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Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

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Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#401
post #344

Difficult not to see this as anything other petulance. It's Musk's site and he's free to do whatever he wants with it, but this seems squarely against "any legal speech will be allowed"

Well in many cases doxing is considered illegal: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/119 There are many shades of gray, of course.

That's applicable in a pretty small amount of cases.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#402
At the start of this saga, I pointed to Napoleon as an example of what happens when hyper-ambitious and capable people meet an unyielding challenge,

    > It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
    > 
    > Right up until the moment you can't.
But never in my wildest dreams I could have imagined this turn of events. Forget Napoleon's retreat from a burning Moscow, this decision is as if Napoleon had decided to light the city on fire himself.

It is unfathomable. What happened?

All he had to do was nothing. One strategy could have been to wait for a few months, kept teams in place, offers assurances of continuity, do an audit of systems, and then swoop in to make changes. Even at $4M/day it would have cost far, far less than this.

-

In my mind, the most valuable thing about these circumstances is that they offer an opportunity for us to learn.

Right now, the burning question I have in my mind is one I asked a few weeks ago, what's the MTBF for such a platform?

From a thread 23 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33701999 ,

There's a pattern of diverging expectations here, one is the non-technical/naïve one,

    - Twitter is going to go down tomorrow and it's all over. RIP.
The second is,

    - Twitter is going to experience a failure cascade over time.
The third is,

    - It's all going to be fine.
I suspect that the real question is, how many individual wires can break before the cable holding the suspended platform snaps?

I am not that good of a developer, but watching Twitter I can't help but be reminded of Arecibo, except at a larger, more abstract scale. There was no single massive event that caused the failure, rather a series of factors and events, tiny cables breaking that eventually leads to a failure cascade that then causes the suspended platform to crash.

From what I can tell, in the past week or so, [note: this was written 3 weeks ago]

    - Twitter's copyright system failed

    - Two Factor Authentication broke down (it seems to be back up?)

    - (anecdata) Tweets have been loading sporadically for me and other people, sometimes we try to open a tweet and it says that it doesn't exist. Happens more frequently with new/recent tweets.

    - (unconfirmed) Twitter's managed account backend is behaving "strangely." For e.g., "One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated." from https://www.teamblind.com/post/i-told-my-team-to-pause-our-750kmonth-twitter-ads-budget-last-week-4dnbo1Ft ———— Friends have told me other similar stories
Are these failures symptomatic of a larger problem, or are they well-isolated parts misbehaving? Can Twitter even experience a failure cascade like Arecibo? Can that be paused/stopped?

I am asking this question because I don't know. And I'd like to develop a better mental model to understand what happens next.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#403
"so far, i’ve been able to confirm about half the accounts suspended posted links to the jet tracker thing in violation of the new doxx’ing policy. unclear just yet about the rest, but i think it’s safe to say the rule is for real."

https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1603570995490455552

Musk replied:

"Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#404
post #62
post #22

So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day. Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.

Elon is certainly awful for all that he’s doing, but couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company instead of taking legal action to ensure he did it? People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.

If by "people up top" you mean Twitter's board, they would have been sued seven ways to Sunday if they did not enforce the contract Elon signed.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#405
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame. I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all). Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did. Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not go…

Tinfoil hat on: the dude is a foreign asset and now has to pay dividends. Tinfoil hat off: all the admiration and money he received turned him into whatever it is that we are seeing today.

Right... or those are both ludicrous rationalisations for someone who was always a gaping asshole. Many of us managed to never have been fooled by him.

If anything turned him into who he is, it would be his childhood. When he writes the xmas card to his half sister / niece, it must be difficult deciding how to fill out the card.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#406

> Update: Musk just weighed in on the suspensions, characterizing them as intentional. “Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else,” he tweeted in a reply. > It’s worth noting that the policy these accounts violated, a prohibition against sharing “live location information,” is only 24 hours old. It seems like a good rule, but in this case the application of the rule seems less impersonal than it c…

>It seems like a good rule,

I don't know - it doesn't seem consistently applied Donie O’Sullivan published a tweet containing a statement from the LAPD and was banned; and personally I don't see it being upheld once Elon's fixation on this story wanes.

Furthermore, it just seems that Elon is doing what he accused Twitter of doing for so long; enacting arbitrary rules to silence political opponents. It's his site and he's free to ban who he wants but does he see the cognitive dissonance of how he's running the site?

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#408
post #37

'New Elon / New Kanye' I think is disillusioning for a lot of people. It's one thing to see a random celebrity or business person lose their marbles, but there was (and continues to be) high hopes for Elon at least with Tesla and Space X. I absolutely understand someone trying to shake things up for PR, but I can't see how he's winning here.

I mean I don't see any difference between kanye 10 years ago and kanye now really. Ego and narcissism are a hell of a thing., and they don't get better when your wife kicks you to the curb .. probably for being the man that we all see today, but quieter in private.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#409
post #58
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if he felt he could do all this as far as bans and etc goes. Why do it by saddling the company with so much debt that it seems financially so difficult to survive? Just from a business standpoint it doesn’t make sense.

As best I’ve been able to discern it, Musk said he was going to buy Twitter for a way overvalued sum ($44bn) as a troll? But ended up getting in so deep that he found himself with a legal obligation to buy the thing for an absurd price. It’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me: obscenely rich man is very used to doing whatever the hell he wants with no repercussions, particularly when shitposting on Twitt…

What kinds of fines would he have been facing for pulling the ejection lever? How much has he lost on this deal by taking it?

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#410

One thing that bugs me about the commentary here is that absolutely everything comes down to whether someone is mean or nice. It doesn't matter what they're saying, it's the TONE. Like we could all die fighting over the last gallon of gas in some burnt out hell world and it would be fine as long as everyone was nice to each other. It's like there is no past, there is no future, there is only the every present now and…

"Tone" is a part of what one says. It's not meaningless. It carries a message as well.
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