Elon Musk takes control of X account from user who had held it for 16 years

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/twitter-x-elon-musk-account-b2382120.html

by isaacfrond • 3 years ago

50 64 3 years ago

independent.co.uk

DemocracyFTW2• 3 years ago

World’s richest person offered no money to previous owner of @X

As you would expect.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

Previous owner was compensated proportionally to the value of Twitter.

In an act of kindness, Elon Musk didn't make him pay.

acomjean2• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Homer Simpson getting bought out by Bill Gates.

Gates: “Buy him out boys”

Gate’s goon trash Homers office

Homer: “What is going on”

Gates: “I didn’t get rich writing a lot of checks”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE

tekla7• 3 years ago

I don't understand what the outrage is. Somewhat of a Dick move? Maybe. But illegal/unethical/immoral hell no.

asdajksah2123• 3 years ago

It's not illegal, but how is this not unethical?

tekla7• 3 years ago

What is unethical about it?

simbolit2• 3 years ago

"without paying the previous owner for the one-letter account"

(1) paying for transferring a T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ account is against the TOU

(2) the "previous owner" was never the owner of the account, read the TOU

Finally: why is this news?

regularjack• 3 years ago

You know why this is news.

bradhe• 3 years ago

Because Elon Musk is a douchebag and this is another brick in that wall.

craftsman4• 3 years ago

It further devalues the idea--such as it was--of "verified" accounts.

simbolit2• 3 years ago

Also in Elon News today:

Community Note correcting Musk’s anti-vax tweet mysteriously disappears https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/15a086f/com...

ea550ff70a• 3 years ago

Free speech for me but not for thee

izzdrasil• 3 years ago

This happens shortly after Twitter pays out five figure sums to users that amplify Musk's own posts. Obviously they're within their rights to do this and also to take @x but it's not a great look.

kalleboo6• 3 years ago

Why does anyone think they own or are owed anything on a private platform?

Decentralize or one day you'll also get screwed over. That's been the lesson of the past year or two.

saurik• 3 years ago

How has not been the lesson of the past quarter century (of general people having access to the Internet), over and over again except then new people show up or everyone just forgets and they start using whatever the new shiny thing is?

kalleboo6• 3 years ago

It certainly has, but the level of centralization, the amount of control by the platforms, and the lack of alternatives has always been slowly ratcheting up year by year, day by day, as we boil in the pot.

It reached other people's breaking point far earlier, many of us only noticed last November, and for the majority of the people, that breaking point is still in the future.

edit: noticed you were being downvoted and I don't like that, you make a good point

agubelu• 3 years ago

Doesn't the admin of a decentralized Mastodon instance have similar powers?

kalleboo6• 3 years ago

If you don't trust any other admins, you can run your own. Or pay a managed host like mastohost where you'll have a contract that is more in your favor than the typical social network "we reserve every right".

barrysteve• 3 years ago

People give up ownership in the hopes of a reciprocal relationship, even an unbalanced one.

Grabbing the X account just feels petty.

These are made up user accounts, you can just make two X accounts with different IDs in the database. It's not like real estate where the locations are bound by the laws of physics.

And it's Elon's modus operandi. He screwed over his relations with the tesla founder in similar fashion.

He really would benefit from hanging out with Gaben and spend less time courting controversy.

acomjean2• 3 years ago

People give up ownership in the hopes of a reciprocal relationship

I think this is it. With your account, you get an easy platform to post on. The platform gets to use your content to presumably get more visitors to show ads to and publicize itself.

kalleboo6• 3 years ago

People give up ownership in the hopes of a reciprocal relationship, even an unbalanced one

Yeah, and you can go 10 years on a platform thinking you're in a good relationship with them, but one day the ownership changes and you have absolutely no say in what happens

dasil003• 3 years ago

This is a weird take. It’s not practical for everyone to self host and if you don’t do that you’re not really decentralized (eg. Gmail account lockouts).

Social media handle ownership is normally pretty stable and reliable because otherwise they wouldn’t be able retain users. The odd account repossession is a very low probability event compared to ATO or other type of lockout.

What makes this case unique is that the rebranding of Twitter was random and shockingly brand destructive. I happen to know Gene X (he’s a well known and beloved photographer in SF) and as soon the announcement was made we all immediately guessed this would be the outcome. Annoying yes, but also not a failure mode to optimize against.

_aavaa_• 3 years ago

It’s not practical for everyone to self host

It's not practical given the current state of the software stack.

Annoying yes, but also not a failure mode to optimize against.

The failure mode in question is being a digital sharecropper and not owning anything, even your persona. And that is a failure mode very much worth optimising against.

kalleboo6• 3 years ago

It's an inconvenient take, but [Stallman(strikeout)]/[Corey Doctorow] was right, the shittification is real.

It's been really nice letting VC funding pay for people with no money or technical knowledge participate, and I don't want to be an "Eternal September" gatekeeper, but every platform like this has it's glory day when it's happiness and rainbows, and then one day, we need to maximize profits, and it all goes to shit when we need to MONETIZE MONETIZE MONETIZE.

We need to figure out some model where people have ownership of their identity instead of selling it to some "free as in beer" corporation. This also goes for all the "Google deleted my gmail which I use for 2FA because I uploaded a video of my kids birthday party with copyright music in the background" type worries

Back in the late 90's in my European country, the post office had a vision of giving everyone their e-mail identity (verified by sending a post card to their address). Then the post office got privatized. We need more non-VC, non-Unicorn thinking like these (not necessarily giving power to governments...)

Jiro• 3 years ago

It hasn't been long ago where there was news about right-wingers being kicked off of platforms and then the response by the HN public was "they're a private platform, they can kick people off for any reason they want. Nobody owes you a platform". Why wouldn't that same argument apply here?

kalleboo6• 3 years ago

The first time I learned about Mastodon was years ago when some libertarian-leaning podcasters I listened to moved there along with their audience due to being unhappy about centralized Twitter moderation (and no, not at all related to Gab or Truth or any of those).

They're silenced or defederated from most other instances because a lot of their kin are douchebags I also wouldn't want to associate with, but they still have their own place to be and I respect that they actually walked with their eyeballs away from the centralized service while all their outrage-starved brethren stayed while complaining about the platform they kept on boosting.

Timon3• 3 years ago

Those right-wingers broke the ToS. Which ToS did the previous account owner of @X break exactly?

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

He is just a bully - why some people on HN worship him is puzzling.

valval• 3 years ago

What are you talking about? This forum is 98% mindless Musk hate just like all the other left-leaning forums.

seeknotfind• 3 years ago

Can you imagine if a company did this for something really important, like your email? Is there protection against this?

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

Is there protection against this?

No. People call these "their accounts", but they don't own them. They only exist as long as the company allows them to.

craftsman4• 3 years ago

Given that a user can purchase a "verified" account--although you may be correct--the company just eliminated the value proposition of doing so.

lesuorac• 3 years ago

Depends on the exact action.

But generally yes you can go to court. Historically people have done that with Google to figure out the exact ban reason (or to get unbanned) but that's often with Adsense / YT accounts where you have clear financial harm.

exogeny• 3 years ago

It's so unnecessarily callous and such an unforced error. Why do this? Why accrue all of this bad PR for no reason?

Fuck Elmo. What a dick.

mint22• 3 years ago

The article mentions they did offer some company merchandise… depending what that was I actually think that was nearly appropriate. Paying for it made no sense - it’s a private company and can do what it wants.

But in order not to be appearing as a roughshod callous company, giving a token of appreciation makes sense AND an actual paper card saying apology signed by musk. The token could be one of their old logo statues, its not like they need them anymore. That would have been reasonable.

nerdbert• 3 years ago

Paying for it makes sense because it establishes that the company agrees that accounts have value, and that the company will be even-handed in managing that value.

Appropriating it with an offer of some laptop stickers or a Twitter coffee mug says "this is all crap and anyway we can take it away anytime we feel like it, so you'd be a fool to invest any serious effort or resources into this ecosystem."

mint22• 3 years ago

It’s not nice to twist my words and ignore what I actually said in order to try to make a point.

I specifically cited a Twitter statue as the example and also said a hand signed note from musk. That’s not not even close to “laptop stickers and a coffee mug” garbage that I’ve been falsely accused of saying.

For reference, the auctioned Twitter logo statue sold for $100k, which is crazy. So actually that might be too much, I’d assumed it was a few $K not $100.

Rapzid• 3 years ago

A bunch of junk he now has to dispose of and a meeting with the management team running twitter straight into the center of the Earth?

So, they wanted him to pay them for taking @x ..

morkalork2• 3 years ago

Now, would you trust X with your online banking when they do stuff like highjack an account just because it has a cool name they want?

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

In fairness, I wouldn't trust X with anything whatsoever in the first place.

znpy• 3 years ago

Reminder that the same guy is also the ceo of starlink, the satellite internet service provider.

bko• 3 years ago

Would you trust Nissan for trying to kick off a person who owns nissan.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comp...

6D794163636F756• 3 years ago

Is that at all relevant to the product they sell?

craftsman4• 3 years ago

If Nissan took my "verified" car that I purchased, no I wouldn't.

mamoul• 3 years ago

This makes me even less interested in buying a Tesla while he's in charge. Imagine what he can do with your Tesla, with all of its telemetry.

JohnFen4• 3 years ago

This is a very large part of why modern cars aren't of interest to me. It's not just Tesla. The same problem exists with all EVs as near as I can tell, and more modern ICE vehicles.

JumpinJack_Cash• 3 years ago

Isn’t it concerning that short domain names and handles are generally the weapon of choice of people who have literally zero money to spend on promotion?

It’s something people who are just starting out do in the hopes that the ability to quickly find their username/website would help them go viral.

Make your company into a verb and or a noun is much more valuable , Twitter has all that, at least until last week.

‘President Trump tweeted’ was the most frequrntly repeated newsflash story 2016-2020

netcruiser• 3 years ago

In the early days I managed to register administrator@gmail.com. It was of course taken from me.

Elon Musk takes control of X account from user who had held it for 16 years

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