Musk, the Anti-Censorship Crusader, Allegedly Shadowbanned ElonJet Account

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-shadowban-elonjet-private-jet-twitter-1849882446

by nickthegreek • 4 years ago

84 79 4 years ago

latchkey• 4 years ago

Back tracked quickly. https://twitter.com/JxckSweeney/status/1602354433807061070

cogman109• 4 years ago

Wow, musk is flying a LOT. Sometimes multiple times in a day. Often across the country and back again. All in a private jet.

That's profoundly wasteful.

api3• 4 years ago

He seems to be a member of the everything must be done in person school of thought. He also likely has to have meetings with even more "non-digital-native" people that are even more of that mentality.

cogman109• 4 years ago

He also likely has to have meetings with even more "non-digital-native" people that are even more of that mentality.

Maybe? A lot of his flights appear to be to places where he owns the factory or company. (Like the giga factory in nevada, or twitter in san fran).

jrm42• 4 years ago

Given recent events, I personally find this strong proof of his mediocrity (and perhaps many people misunderstanding his motives?) Which is to say -- all this says to me is "I'm bad at management" at best and "I'm an over-engineerer, to the point that if I'd done nothing at all, you'd probably get better outcomes" at worst?

I'm not exactly sure what his endgame(s) is/are, or what skills he may actually have to get there -- but it's becoming increasingly clear that the real Elon Musk is not anything remotely close to the image we had of him during the rise of e.g. SpaceX and Tesla et al.

fakedang2• 4 years ago

It's still perfectly understandable if time is of the essence to you, hence you need to jet around quickly in a plane for a 30 minute flight to travel from Fremont to LA (obvious bias here because I fly often between cities).

What's profoundly wasteful is that Musk travels on a full-fledged Gulfstream 650 for such a short distance - and often traveling within hours of each other on that mega jet.

crote• 4 years ago

If time is of the essence, you'd just make a Zoom call. This type of corporate air travel is almost entirely status signaling.

hbn2• 4 years ago

Do people actually care that an incredibly small amount of people that can afford private jets are flying around? How many less dogs would we need on earth to offset the carbon footprint of private jets? What does the pollution look like as a percentage of smog China pumps into the air, or cities in India where they're burning all their trash?

Billionaires flying in planes is such an infinitesimally small issue in the grand scope of pollution that it doesn't even feel worth the brain power to think about. It's like both of your legs were blown off and you're haemorrhaging blood but being concerned about the paper cut on your finger.

voz_2• 4 years ago

The point is that these people shouldn't even exist, every billionaire is a policy failure - there is no ethical route to a billion dollars. So the egregious and outlandish lifestyle of waste and excess while simultaneously reminding us to recycle our cans and unplug idle devices is blatantly insulting.

cogman109• 4 years ago

These incredibly small amounts of people are the people running companies that pump the smog in china or india. Their personal disregard for their impact on the climate is reflected in the way they run their companies.

Beyond that, it does speak to a failure in regulations. The fact that that much CO2 can be emitted without a thought of how it will be reclaimed IS the problem with global warming. The cost of emitting CO2 apparently isn't high enough.

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

How about instead, they quit flying in private jets all over the place, so that I can keep my dog?

oneoff7862• 4 years ago

Searching around I found aviation accounting for 2.5% of CO2 emissions and private jets accounting for 4% of it.

Meaning they comprise 0.1% of global emissions. Seems non trivial when you consider how few people this includes. At the very least it’s hardly infinitesimally small.

rqtwteye• 4 years ago

They should have the same restrictions as everybody else has. They can buy their into using tons of waters in drought areas, park wherever they want, blow insane amounts of fuel in their superyachts and much more. It's a small group but they should limit themselves in the same way as the regular guy has to.

bjourne• 4 years ago

The answer is yes since @ElonJet has half a million followers. The amount of violence committed by serial killers is minuscule compared to the total amount of violence in the world, yet people care a lot about serial killers. And yes, flying private jets is comparable to violence.

midoridensha3• 4 years ago

You bring up a good point about dogs. The carbon footprint of pet dogs these days is incredible, all so people can virtue signal while they walk around outside picking up fresh poop from the animal they keep in a stroller.

SamReidHughes5• 4 years ago

Lol, no. CEOs of large companies that need to travel need a jet to do the job. Waiting for some passenger jet is just playing to lose.

cogman109• 4 years ago

Why does elon need to travel? To be present with his employees during a hack-a-thon?

We live in an era where anyone can have a video call with someone on the other side of the planet (I do this regularly with our india team). What large business needs their CEO physically at a location?

papito2• 4 years ago

How else are you going to ask for naughty massages from a flight attendant in exchange for a horse? I mean, come ON.

api3• 4 years ago

It's pretty clear at this point that this is a personal hobby horse project that involved spending an absurd amount of money to unban a few people from a private walled garden.

Twitter is a private walled garden. It always was a private walled garden. It always will be. If you want free speech head over to the fediverse or run your own site.

If you're pissed about what Elon did, consider that he has been punished for it already. He paid $44 billion for Twitter.

jakelazaroff2• 4 years ago

One of the problems is that there are a ton of people who, in spite of all available evidence, are still willing to pretend in bad faith that Elon is somehow "pro free speech". So I think it's worth bringing this up to remind casual onlookers that it's not actually the case.

hardnose• 4 years ago

Wow, Musk's getting coverage on HN. Let's check it out...

...oh. OK. Hmmm.

Starting to get a little worried about the neutrality of coverage. It's never good when technical issues and technical projects get polluted with political animosity.

voz_2• 4 years ago

What are you talking about?

taolegal• 4 years ago

So it's wrong to be vocally anti-censorship cause it's so heavily used on HN?

Is it truly hypocritical to not want your location publicly available?

Downvote me into oblivion censorious fools!

guywithahat• 4 years ago

I mean this can legitimately be considered a privacy violation, right? It's also probably not correct, I assume that's just his jet moving, they don't tell anyone whether he's in it or not.

jakelazaroff2• 4 years ago

Sweeney, a first-year student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, says he uses publicly available transponder data from Musk’s private plane to track its location.

I am sympathetic to the idea that there's an overlap between "publicly available" and "privacy violating". Not for the flight data of the richest man in the world's private jet, though.

Fatnino4• 4 years ago

*second richest.

just4nornies• 4 years ago

This is a privacy and security issue, not a free speech issue. Would you like it if every time you drove somewhere someone tweeted your info on your trip? Thieves would go to your home to rob you while you're away, or someone could arrange a fatal car accident (smash into you) if you're important enough. Or in his case, someone could fly a drone into his plane as it's landing. I mean anything could happen. Why is this an issue of free speech rather than an issue of security and privacy?

someNameIG• 4 years ago

This is a privacy and security issue

This is the same Elon Musk, who has one of the largest audiences in the world, publicly accused Yoel Roth of being a pedophile. Because he left Twitter due to disagreeing with Elons actions.

He also platforms and likes tweets from Libsoftiktok, who have targeted multiple Childs hospitals resulting in bomb threats.

nickthegreek3• 4 years ago

The location of every plane that flies in the US (99.99999999%) is public data. If you want to take your big old metal tube up in the air, then you abide by the rules set forth by the party in charge of the air. We, as a society, have decided that those planes have an ID and if that plane wants to enter the air, then they agree to be tracked. That's the terms of service. There is no privacy violation.

constantcrying4• 4 years ago

The owner of the @ElonJet Twitter handle says a Twitter employee told him his account was given limited visibility “to a severe degree."

Then you would expect e.g. his likes to go down significantly, right? He would start not showing up in people's feeds and engagement would dwindle to a halt.

From briefly looking through the history to the beginning of November I see no clear trend of reduced engagement. It seems quite consistent. Afterall it is an account about the plane of a billionaire, not exactly the most breathtaking content on the site. I see no evidence that he has "severely" less engagement then before Musk took over.

Back in January, Sweeney told The New York Times Musk personally reached out to him over DMs asking him to remove the bot in exchange for $5,000. Sweeney counter offered, saying he would consider deactivating the account for $50,000 or even an internship at one of Musk’s companies.

This also seems bizarre. Does Musk really care about $45.000? Is that the kind of money a billionaire wouldn't spend to make some nuisance go away? Seems ridicolous to be honest.

SamReidHughes5• 4 years ago

Anybody with a modicum of self-respect wouldn't accept that counter-offer. The $5K offer was a gift, and publicizing a person's flights is sick behavior.

thatswrong03• 4 years ago

Sick behavior? In what way? It's publicly available information.

TapWaterBandit• 4 years ago

Yea, I'm genuinely curious if the people criticising Musk here are also in favour of doxxing people and then publishing the info online? Cause that's effectively what this is.

I'm not sure where I stand on this but I can see why someone of Musk's public stature would be concerned about this.

Hell, I am a literal nobody and of someone did this or something similar to me I'd be paranoid as all hell.

constantcrying4• 4 years ago

Civilian flights have their data published. If I am flying my plane is publically tracked too.

AdamJacobMuller• 4 years ago

It's also entirely possible he realized that it would quickly become whack-a-mole.

Someone can trivially spin up a copycat, especially if it's known (or even suspected) that the former account got a payout.

There would also be lots of extra visibility on it if the account disappeared, I'm sure there would be articles worse than this one waxing poetic about how obviously twitter did it to oppose their new overlord musk, and if not, how obviously musk strong-armed the account owner into shutting it down, and if not, how musk using his exorbitant wealth to hide information is egregious.

I'm sure it just became easier to ignore it and mitigate the actual issues it created (if any) in other ways.

constantcrying4• 4 years ago

It's also entirely possible he realized that it would quickly become whack-a-mole.

Why offer the 5k then?

Of course it is a stupid idea, the flight data is public anyway. But why would $45k change Musks mind about the matter?

pannSun• 4 years ago

Now ask yourself why other alleged shadowbans, pre-Musk, weren't so credulously (or at all) reported on. I guess they weren't "newsworthy".

rhaway84773• 4 years ago

They were reported on.

The difference is that pre Musk this was a known practice used by Twitter.

But Musk has bought Twitter insisting that he won’t be “censoring”. Yet he is continuing the practices he decried but limiting them to people he personally doesn’t like.

threatofrain• 4 years ago

At the top of Reddit is also this post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/zjutsq/elon_musk_go...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdBga225HBk

Which seems to be an account being banned for featuring a video and commentary of Elon being booed on stage with Dave Chapelle.

__void• 4 years ago

Why is this post flagged?

Musk, the Anti-Censorship Crusader, Allegedly Shadowbanned ElonJet Account

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