always counter-productive and every time it fails it just escalates. Eventually we'll be doing night raids on people's homes over tweets like the UK.
The costs are far too high for very little benefit. Just look at the moral and cultural compromises taken by the US/Canada/UK in Afghanistan/Iraq/globally to crush Islamic terrorism by force. It generated as many problems as it helped, at a very high cost of tons of freedoms for the western public (not just people in the middle east). Now we're on Part 2 of "compromise freedoms for the greater good". No thanks.
some people's personal information, if broadcast, puts them in danger like Salman Rushdie, while with most people nobody cares about them. what's your snappy hypocrisy koan for that? Salman Rushdie's exercise of free speech but not revealing where he was made him some kind of huge hypocrite?
some people's personal information is in the public interest, like Al Gore's electric bill or how often he and John Kerry fly to climate conferences, and POTUS's also, yet the secret service keeps his travel plans obscure to protect him.
many attacks may be consequent, and many are not; much of life is stochastic.
so I don't get your point. I think Musk is sincerely trying to make twitter more free speechy than the previous administration, and I think he's sincerely grappling with issues at the margins. I don't think this silly twitter bot's POV is no longer being heard.
The counterargument is that elonjet is only tweeting information that is already very public.
Elons Jet, by law, must openly broadcast, over the radio waves, location and route while operating. There is a legal right to publish that information. If he doesn’t want people to know his location, he can avoid traveling on the one private jet linked to him. But that’s not what he’s doing.
His child being followed by someone wanting to meet him has literally nothing to do with the location of his jet.
This is an emotional reaction to a situation that only affects him.
And given the massive negative PR some of his decisions have garnered lately, and his thin skin about them (just today he claimed that the booing at the Dave Chappelle show is because "people weren't letting him speak"), I take this vague claim which has only tangential relevance to the stalking with a grain of salt.
"Pursuing legal action against Sweeney"? Not criminal action against the stalker?
No video, not with all the cameras?
Proof that alleged stalker got the information from that Twitter account, and not FlightRadar24, or even the FAA?
Yeah, I would be unsurprised if it turned out that this was all just horse manure to try to provide cover for his decision.
Perhaps his security guys called 911, but so far LAPD says they have no record of the event. I'm wary of trying to draw any conclusions about the event absent some independent confirmation.
I'm not sure police would be eager to investigate "some guy followed me" type of complaint. Of course, if the complainer knows the right people, they would. But Musk is squarely in the "wrong people" corner with the powers that run LA now, I think, so not sure he'll get a lot of help from LAPD on this.
It only takes one lunatic to care about "nobody" and you can have a fatal outcome. The criminal registry is filled with lunatics such as domestic violence perpetrators or stalkers that found out personal information about a nobody and acted violently on it.
You might be star stuck and a deep believer of Elon the new Saint, but the original comment is pointing out the hypocrisy and danger of one person deciding on whose information we can spread based on augmenting it in the framework of "free speech"; but then essentially boggling it down to naive notion like you stated:
"nobodies" - who cares about them? It's about popularity and favoritism (free speech is the rhetoric)
"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)" seems like a simple rule that can be enforced even-handedly against both sides. On the other hand, "don't do speech that causes harm" is so vague that it guarantees endless battles.
If the New York Times writes an article criticizing someone, and then a crazy person shoots that someone, is the NYT now required to stop writing articles criticizing people? If not, then why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?
U.S. case law sets the bar for incitement really high precisely so you don't have prosecutors trying to silence newspapers in the way I described above. Some people have argued that Twitter should adopt a lower bar in order to prevent harm, but I've never heard anyone describe a coherent principle that wouldn't also allow the NYT to be banned as I described above.
This is a weak comparison. There are some pretty big qualitative differences between a critical NYT article and LibsOfTikTok. And… frankly if the NYT was routinely publishing content that was getting people harassed and threatened? Yeah we should be asking them to change something in their content too.
Humans can tell the difference between news that sometimes has negative side effects, and singling out people for harassment. If humans can tell that difference, so can rules - society isn’t math, the rules don’t have to be equations.
Humans can't tell that difference, except in the sense of "it's good when my side does it to you, and bad when it's the other way around."
Elon Musk aggressively criticized Yoel Roth, forcing him to flee his home in fear for his life.
Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz published the full name and address of the (previously anonymous) LibsOfTikTok writer Chaya Raichik, forcing Chaya to flee her home in fear for her life[1].
Most people think that one of these two events is okay, and the other one is very bad.
Again, I see major differences between those situations that don’t have to do with “sides”. It seems like you’re equating the consequences of the actions with the actions themselves. I.e. if both actions result in someone fleeing their home, they must be the same action.
They weren’t the same action.
The first difference that comes to mind is that the elon situation is an unaccountable individual billionaire, where the nyt is a group of journalists / editors. Dozens of people vetted the choice to publish her name - nobody can vet or check who elon decides to go after next. Plenty of more nuanced takes about the twitter files and roth have been published and didn’t result in angry mobs thinking he’s a pedophile - because those takes were checked by editors and a well established code of ethics.
Elon attacking roth is in many ways the same as what libs of tiktok is doing. Using a huge platform to point an angry mob in someone’s direction, while claiming innocence of the resulting harm. Where revealing libs of tt’s identity is an act of holding power accountable - you wield the power of the mob? The public deserve to know who you are. Elon attacking roth, is… what? Roth has no power anymore, isn’t causing ongoing harm, at this point criticizing him seems indistinguishable from trying to sell elon’s public on the righteousness of his twitter takeover.
What “sides” are those? I’m on the side of “billionaires are too powerful”, “journalism is generally pretty useful”, and “don’t send angry mobs at people for living their lives and having opinions”. Liberal agenda gone mad over here :)
> Humans can't tell that difference, except in the sense of "it's good when my side does it to you, and bad when it's the other way around."
Many humans can though. There's a very big group of people that think every corrupt politician should be investigated. This type of thinking is not equally prevalent amongst all sides of the political spectrum. It is prevalent amongst all extremist forms though, but that probably has to do with the type of person that becomes extremist in the first place.
Why did she have to flee her home? No one was after her. Do we even know if she did flee her home or was it just another lie? Seems like a scandal to gain attention.
>"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)" seems like a simple rule that can be enforced even-handedly against both sides.
He posted a real-time photo of X at twitter HQ like two weeks ago. And then a picture of him getting his badge.
Should Elon suspend his own account for doing that?
In the current political climate, anything that isn't political but does something one side of the spectrum dislikes, automatically becomes political. Elon has turned quite extremely and vocally to the right. So people on the right will view ElonJet as an attack on the right. Unfortunately, that's just how it goes.
These days you can't even write anything objectively anymore. You'll always end at a conclusion that one side will interpret as being against them and then attack you for it.
Slight tangent, but it's especially visible in people who support stuff they're actually not in favor of, just because the perceived 'other side' dislikes it. I've seen people who live environmentally conscious support farmers in the Netherlands, just because the farmers were protesting the current government. Dutch farmers have a huge impact on the Dutch environment and supporting them is the opposite of being environmentally conscious. Yet, people think that the enemy of their enemy must be their friend and the other way around.
Real time location tracking and harmful speech don't impact the ultra rich and normal people in the same way.
Location tracking can be dangerous to rich people because they are a target. Most people are not targets and therefore really would have significant extra risk from being tracked, although obviously no one enjoys being tracked.
Harmful speech is much more impactful to minority groups than it is to the rich.
The rich can chose to live in a bubble, they can move around the globe to avoid the issues and they can hire security. Normal people can't so easily escape the consequences of society becoming hostile towards them due to widespread hate speech.
>"Don't publish someone's location in realtime (24 hour delay is required)"...why should LibsOfTikTok be required to stop criticizing liberals or children's hospitals that do gender-affirming surgery?
LibsOfTikTok has called out doctors using their names, photos, and their place of work. Isn't that effectively revealing the location they will be at most days? Is it any less likely that a crazy person will wait outside those medical facilities to attack a doctor than it is that a crazy person will wait outside an airport for Musk? Isn't what LibsOfTikTok is doing even more dangerous considering they intentionally frame these doctors as a threat while ElonJet is purely informational?
> speech that may be harmful to tens of thousands of already marginalized people
What this means in practice is "speech that powerful, privileged, unaccountable people, who think they are worthy of controlling the thoughts of everyone else, deem to be 'harmful', based on their vague feelings and biases."
So if people who are marginalized go on Twitter to complain about it, their reports don't count? Perhaps some 'powerful, privileged, unaccountable' people do exploit this cause for their own selfish ends, but it seems to me that your argument is predicated on the idea that marginalized people are incapable of asserting any agency, and if they try to do so they must not really be marginalized. I think you should re-evaluate your premise here.
If you consider doxing as a real tangible harm then what about vulnerable groups coming under harm due to being singled out? LibsOfTikTok made claims about Boston Children’s Hospital that caused tangible harm and yet they were unbanned. You might say that LibsOfTikTok didn’t cause the harm, that the responsibility was on the people perpetrating the bomb threats, but the same logic applies to ElonJet and this “stalker” incident.
"harm due to being singled out" seems way too broad, e.g. every time a politician is criticized, they could complain on the grounds that they're being "singled out"
From my limited understanding of the whole LibsOfTikTok / Children's hospital thing, what they had posted was false and thus libel and thus illegal speech which is not allowed on the platform?
I don't connect to Twitter, but I thought that LibsOfTikTok posted evidence in the form of screenshots and recordings of what hospital representatives had said over the phone. Someone even found a paper where authors affiliated with Boston Children's Hospital reported 65 gender affirming surgeries performed when the patient was a minor at the time of surgery: https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm11071943 (Table 1).
From the paper: "The Center for
Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric
center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals
over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. "
Information being false or libelous is another reason to ban someone. That makes it more hypocritical that LibsOfTikTok was unbanned but ElonJet was banned.
May be useful to consider the hypothetical where the statement is true though. What's the right policy in that case? Seems like the sort of hypothetical our speech policies should be robust to.
The specific claims of surgeries being performed at the specific hospital, most relevantly, which was the specific thing that motivated the bomb threats.
> It's well-documented that children are being subjected to 'gender-affirming' drugs and surgeries.
Its well-documented that a small numbet of children with identified needs are prescribed puberty blockers, and that this is extremely significant in reducing suicide rates; its well documented that even smaller number of teens get hormone treatments to promote puberty of the gender of identity, and that a positively miniscule number of teens get (mostly) top or mor rarely) bottom surgery, as well.
> We'll likely look back on this as a huge medical scandal, just as we do for the frontal lobotomy craze.
It’s more likely that we’ll look at the drive promoted largely on the basis of religious conservatism to impose ascribed gender over gender identity and deny such care, with clear evidence that doing so is killing people, as a medical scandal, similar to all the other times care was denied or known harmful interventions were applied systematically to a targeted marginalized community.
> especially with the rise in outspoken detransitioners
Detransitioners are rare among those who have transitioned, and of detransitioners, most of tjkse that are public about their views most support trans rights and access to gender affirming care. The propaganda narrative that you are being sold with outspoken detransitioners is, like everything else about trans issues from the same media channels that isn’t an outright lie, a distortiom.
> They have first-hand experience of how harmful these medical interventions are
The data shows that they are overwhelming helpful. You are, when the individuals in question aren’t lying about the specific cases, still just being sold isolated anecdotes with no perspective on relation to the normal experience, designed as emotional manipulation by professional propagandists, to get you to support a campaign of death (both through neglect and more actively) for trans people.
> Some European health systems have already massively walked back their 'gender-affirming' care for children.
Yes, and so have some American ones, as the consequence if an international political movement actively seeking the elimination of trans people, by death if necessary—and this walk-back absolutely, provably contributes to deaths.
> You might say that LibsOfTikTok didn’t cause the harm, that the responsibility was on the people perpetrating the bomb threats, but the same logic applies to ElonJet and this “stalker” incident.
Correct on both counts. Neither account should be banned or punished
I like that response; its a point of view with proper consistency. Twitter is also a private so another view is that you can ban them both and it’s also consistent and within Musks rights.
Of course it’s also within Musks rights to ban one and not the other, just because. But he’s also taken a very public position on free speech wrt Twitter so I think it’s reasonable to point out when those standards are applied inconsistently, and also challenge people who are trying to draw arbitrary lines to defend him.
This is an imaginary dichotomy, though. The proponents of content moderation on social media argue that hate speech causes tangible harm. For example, there are many mass shooters that say that they got radicalized purely online, such as Dylan Roof. This is not intangible harm, it is tangible.
Sure, but where is the line drawn? A lot of political rhetoric across the board is pretty extreme. The guy who shot up a Republican Congressional baseball game at baseball practice was into a lot of anti-GOP and anti-Trump stuff[1]:
> He had also joined several anti-GOP Facebook groups, including “Terminate The Republican Party;” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans;” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”
I'm all for people toning things down. But the entire online ecosystem seems to be full of various factions warring against each other with extreme rhetoric. Even the discussion of extreme rhetoric is filled with extreme rhetoric ("These people are going to get someone killed!"), which can (and is) used to justify all sorts of bad things.
There will always be insane people in this world. Was Hitler and the nazis radicalized through the internet? Was Timothy McVeigh? Censoring people out of the fear semi casual relationships occurring between them and radicalization doesn’t work.
It’s not like people who apt to deeply believe radical ideas once their source becomes censored they just stop there. Human beings don’t work like that.
I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.
> Was Hitler and the nazis radicalized through the internet?
They radicalized millions of people via their speech, which is the correct level of abstraction. Whether it was offline or online speech is a distinction without a difference.
> There will always be insane people in this world.
Mono-causal explanations are factually wrong. The Dylan Roofs of the world clearly have severe mental health problems, combined with being radicalized online by other people's speech. It's the union of all these factors that causes the observed outcome.
> I don’t believe libsoftiktok is causing real world harm.
Well, it's harder to make a case for libsoftiktok than places like 4chan. I think it's reasonable to say that 4chan et al. have literally caused people to die via mass shootings.
That's motte and bailey on "harmful". Nobody is banning people for saying Musk is a moron, nobody is advocating for "There is a <slur> walking on so and so street right now" tweets. Criticizing people vs revealing their precise current location to everyone on Internet are very different things.
This is public information. His own plane reports it. Anyone can buy a receiver to pick up the transponder, and websites exist to collect that data from people who do. All this Twitter account does is report that for one plane in that database. Anyone, including stalkers, can make a script to watch it.
If it is in real time then presumably yes. Perhaps with exceptions for previously announced or expected attendance at certain public events like award shows and the like.
Well there was an issue with other account posting information about school teachers being groomers and pointing people to their names, pictures, etc.
That account is still online, well and doing it. As others have pointed out, as long as the people that are affected are not Elon Musk, then it seems like for Elon Musk it is mostly fine.
Direction threats have always been against the law, what you claim is “harming already marginalized groups” is not at all the same thing, and not against the law.
Unless you mean specifically targeting people, in which case, twitter and other places don’t allow this.
>Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
The difference is that the information we're talking about here is already completely public information, repackaged in a different format. It would be more like an account that tweets the nearest homeless shelter to you - open information, packaged differently.
Where it might become more problematic would be if the account included inciting language with the information ("here is a homeless shelter, go and mob it"; "Elon's about to land in CDG, who wants to stage a riot"). But I think it's clear that that's not what this account is doing - it's just giving information out that already exists.
And for what it's worth, it's not just Musk who gets this treatment. Most British political events of the last few years have involved journalists excitedly gathering around flightradar24 and watching some poor minister's plane as they make their way back to London to get fired, hand in their resignation, etc. That's essentially the same thing that this Twitter feed is doing (albeit usually more focused on the event rather than 24/7 tracking of one vehicle), but it's not considered a security risk because it honestly isn't. I mean, when the Queen died, Huw Edwards did the same thing for the Princes' plane, and he'll probably win a BAFTA for it...
In all fairness, I have some sympathy towards Musk, as it sounds like he's dealing with the shock of his child being stalked. That's going to evoke a strong emotional reaction, and I can completely understand why he'd want to shut this sort of thing down. But that doesn't make it useful (the information is still public, and anyone motivated enough to track Musk down IRL doesn't need Twitter to find it), nor does it change the hypocrisy of the situation. It seems like he's just lashing out at the wrong person, and making decisions over things that he can control.
Trust and Safety is an extraordinarily difficult problem to handle at scale. Ideally guidelines should be public and applied consistently. That's a high standard.
Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.
>Trust and Safety is an extraordinarily difficult problem to handle at scale. Ideally guidelines should be public and applied consistently. That's a high standard.
Agreed.
>Elon came in saying he was pro free speech, even saying ElonJet wouldn't be banned. But he fired moderation teams and replaced them by personally making individual decisions. Twitter can't get consistent application of public guidelines from that.
I agree, but the previous admin was not even trying to meet the "public and applied consistently" standard (see Twitter Files). So I'm hopeful that there will still be improvement in the long run. Hopefully this is a teachable moment for Elon.
It won't be his downfall. He still owns SpaceX, which is starting to become very influential. He still owns a large part (though less than he used to) of Tesla. If (when) Twitter crashes and burns, he will get sucked further into his dark abyss and I expect he will become the next Thiel / Koch and use his money to fuck the US political system even more than he's already doing.
For first point: https_//twitter_com/libsoftiktok/status/1592655096252608513
'Supports' does a lot of work in his post, 'mingles with' or 'enjoys the content of' is closer to the truth. Philosophical alignment with that kind of characters betrays contempt for certain groups.
For second point: https_//www.thefader_com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-talib-kweli-twitter-ban
A few boos are enough to make him re-platform a dude with that kind of public record? It shows brittle spirit, as his friend Dave Chappelle would say.
For third point: https_//nymag_com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-smears-former-twitter-executive-yoel-roth.html
This one is the one that's serious, this kind of thing could amount to stochastic terrorism, but no one cares, because he's rich beyond measure, and that makes people excuse his every indiscretion.
It was a cursory google search, and while the burden of proof is on the one making the statements, it costs little to check it yourself.
It definitely isn't a good look for him, and while looks aren't that important, it does paint a picture of a man that has principles only outwardly, a man that is petty, and a man that thinks the world bends to his very word. It doesn't matter, though, the title 'billionaire' tells us that much, and grants him those powers.
Doxxing is not free speech. The sensible majority of people understand that. It's only a vocal small minority of idiots and troublemakers that argue otherwise.
Musk disagreed with you until today, he explicitly said that he would be leaving this exact account up because he believed in free speech even when it was about his location.
The problem is that he is only learning when it negatively affects him. Plenty of people have already learned many of these lessons, he just has no interest in listening to them.
Sure. But if the only way Elon can learn why something is bad is through first-hand experience, will he act against speech that threatens minority groups he's not part of? What about those that are economically disadvantaged?
You can already see this lack of empathy at work in how he's trying to claw back severance he owes Twitter's ex-employees.
Evidence so far is that he’s not principled enough to do so. “Free speech absolutism” just meant he didn’t give a fuck as long as he wasn’t the one at risk. I don’t think that will change, but I’d love to be wrong.
Maybe if one of Elon Musk's children came out as trans he'd realize that trans people are just people and stop needlessly demonizing them with right-wing invective.
My preferred operationalization of free speech is "minimum intimidation".
Slurs don't qualify for protection under this operationalization, because they intimidate the listener without providing any information content.
Same goes for protesting a talk so loudly that the speaker is drowned out, or doxxing.
If your speech serves only to intimidate others into silence, I don't think it should be protected.
Curious to hear everyone's objections to this high-level approach. (Note: I would want to add a bunch of clarifying details before making this Twitter's official policy, but it seems more interesting to provide those details in response to objections, instead of writing a long boring comment.)
Same goes for protesting a talk so loudly that the speaker is drowned out
By this standard the speech of people booing Musk in a stadium the other day was not protected and they could be subject to legal sanction. I doubt this was what you had in mind.
I don't think legal questions related to free speech and Twitter moderation questions related to free speech need to have the same answers. I'm happy with the legal framework we have in the US.
The question I'm trying to answer: Suppose a large group of hecklers attend a public lecture. They disrupt the lecture and prevent the audience from hearing the speaker's message. Is there a sense that they are interrupting the lecturer's exercise of free speech? Or alternatively, is it the case that anyone who scolds them is interfering with the hecklers' right of free speech? (Does the scold also have a right to free speech? How deep does this rabbit hole go?) I think it's possible to thread this needle by defining the thing we want as "transmission of information", and the thing we don't want as "intimidation".
You could argue that boos are also transmission of information. I saw a short clip of the boo thing and it didn't seem like they were loud or numerous enough to overwhelm what was spoken into the microphone. So based on my current operationalization, those boos basically qualify as protected speech.
If audience members preplanned a large disruption which made it impossible to hear anything Elon said, that would be anti-free-speech according to my current operationalization. It intimidates and prevents information transmission.
I still have to think about the case where they spontaneously disrupt the event, unintentionally making it impossible for him to speak. It seems analogous to the case where people are killed because they're in a big crowd where everyone is squeezed into a tiny space.
Imo it's too simple a ruleset you've got here, though I get why we want to do this because in the end what we're all trying to do is find out how we could write down something enforceable, like a TOS or law. Those things can't be very vague... Sort of. Laws seem to allow for some discretion on the part of the justice system.
Anyway to me it's similar to saying "violence is bad," yet we probably both believe people should be allowed to emoloy violence when violence is being done to them.
I think similarly applies to hate speech. If a nazi shows up to campus to deliver their message of hate, it's ethical to drown them out and prevent any spread of the hateful message.
"But both sides but hypocrisy but free speech"
Imo tolerance is not a universal ethical position but instead a peace treaty. Peace treaties should not be suicidal. If you make a peace treaty with someone and they attack, you should abandon the treaty.
Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence. They don't have a place in civil society, civil society should not allow this sort of speech or behavior in it. Someone who is saying these sorts of things is telling you clear as day that they don't tolerate some part of you. So why should you tolerate them? They've abandoned the treaty.
What that doesn't mean is that civil society should go out of their way to hunt and kill anybody that likes to say slurs: that's the opposite of a peace treaty. More like they should be rejected utterly from participating until they're willing to again subscribe to a peace treaty (by being civil, not attacking people).
Deplatforming vocal racists is thus ethical. Their language is attack on civility and our ability to maintain peaceful society.
>Anyway to me it's similar to saying "violence is bad," yet we probably both believe people should be allowed to emoloy violence when violence is being done to them.
Yep, there's an important parallel.
I think a good frame is "protected speech". If someone says something to try & intimidate you, and you respond by trying to intimidate them, then nothing said by either party should be considered "protected" -- Twitter admins should feel free to delete the entire exchange.
I don't think a policy of "intimidating speech for self-defense is protected" is workable, because people will intimidate others and claim it was in response to something the person said to intimidate them, and adjudicating such claims gets messy. If you want to say something nasty to someone else because they were nasty to you, go ahead. Just don't expect your rejoinder to be protected.
>Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence.
I don't think we should use the word "violence" this way, because reserving the word "violence" for physical harm helps us avoid upward spirals of antagonism.
It's good if a conflict stays in the realm of words and doesn't go beyond that. Calling speech "violence" blurs the boundary between those domains.
Chain of effect - using words to call for someone's beheading is surely making them complicit in the physical harm that follows, particularly if the person is a figurehead that can feasibly assume their requests will be followed out.
Thus we grant that there's at least one case where speech could be considered violence, can we not consider others that might be involved in causal chains of physical harm?
The general air of racist rhetoric in the usa meant that black people were effectively dehumanized which meant that calls for lynching led to actual lynchings. With this context I feel it's reasonable to call the use of a racial slur, "violence". I should hope it's obvious I don't believe it's as harmful a form of violence as physically harming someone. We use the word violence to describe many remarkably different in nature things, so I don't think we risk devaluing the word.
>Thus we grant that there's at least one case where speech could be considered violence, can we not consider others that might be involved in causal chains of physical harm?
As a reductio ad absurdum, suppose you and I are medical researchers. We're trying to figure out the best way to treat Disease D. You favor Treatment A, I favor Treatment B. We participate in a public debate defending our respective preferences. Suppose as more data comes in, it becomes abundantly obvious that Treatment B works way better, and Treatment A actually exacerbates Disease D. I acknowledge that reasonable people could've favored Treatment A at the time we had our debate, and you acknowledge that the new data favors Treatment B. Nonetheless, some people in the audience of our debate felt you were persuasive, used Treatment A on their patients, and their patients died. Does that make you a murderer?
The scenario can be progressively modified: Maybe there was recent research showing Treatment B worsens Disease D, but you hadn't read it yet. Maybe you made a mistake in your statistical calculations. Maybe we decide you are a murderer, in which case no one wants to debate medical questions anymore lest they be declared a murderer, and the medical field languishes instead of developing new best practices.
>I should hope it's obvious I don't believe it's as harmful a form of violence as physically harming someone.
To play devil's advocate -- it wasn't obvious to me, and I think people with less context will find it even less obvious. So from the exact point of view you're arguing for -- creating a causal chain to physical harm -- I'd say overusing the word "violence" does have the potential to create harm, through the escalation of antagonism as I described previously.
(BTW, although I think you're mistaken about the use of the word "violence", I would consider your claim to be protected speech, and don't think censorship of your claim is justified -- e.g. if the HN moderator stepped in and deleted your comment, I'd call that an overreach.)
>We use the word violence to describe many remarkably different in nature things
Would you describe the gassing and burning of humans in the Holocaust as violence? Would you describe Will Smith slapping Chris Rock as violence? I think of those as almost unimaginably different in nature, but both forms of violence. The gap between a racial slur as violence, and Will Smith's slap as violence, is mundane in comparison. What do you think?
> , in which case no one wants to debate medical questions anymore lest they be declared a murderer, and the medical field languishes instead of developing new best practices.
In your example isn't the question going to be less "why did doctor X and Doctor Y hold positions they had in some debate" and more "Why wasn't it abundantly clear to all that T-A exacerbates D-D to the point of killing patients?" I don't think in this scenario the speech would be at issue at all... I'm trying to participate in good faith by encompassing the entire metaphor but I'm just stuck on that basically. Is this a real world example you're paraphrasing? I'd like to read about it. I mean it strikes me as far-fetched that one could be well researched enough on a medical subject but ignorant of a recent study that shows the opposite of your conclusions; I guess I've seen it in the financial world when a smug CEO is told during a press conference that their stock is crashing. In science, surely one has the option of simply retracting your statements? I just don't see the violence there.
> I'd say overusing the word "violence" does have the potential to create harm, through the escalation of antagonism as I described previously.
Well, context, I don't believe violence is inherently bad, in many forms. Elsewhere I note that tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact. If the Proud Boys show up to town so as to kick around protestors, I believe it's ethical to use physical violence in return. The point for me is to show that the intent of racists is to do violence, they're normalizing the dehumanization, they're working towards their goal of physical forms of violence, and it should be seen as such and met as such. "But if you never lynch, where's the violence? These Proud Boys don't want black people killed, just the races separate! Peace, at last." Segregation required violence to enforce - the violence was there in the rare times black students tried to enter white schools, or use white water fountains etc. Just because most "complied" doesn't mean the violent enforcement structure isn't in place. Though reading that you're probably throwing your hands up, "everything is violence then!" No, just more things than I think people acknowledge readily.
> (BTW, although I think you're mistaken about the use of the word "violence", I would consider your claim to be protected speech, and don't think censorship of your claim is justified -- e.g. if the HN moderator stepped in and deleted your comment, I'd call that an overreach.)
I mean, I would be very confused if either of our comments got deleted, we're not violating the TOS and from my own value standpoint neither of us are trying to do harm.
Hateful speech (slurs etc) are a form of attack, they're a form of violence. They don't have a place in civil society, civil society should not allow this sort of speech or behavior in it.
I agree with your first argument but not your second. Yes, it's a form of attack. But rather than saying it is simply never allowed (which could be used by politicians to punish criticism) I argue that that the freedom to attack goes both ways and that people should be allowed to exercise self-defense rather than the issue being ceded to some monopolistic higher authority.
Can you give an example of harmful speech that doesn't also intimidate? I think most speech intended to harm also ends up intimidating people, but there are probably exceptions that aren't coming to mind.
An extremist discussion board, say dedicated to harming some other group. They may have no interest in advertising their plans, their speech is used to coordinate attacks.
I think that counts as conspiracy to commit a crime, so it's already covered in the criminal code? I'm focused on trying to develop speech norms for speech that's not a crime. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998327
Also: libel. It does harm, to the point that damages can be awarded, but it's not necessarily meant to intimidate the target, just to misinform others about the target.
Yeah, there’s always a pretext. That’s the point. It’s easy to say “I’d only ban speech that violates the law!” when someone else is running the show. But when you’re in charge and reality hits, well, of course posting someone’s location doesn’t count as free speech!
And so on and so forth. It happened with parody, it’s happening with this and it’ll happen with something else in the future. No one comes out and says “actually, I don’t support free speech anymore.” They just keep moving the goalposts. Which would be fine, except people keep trying to tell me they don’t exist.
From a legal perspective it definitely is in the US at least (unless it's pretty clear that you are calling for immanent action to be taken against the person you're doxing). Still a dick move, and probably illegal in a lot of other countries.
Reposting public information that is broadcast to the public in real time and required by law to be public while operating an airplane in the public airspace isn't doxxing.
How come this is only an issue now that Musk is throwing a tantrum? It's not like his situation is unique, the location data of every aircraft is broadcast and published in the same manner.
Elon Musk, within the last hour, sent out a request for a person to be doxxed with a video of someone's license plate and face. This is not a principled policy.
This is also rampant in US political discourse and action.
The minute someone gets shot on a congressional baseball outing, shit hits the fan. A few school children get shot every few months...thoughts and prayers.
"Free Speech Absolutism" is just another conservative boondoggle that they can endlessly talk about to attract voters.
Of course actually trying to put it in practice immediately falls apart, but that's not the point.
Nobody on the malicious side of the "malicious or stupid?" scale actually wants everyone to have unfettered freedom of speech (see: republican outrage at LGBTQ rights, people teaching/learning about systemic racism ('CRT'), drag queen story time, republican school districts banning books for some recent examples). They just want to be able to cry "muh free speech" to silence criticism of anything they say.
>people teaching/learning about systemic racism ('CRT')
This is less of a free speech issue, and more of a "what should government employees be paid to do" issue.
It's the difference between a gutter punk wearing a swastika, and a cop on duty wearing a swastika. The constitution prohibits the government from making a law regarding the gutter punk. But while the cop is on duty, they're an employee of the state, and it's perfectly reasonable for voters to say "we don't want to pay government employees to do that".
It’s a fair point. Systemic racism by police is a real thing, and the culture of silence and borderline extortionate tactics employed by police unions make it hard to change. Voters can say we don’t want to pay for that kind of institutional bad behavior. . . But all too often what we want doesn’t matter.
You assume I'm a conservative trying to "own" someone the second I say something you don't like. I was just trying to demonstrate how vacuous, lazy and generic the original statement was that it can be easily turned on its head while maintaining the same level of impact and truth.
I am not really sure what facts have transpired aside from people being outraged and having political opinions.
As I understand it...?
A) A guy who has a bot that shares public information on Twitter has been banned, sounds like that is free speech being suppressed, not that Twitter is under any obligation to support free speech, as we have been reminded many many times by people who wanted to suppress other speech
B) There is a different guy (?) who allegedly obstructed a vehicle containing Elon Musk's child and climbed on its hood, is this a speech issue? Or assault? Asking that question mostly in earnest
If someone hoards the attention of millions of people, of course that person will have problems when a tiny fraction of these millions of people inevitably exert their free speech.
Is the solution to ban free speech or to stop hoarding the attention of millions of people?
There are two sides to every coin.
I am not taking a stance but lately I have notice more and more how regarding a few matters that I used to think were black and white, there are good arguments on both sides.
Deciding on one vs another often comes to what is perceived the most pressing matter at the moment. The long term consequences are often not taken enough into consideration.
> Many people have been trying to get the point across that legal, unlimited free speech can put people in harm's way.
It would appear, based on empirical evidence, that in practice everyone agrees with this point. That may count as mission success for those many people.
Was free speech absolutism ever something Musk put on the table? The issue that Musk is addressing is Twitter's systemic suppression of right-wing political speech.
Isn't he suing the person behind the tracking thing? Musk thinks this is against the law, so he isn't being inconsistent with that tweet.
But even if he was, one tweet isn't really much of a commitment. People throw out tweets they don't mean all the time. 140 characters isn't enough to lay out an ideological position. Running a company like twitter is a bit more serious - they can't moderate just based on interpretations of what Elon tweets. And they were never going to.
Although if he was committing to keeping the plane account around he is definitely didn't think that through.
> Isn't he suing the person behind the tracking thing? Musk thinks this is against the law, so he isn't being inconsistent with that tweet.
You can sue anyone for anything. If you're going to say that only illegal things don't belong, you should wait for the legal system to produce a judgment.
> But even if he was, one tweet isn't really much of a commitment. People throw out tweets they don't mean all the time.
He's said it multiple times. If you don't mean it, how about you just don't say it?
> Running a company like twitter is a bit more serious - they can't moderate just based on interpretations of what Elon tweets. And they were never going to.
Except so far that's exactly what is happening. Musk promised "free speech", so far everything indicates that in reality what we get is "Elon rules". In the end it's simply about what he wants, nothing more.
Mind, I fully agree he's got the right to do anything he wants. It's his site now. I'm just pointing out the inconsistency.
Streisand effect refutes this, especially for a famous person very overtly banning something.
There is no gain from censorship besides a limited set of cases, most of which are illegal but obviously some cases beyond that. Still very very far from the level of censorship being pushed by the Reddit/Twitter crowd these days (‘misinformation’ being bannable is a cancer on society).
It's a private company, they can do whatever they so wished.
And as a non-US citizen, I don't care one iota about where the US billionaires are flying, for better or for worse those US billionaires don't influence my life too much. But I do care about censorship when it comes to US politics because those US politicians decide about the status of big boom-boom military stuff in my country, stuff that is employed in killing people (this recent video [1] was filmed about 20 km from the town where I grew up as a kid). The latest Twitter seems to really have changed its stance when it comes to fighting censorship in US politics. As such, I applaud Musk on this.
