I am fully expecting this thread to be swarmed by HN users claiming this is a righteous upholding of principals and Elon Musk is a pure man free of hypocrisy, with only the thickest skin. Wont stop me from being mad about it, though.
Actually, the new policy against live-tweeting people's whereabouts (with the obvious exceptions) and enforcement of a 24h delay would have been pretty easy to defend, had it preceded the account suspension rather than the other way around.
A rule of "don't piss off Elon" is much more honest and easier to follow. It's really not a big deal either, most Twitter use cases don't involve Elon at all -- all it takes is Elon losing face about the free speech thing.
It's trying to be both ban-everything-elon-dislikes while letting Elon claim Twitter is a full free speech zone that makes it entertaining. Trying to make rules around how Elon is feeling that day, and probably how high he is at the time of the pronouncement is always going to make for ridiculous results
But it was clearly a last minute deal with no accounting for things like talking about public speakers, concerts. And talking about such things is a big part of what reporters do. So now they can add and judge who is a legitimate journalist. It opens up entire new cans of worms.
Aren't the public govt data feeds of the actions of notable public figures public events? Define public event? If I see him going into safeway to buy some cheetos is that public?
Let's be honest - he owns the company and he have every right to do whatever he want with it including burning it all to the ground. So he could just ban that account to begin with and everyone would just learn that Twitter is now his private fan club.
Instead he given some empty promises about "being free speech absolutist" and "not banning account that track his private jet" just to do exactly that shortly after. It's hypocrisy and he should pay dearly for that with what reputation he still have.
The problem he's going to have to contend with is that you can't be a partial free speech absolutist, especially not when all the exceptions have to do with your own person. It puts the lie to most of his statements on the subject so far. Not that there was any doubt.
Seems to me that the reputational damage comes from the amount of money these flights cost and their carbon footprint. That part would be difficult to defend someone wanting to hide.
The information is out there already, but this practice goes a step further by shining a spotlight on a person (and their children's) locations.
People would have a different attitude if this guy's niche was live tweeting female celebrity's locations instead of billionaires.
