Future Timeline

Xyls wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 3:53 am Apparently he is taking legal action again him? For what exactly? Reposting publicly available information? This is literally a first amendment right...

Elon is such a fuckin' tool.

erowind wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 5:21 am Huh, it's almost like the alt-right doesn't care about free speech or something, they only care about their speech.

Xyls wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 3:07 am Mr Free Speech has done it again!

Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... lists-musk

I mean Twitter is junk anyways, not sure why anyone actually uses that site.

Hopefully, people start using social media less and less.

(Vox) Twitter has suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists, many of whom have been reporting on Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of the company.

So far, the journalists who have been suspended include Donie O’Sullivan from CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Matt Binder of Mashable, and Micah Lee of The Intercept. The sudden purging seems to contradict Musk’s stated commitment to protecting freedom of speech on Twitter.

“I was very baffled. I thought people were trolling,” said independent journalist and former Vox reporter Aaron Rupar, recounting when he started getting messages from other journalists telling him he’d been suspended. Overnight, Rupar lost access to his 790,000 followers. He said he received no warning before being booted. “You basically have to comply with the whims that change day by day of the owner of the platform, that seems pretty unsustainable. It almost seems kind of spiteful.”

Several of the journalists who have been suspended, including Rupar, had recently posted about the debate over @ElonJet — a Twitter account that tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s private aircraft using publicly available flight data. Musk has argued that the account was jeopardizing his physical safety and changed Twitter’s rules to ban the sharing of “live location information” in order to suspend the account. @ElonJet’s 20-year-old account owner, Jack Sweeney, argued that the information about Elon Musk’s jets is already public. “If someone wanted to do something, they could do it without me,” he told the New York Times. Some journalists, such as Rupar, had recently tweeted out links to @ElonJet’s alternate Facebook account.

Twitter’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin told The Verge’s Alex Heath that Twitter “will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk” and that “we don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

wjfox wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 11:35 am

(Vox) Big surprise: The Twitter Files — the reports based on internal Twitter documents and messages that the company’s new owner Elon Musk provided to journalists — have landed as a polarizing salvo in the culture war.

Many inclined to distrust what they see as Big Tech’s liberal leanings have cried vindication. The documents show in detail how Twitter made key content moderation decisions that disadvantaged Trump, conservatives, and people who broke with the public health consensus on Covid-19. They say the evidence proves that, again and again, Twitter intervened to squelch speech that the liberal establishment didn’t like.

Meanwhile, others — including most liberals and many mainstream journalists — are unimpressed. They say Twitter’s policies here were already known and that the specific decisions in question — blocking a story they feared stemmed from a foreign hack, banning the account of President Trump after he incited an insurrection, and deboosting accounts spreading public health misinformation — generally seem at least defensible.

The discourse has quickly become one of us versus them — perfect for Twitter. The journalists to whom Musk gave the documents — most prominently, Substackers Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss — are outspoken, unsparing critics of what they believe is the “woke” liberal groupthink that pervades mainstream American media institutions, making them now effectively allies of the right in the culture war. Musk’s behavior since buying Twitter has made him a villain to the left, too.

So liberals have been inclined to view anything they say with deep skepticism, an instinct that was seemingly vindicated quickly after Taibbi posted his first report. He spotlighted an email stating that in October 2020 the Biden campaign had sent along requests to delete certain tweets, writing that an executive responded: “Handled.” Musk responded to this revelation with outrage: “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” But internet archive sleuths soon established the deleted tweets were pornographic or nude images of Hunter Biden that violated Twitter’s ban on nonconsensually posted sexual material, something Taibbi seemingly had not known.

(Axios) Elon Musk brought a number of journalists back to Twitter after suspending their accounts earlier this week, using a Twitter poll to decide their fate.

The big picture: Musk has repeatedly said he supports free speech and intends to use Twitter to promote it, Axios' Sara Fischer writes. However, he has been inconsistent with content moderation decisions.

Details: Musk asked Thursday night if the "accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time" should be unsuspended from Twitter.

• This was a reference to a number of prominent journalists, who were kicked off Twitter Thursday night, Axios reports.
• The poll, which had more than 3.6 million votes, showed the majority of voters (58.7%) wanted the accounts brought back "now."