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They did this so they could say they banned it due to their new rule against location sharing, rather than Elon's personal vendetta.


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I would probably add that sharing anybody's live location is now a bannable offense. While the timing of rule change is clearly Elon case-driven, the rule itself makes sense to me: we wouldn't want to broadcast people's live physical location to all kids of people on the Internet, would we?

I defended Elon many times on HN but this is straight up incompetence. Even if they violated some silly location sharing rule they invented yesterday, there's no good excuse.

The saddest thing is this only adds fuel to the pro-censorship crowd.


What does that have at all to do with posting the already publicly available location of his jet? Seems like a pretty obvious attempt to play on people's emotions and shut down any kind of rational thinking to cover up for Elon just banning people that annoy him.

Elon, quite literally, immediately asked for the Internet to doxx someone right after making this rule change. He posted a picture of a car/license/person and demanded everyone find this person. Strangely, the 'incident' was never important enough to actually contact law enforcement over...

Musk seems to be indicating that banning it was a mistake:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737


Elon said he wouldn't ban the account. It's banned. That's the story.

Nonsensical comment. The rule was made to justify the ban of the musk jet tracker account, since the account was banned BEFORE the announcement an hour ago.

This might be the first post in this thread stating the alleged actual reason for the bans: they posted screenshots of the location tracking or linked to the Mastodon tracker account, breaking the rule against sharing real-time locations. That's the claim at least. Also, Musk states that these bans are not permanent and the accounts will be reinstated: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603591994244071424 He also posted a poll on the suspension time: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073

That's because they pissed off Elon by supplying the source data for ElonJet. He's been on a banning spree for weeks. Anyone who so much as mentioned the account would get the banhammer.

legal asked us to ban it again after they learned elon's goal.

which was to shadownban-2.0 the account when needed to delay news of certain travel. he came up with the idea when we pointed out other smaller accounts started to post the info and we were considering flagging them as bot last week.


LibsofTikTok are doing it but not getting banned. My problem with Elon's decision is he's only banning people providing his information. He doesn't care about anyone else just himself.

Why the weird Elon hate over this? My understanding was that this broke Twitter TOS and that he was leaving it up as a gesture of good faith. If he wants to take it down to keep things consistent across Twitter, why the hate? I know the Elon hate boner on HN is strong but this seems absurd.

Elon is claiming this is the new standard going forward:

"[Elon] added that any account revealing people's real-time locations will be suspended "as it is a physical safety violation"."


That doesn't really mesh with the actual bans that happened though which were all related to sharing the ElonJet account.

> Elon claimed he would not “ban” the account. And he has not done so. They were suspended.

That's just nitpicking. the ElonJet account didn't "violate Musk's privacy", it just "republished tracker information".


That's not the point. The publicly stated reason for this whole saga was Elon was claiming Twitter was suppressing free speech and wanted to make it free again. This play goes against all that.

These bans weren’t under “their existing TOS”. The policy was rewritten after banning @elonjet to justify it retroactively.

The bans weren’t 12 hours. They were eventually announced as week-long ones; Musk backed down after backlash and his public poll resulted in a “unban now” vote.


I mean...yes it's quite obvious the whole point of this update was to "allow" Elon to ban that account.

A lot of people seem to be worried how this will effect various use cases, like coordinating protests and such.

I wouldn't worry. This policy was made specifically so that Elon could take down the account that posts where his plane is and any reincarnation of that. It won't be enforced on anyone else, unless you're protesting Elon. Or one of his autocrat friends. In which case you should use a different platform anyway.

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