[NaturalPhallacy]

>Those journalists weren't reporting specific locations of his jet...they were reporting on a legit news story about it.

Come on now. They were linking directly to the tracker that Sweeney was banned for, not just reporting on the story about it.

It was a childish petulant doxxing on purpose and they got treated the same as Sweeney.

[revetkn]

Maybe, but the last straw for me on that platform was preventing tweets from linking to arbitrary, non-doxxing Mastodon profiles (try it and see). I tested it to confirm and deactivated my account afterwards. Who would want to be on a social network like that?

[notinfuriated]

Why didn't you leave when they blocked tweets that linked to the Hunter Biden laptop story?

[kennywinker]

Because it was a dubiously sourced story at the height of a highly chaotic election campaign. You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress, not because they’re Democrat sleeper agents - but because they don’t wanna be responsible for swaying the election because of fake news.

[notinfuriated]

> You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress...

No, I 'literally cannot even.' I cannot see how a platform might want to suppress anything except, perhaps, gore videos and child pornography. And that includes links to Mastodon and the ElonJet account, but I don't feel like I should have to put this disclaimer up just so people will stop telling me that I wanted to look at Hunter Biden's penis.

Sure, I can follow the proposed line of reasoning, but it is evident that instead of swaying the election because of fake news, they may have swayed the election because of not fake news. They were aware of this possibility, and yet the soldiered on censoring that story, so I'm not convinced that their actual reasoning was that they honestly did not want to sway the election.

[kennywinker]

Did you miss what happened with facebook in the wake of the 2016 election and brexit? They took the blame for all the misinformation that was flying around, being a vehicle for russian troll farms, etc. A lot of that was rightly so, imo, but even if you don’t think they did anything wrong the perception that they did something wrong hurt them financially. You may believe that a company like twitter or fb should act like a dumb pipe - but they’re operating in a capitalist system - they have a huge incentive to avoid things that will hurt them financially. You think they did it because they wanted to swing the election dem, but i don’t believe that for a second. I think they were motivated by wanted to not be seen as swinging the election at all. That means suppressing any sketchy stories.

Personal politics may have made them a little more skeptical of a story sourced from rudy guiliani than one from a sketchy source on the left - but honestly if you’re not deeply skeptical of stories sourced from rudy at this point, I’m sorry to say but you are biased away from truth.

If you want twitter / fb / etc to be dumb pipes you need them to operate outside of market forces. Either by being regulated by gov as a common carrier, privatized by someone with high minded ideals enough to resist banning anyone who criticizes him and doesn’t mind losing money on it, or by being run by some non-governmental foundation. Under capitalist motivations, you’re not going to get a dumb pipe.

So far none of those things are happening. Expect twitter to continue to be not a dumb pipe, not a zone of free speech, just biased in a different way under its new management - less about maximizing $$ and more about protecting its owners interests.

[NaturalPhallacy]

>Because it was a dubiously sourced story

Fake news.

>You can see how that might be something a platform would want to suppress, not because they’re Democrat sleeper agents

They suppressed it because they were very awake Democrat agents.

>but because they don’t wanna be responsible for swaying the election because of fake news.

No they wanted to deliberately sway the election, because of their partisan alliance. You can read the story here:

Part 1: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394

Part 2: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600

Part 3: Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281

Part 4: Michael Shellenberger: https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/16017204550055116...

Part 5: Bari Weiss: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515

[mcv]

> >Because it was a dubiously sourced story

> Fake news.

Same thing. But the Hunter Biden laptop story was not only fake news, it was completely irrelevant, because Hunter Biden wasn't running for office, and unlike Trump's children, Biden's children don't work for him. And yet the fake story was leveraged by political operatives to sway the election. After all the issues of fake news swaying the 2016 election, Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.

[NaturalPhallacy]

The part it contained about "10% for the big guy" (Joe Biden) was 100% newsworthy.

It wasn't fake news and deep down all the downvoters know it.

Suppressing it when it was known to be true was also a story.

>Twitter decided the responsible thing to do for them was not to be complicit in spreading fake news this time.

Actually they were at the forefront of spreading fake news as three actual journalists disclosed. Did you not even read the coverage? Because it sounds like you didn't. I even provided links to all of it above.

Let me know after reading it if your views have changed.

[godelski]

You're allowed to be upset about more than one thing.

[notinfuriated]

Yes, you absolutely are. Nothing in my comment suggested you are not.

The comment I responded to specifically was upset about censorship targeted at tweeting Mastodon links and not another version of censorship which came in the exact same form but targeted X links. I just gave X a name.

I find it somewhat absurd that a person would become indignant when the link is Y instead of X.

[RavingGoat]

One simply called out his lie about the attack on the car. He didn't even file a police report.

[DocTomoe]

Given that the police is mostly a hassle and pretty useless otherwise, especially when you are part of the uberrich, I am not surprised. Why spend valuable time at the precinct trying to make a high-school-dropout in uniform understand what they are supposed to do if you can just hire private security?

[shapefrog]

When you are spinning up lawsuits (allegedly) to sue induviduals around an indident that occured (allegedly) - it makes your case, that these induviduals were party to a crime, much stronger if you have at least a police report, statements etc of the crime in question.

[nephanth]

I mean the location of his jet is public information (all flight plans are public records).

Plus he's a public personality, so not really concerned by most of that "anti-doxxing" rule

[lovich]

On that note, for anyone who would argue he didn’t consent to giving up his right to privacy on where he travels, he explicitly used his presence as a tool to endorse companies, people, and activities.

You can’t actively imply people give you and your business partners money because you physically showed up to a location and then be upset that people care where you are physically located

[zoklet-enjoyer]

That's a ridiculous argument. Just because he does some public relations stuff doesn't mean it's ok to blast out his location to the world. Yes, it's public information, but so what? Would you want a Twitter account dedicated to broadcasting your movements to the world?

[tluyben2]

If I owned a private jet, I would assume it is broadcasted, because it has to be, legally. Nothing you can do. Anyone can find it, so what’s the difference if a Twitter account links it?

Obviously it’s a different story if someone would indeed make his (and his family) real-time moves outside his jet known. But I haven’t seen that unless he announced it himself.

[lovich]

On that note, for anyone who would argue he didn’t consent to giving up his right to privacy on where he travels, he explicitly used his presence as a tool to endorse companies, people, and activities.

You can’t actively imply people should give you and your business partners money because you physically showed up to a location and then be upset that people care where you are physically located

[yurodivuie]

They were banned for including a link to where Sweeney moved. I wonder if everyone who posts a link to these journalists will get banned too.

If it were an algorithm, everyone in Twitter would be banned by tomorrow. I hope it works.

[TulliusCicero]

How is it "doxxing" to use public flight data? Am I missing something here?

[WeylandYutani]

We are moving the envelope. Journalists doing their job is now "doxxing". This suits the elite who don't want their actions scrutinised.

How many rich and famous have been disgraced in the last 200 years because journalists posted outside their hotel room or followed their car?

[rosnd]

What adsbexchange, flightradar & co. are doing is almost certainly illegal in Europe under the GDPR.

This isn't exactly "public flight data", in many cases it's illegally collected and published flight data.

E: I can't reply to "imnotjames" below thanks to HN ratelimits, but here you go:

It's an obvious GDPR violation, just like it'd be an obvious GDPR violation to publish a similar database but with phone IMEIs and associated locations instead of aircraft.

[Nas808]

The FAA has a program called LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) and high-profile individuals, etc can sign up to it. The major players in the flight tracking business like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware follow that. But sites like ADS-B Exchange do not adhere to that, so you can see a lot more flights that are blocked on the others. Also anyone with a Raspberry Pi and a cheap antenna can build their own ADS-B receiver and get that unfiltered data.

[Xylakant]

I don’t see how it is an obvious GDPR violation. The GDPR is a lot more nuanced than “all private data is protected”. It has exemptions for data published based on a legal requirement (could be the case here), data that cannot easily linked to an individual (number plates are not protected by themselves) and data regarding companies is also exempt. This jet isn’t owned by musk, it’s owned by a company. Journalists (including citizen journalists) also have broad protections in European law and those must be weighed against the GDPR protections.

There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it’s very far from obvious.

[jdong]

> It has exemptions for data published o based at n a legal requirement (could be the case here)

Couldn't, there's no legal requirement for anyone to record and publish ADS-B transmissions.

> data that cannot easily linked to an individual (number plates are not protected by themselves)

This is incorrect, number plates of cars belonging to individuals are going to be protected in almost any context you'd be storing them in.

> This jet isn’t owned by musk, it’s owned by a company

Doesn't matter, Musk isn't the only person with a plane. I own my own plane, it gets tracked by these sites.

> Journalists (including citizen journalists) also have broad protections in European law and those must be weighed against the GDPR protections

Websites like flightradar24.com are not journalists, but data brokers. That's simply ridiculous.

>There’s so much nuance to this that it’s possible this might fall under GDPR, but it very far from obvious.

No there isn't, this is crystal clear.

[seanhunter]

Not sure how GDPR is relevant since Elon Musk isn’t the EU data commissioner so it’s not up to him to enforce GDPR, and neither Musk, nor Twitter itself, nor the journalists, nor the sites concerned nor the information in question is in any way European[1].

Here’s the definition of personal data under GDPR[2] for anyone who’s curious. If this information hypothetically were to be published by a company with a European or UK connection about an EU or UK data subject and that person were to complain to their national data protection authority we might be in GDPR enforcement territory.

[1] or UK because UK GDPR is a thing even though the UK is no longer in the EU

[2] https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/personal-...

[jdong]

Why should anyone involved need to be in European? The jet in question is known to visit Europe with Musk aboard.

> a company with a European or UK connection about an EU or UK data subject

If you have EU or UK data subjects, you have an European or UK connection and have entered GDPR enforcement territory.

[seanhunter]

Well Elon still isn’t anything to do with the apparatus of gdpr enforcement so it’s still irrelevant and secondly enforcement would be against the sites which are supposedly infringing rather than people linking to them on twitter. This is a sideshow.

[jdong]

Buddy, not everybody shares your weird Elon obsession.

There are interesting phenomena to discuss here, but Elon's mood swings aren't one of them.

[rosnd]

This is completely incorrect. Elon owns Twitter, Twitter is responsible for complying with the GDPR on their platform.

Elon in fact has a lot to do with the apparatus of GDPR enforcement.

[imnotjames]

How is it illegal?

[TulliusCicero]

Musk lives in the US, I imagine most of his flights are within the US. Not sure why you're bringing up GDPR.

[notinfuriated]

I think of it as about the same as the recent complaints that Elon Musk posting 'prosecute Fauci' means he is responsible for Dr. Fauci receiving death threats, or whatever the actual consequence was of that. That is, the idea or information already exists and is publicly available to anyone, but it has been 'amplified' here and this makes it much more serious.

(I disagree with the logic in both cases.)

[sillysaurusx]

Not quite. Some of the journalists linked to a Facebook page about the topic, which is a small but crucial distinction. Banning for linking to peripheral news stories is pretty bad.

[jhugo]

When did a Facebook page become a "peripheral news story"?

[NaturalPhallacy]

The Facebook page is where Sweeney said you could find the tracker...

[EGreg]

Perhaps now we can see how Freedom Ain't Free. You can't claim to be a free speech absolutist, or a supporter of the second amendment, but then go ban stuff you don't like as soon as it concerns YOU.

Doxxing isn't illegal. I thought Elon claimed that ONLY violation of national laws could be the basis for deplatforming. As if his understaffed team can make legal decisions on the spot, and output true/false about millions of tweets that fall into gray areas. They don't even KNOW the whole body of law, and they aren't the judge or jury either.

I had two discussions with Noam Chomsky about how capitalism has co-opted Freedom of Speech, just like it has done with Women's Lib and many other things

In 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HovxY1qBfek

A year later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc

[hgdfhgdfhgdfbgf]

How is the second amendment relevant here? Zuckerberg's jet account and others like it were also banned.

[MallocVoidstar]

His jet's location isn't doxxing and the public has a legitimate interest in it.

[wfme]

What exactly is this "legitimate" interest?

[kasey_junk]

The general premise about why flight data is public is because the planes are using a public good.

The airspace of a place is a commons, what happens in the commons is everyone’s to know.

[wfme]

Since military planes use this same public good, is their flight data also published?

[matkoniecz]

In general yes, for example https://www.flightradar24.com/ shows right now FORTE10 plane (Northrop Grumman RQ-4B Global Hawk) which is UAV heading toward Black Sea where it will be spying over Russian invasion of Ukraine and launches of Russian missiles from Black Sea in their bombing of Ukrainian cities.

Flights supplying Ukraine were routinely top viewed flights on that website (they were flying to Rzeszów in Poland, so there was no real risk of Russian shooting them down).

AWACS planes and tanker flying in holding patterns over Poland, Romania and Baltic Sea used to be top observed planes on flightradar24 but I should be now working not looking through flightradar24 planes over Poland ( so I will link https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-60612255 that has video of inside one of them ).

Obviously planes flying combat missions are not publishing data there. Presumably ones training in restricted airspace are not either for also obvious reasons.

[_kbh_]

You can actually track a large number of military flights on websites such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ a large amount of the time they fly with there transponder on because they don’t want to hit other aircraft.

[_djo_]

In Western countries, in peacetime, and in regular shared airspace, yes. They broadcast on ADS-B and are visible on flight tracking websites too.

ADSB Exchange even has a ‘military’ filter to focus on them.

[kasey_junk]

No but the most accepted premise is we give up public goods for national security not because rich guys don’t like it.

[zajio1am]

The same argument could be used about cars using roads or even pedestrians using sidewalks.

[kasey_junk]

Yes. And it is. Pedestrians don’t have any right to privacy in public and we demand behaviors of them for the privilege of using public commons.

[forgotpwd16]

Would love to read HN reactions if pedestrians were mandated to wear a GPS bracelet when outside.

[the_only_law]

And when there is publicly available “who’s walking on the sidewalk” data they probably will

[stingraycharles]

How is that different from e.g. cars? The roads are a public good as well, not?

[kasey_junk]

It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.

Transponders are in planes mostly for safety. Their automated dissemination is part of the safety mechanisms of that transport medium and putting up with them (when required) is part of the privilege of using that public good. Similar to requiring drivers licenses to drive.

[rosnd]

>It’s generally accepted that reporting on car movements is allowed as well. You don’t have a right to privacy of movement on public roads.

This is certainly not true in Europe, and in the US there's generally zero restrictions on publicly sharing any kind of PII.

[jjav]

> How is that different from e.g. cars? The roads are a public good as well, not?

For one thing, it's different because there is no law that cars need an active transponder while operating.

But cars do have a license plate anyone is free to look at while they drive by so in that sense it's the same.

[detaro]

Isn't it pretty established in the US that e.g. companies selling bulk license plate scanner data is completely legal, and any "right to privacy" isn't really a thing in public space? (very different in other parts of the world, but US seems to be the relevant context here)

[rosnd]

Why would the public need to know which plane is where, as opposed to just a plane being somewhere?

[detaro]

My understanding is that in the US this kind of thing doesn't work on "need to" basis. It's something planes broadcast (for air traffic control reasons) unencrypted, anyone can receive it, there is nothing banning people "hearing" unencrypted radio from telling others what they hear. (Similarly to how police scanners or listening to ATC radio is legal)

[rosnd]

In Europe it's not always legal to listen to unencrypted radio transmissions if you're not the intended recipient, but this is heavily country dependent and not rabbit hole worth diving into here.

But what's definitely not legal anywhere in the EU is to record unencrypted radio transmissions, use it to construct a database full of PII, and distribute it like Flightradar and friends do.

E: can't reply below due to ratelimits

>Hence why I said "in the US"...

Hence why I said "in Europe"...

[MallocVoidstar]

Tesla HQ is in Austin Texas, Twitter HQ is in San Francisco California. Tesla shareholders have been criticizing Musk for spending far more time at Twitter than he said he would while Tesla's stock has dropped. Therefore, there's a public interest in whether he is in San Francisco or Austin.

[kcplate]

So any time some shareholders are upset it automagically legitimizes the use of cyberstalking the private vehicles of the company’s executives?

Sorry, but that is a really weird justification. It seems to me that is just the type of issue that corporate boards are designed to handle without the need for vigilanteism.

[wfme]

This reads along the same lines as "we must watch our employees because we don't trust them to get their work done". This doesn't seem like a genuine public interest so much as reaching for a justification given the circumstances.

[AlexandrB]

This is a ridiculous comparison because there is little to no power differential between Elon and his shareholders while a significant one exists between an employee and his employer.

These kinds of comparisons, where two vaguely similar situations are considered equal regardless of the wealth, power, or influence of the participants remind me of this quote by Anatole France:

> The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

[HWR_14]

But in this particular case there is a lawsuit that says he is not doing his job. This isn't a micromanger checking door access logs for every employee, this is a manager saying "X isn't getting his work done and there are rumors he's not even showing up. Check the logs."

[Dylan16807]

CEOs of public companies get special treatment.

In this context it is a bit of a reach but I don't think they're wrong, and I don't think there's a reason to expect normal workers and CEOs to follow the same logic.

[dicknuckle]

I don't trust him to get work done. It's common knowledge he's not actually doing anything useful at any of the companies he "runs". There's a whole culture of "handling Elon" so he can't make terrible decisions and run a company into the ground. Twitter doesn't have that, so we're seeing everything out in the open.

[dillondoyle]

holding people in power accountable (musk visit D.C. musk flies to china. whatever).

tracking & pointing out grossly polluting means of travel.

market making information (musk spends more time visiting ___ faltering plant or ignoring ___. Musk makes trips to __ location, acquisition in the works)?

elon is a public figure and his movements/actions create legitimate news. same as any other celebrity or politician.

gawker did this first and that was actually stalking precise irl real time locations of celebs.

[kcplate]

People keep saying that yet no one has been able to define to me what “legitimate interest” the public has for tracking a private plane. I don’t believe one exists.

If you are sure of yourself, do a little experiment. If you truly believe it’s legitimate, why not just buy an AirTag and hide it on a person’s car…perhaps a local well known business owner. Create a website that publishes the live location of the vehicle. Let us know here how that goes for you.

[davely]

Ah, personally, I think getting hung up on the whole " legitimate public interest" argument is a distraction.

The simple fact of the matter is that due to how this data is created, it's publicly accessible information: All airplanes flying in civilian airspace are required to broadcast ADS-B data for safety reasons. It gives controllers (and other aircraft in your nearby airspace) a view of what's happening. Your airplane essentially broadcasts a payload every second that sends out your GPS coordinates, heading, speed, altitude, aircraft identification information, etc.

The COOL thing (speaking as an aviation geek), is that you can buy a cheap little antenna, plug it into a Raspberry Pi and start seeing these raw packets from airplanes FLYING OVER YOUR HOUSE. FlightRadar24 and ADSB Exchange basically crowd source a bunch of real-time data from people who have these antennas and are running various types of software.

Basically, since this is happening in public view and the data is available (primarily for safety reasons), then there is really no reasonable expectation of privacy. In a way, it's like people taking a photo of you on the street and posting about it -- since you're in a public space, there is no expectation of privacy. You might not like it, morally it might feel wrong, but there is no reasonable legal reason that bans this.

Fortunately (for Elon), he is a billionaire and can lobby to change laws he doesn't like if he so wishes.

[kcplate]

Data can be created and used for a legitimate purposes, using this data for aerospace safety is a positive and legitimate use of the data. Hobbyist use of the day could be considered legitimate and appropriate as well. However, the same data can be used for negative reasons too.

I don’t question the legal right to use this data this way, although I think good arguments could be made that if you are using the data this way, your intention is suspicious and you invite scrutiny. I am challenging the folks commenting here that the data being used this way is a positive use of the data.

[jjav]

> People keep saying that yet no one has been able to define to me what “legitimate interest” the public has for tracking a private plane. I don’t believe one exists.

If you have an objection to this tracking, you'd have to take it up with the FAA. Because the legitimate interest is that the rules require airplanes to transmit this information any anyone is free to listen to it.

Which is a great thing for aviation safety, so I'm glad the rules exist.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

Yes but creating a page to broadcast the location of an individual is weird and not ok. Why does it matter that it's trivial and legal to do?

[jonathanlb]

> weird and not ok

I mean, that particular individual is in turn weird and not okay.

But who am I to say? And what does it matter if something is weird and not okay? Lots of things fit that bill, and that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

If you owned a website like Twitter it would be perfectly fine for you to ban users for posting that information.

[jeffbee]

Not the same thing. The airspace above the United States belongs to the people thereof, who have promulgated regulations requiring aircraft to be equipped with ADS-B. You might not see the "legitimate interest" but frankly nobody asked you. Those are the rules.

[kcplate]

So the private vehicle driving around a public road equipped with a government required license plate that can be used to ID who owns the vehicle…yada yada yada. Zero parallels there.

Also I should note, that nobody asked me if I think people who intentionally cyberstalk folks online using public information are slimy either…(but I do).

[jeffbee]

I recently read this book. I think you could benefit from reading it. It's about how escalation of language—as you just did my moving up to "cyberstalking"—is used by people to escape responsibilities.

https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Not-Abuse-Overstating-Respon...

[kcplate]

>escape responsibilities

Just exactly what “responsibilities” do you perceive me to have in this discussion? Others are advocating monitoring another person’s property using technology and publishing it on the internet. I am suggesting that there is no reasonable civil reason to do so. The only “responsibility” I have here is to be true to my opinion. I stand by it.

Also, I used the term “cyberstalking” because that is exactly what it is. Here is a Wikipedia page on the term:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking

According to that page cyberstalking is the use of the internet and technology to stalk an individual and those actions “may include monitoring”.

Here is the definition of “stalk”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking

“Stalking is unwanted and/or repeated surveillance by an individual or group toward another person”

If you find fault in my definition, feel free to push an edit to those Wikipedia pages.

[nephanth]

One "legitimate interest" lies in attracting attention to their horrible carbon footprint

[kcplate]

I think that is what people might be pointing to as justification, but isn’t that simply a bullying tactic?

[checkyoursudo]

How many degrees of separation from actually PII is allowed? Would posting a link to an account that posts a link to the tracker be an offense?

Banning people for posting a link to someone else possibly violating the rules seems like a step way too far.