I'm not defending Twitter or their policy in any way (disclaimer: I left Twitter the moment Elmo took over. I despise his hypocrisy and his fascist ideas)
But this could be a "legitimate f-up". Normally, most of these unsafe-url protection and detection is automated in something with the scale of Twitter.
Just like URL-shorteners often are (were?) "seemingly randomly" banned, because a portion of the shared urls are pointing at malware/phishing/otherwise banned content, all urls from this shortener get banned. It may be that signal.me is simply picking up on amount of illegitimate links. Signal is clearly growing strong. Therefore signal.me links' are increasingly seen by Twitter. Most legitimate links, but the amount of illegitimate links will then also increase.
This would trigger an automated ban¹.
The real problem then is that even if it was deliberate (conspiracy theory: Mark messaged Elon: Pls help me curb the growth of the biggest competitor of Whatsapp?) twitter can easily hide behind "overzealous automation, sorry".
¹ Especially if this automation isn't maintained properly, finetuned and kept being tweaked by teams of experts - many of which left or were layd off after the aquisition of Twitter.
I think you buried the lede in your footnote here. Even if it is just a mistake, it's a pretty avoidable one by having a human in the loop to review changes to start blocking URLs to such a commonly linked site. If he thinks that it's "efficient" not to retain enough people to be able to notice that URL fragments and hashtags use the same symbol, he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near an "office of government efficiency", much less in charge of it.
Humans aren’t in the loop for automated bans. That has no relationship to staffing size.
This is likely a problem with the link banning algo not treating signal.me as high volume enough to prevent an automated ban.
That same logic most definitely exists at well-staffed companies and the internet is full of stories of people getting screwed by these systems. Google sinking legit companies with no recourse, locking out Gmail users who had decades of their life there, etc.
The URL hash (the part after #) is often not considered by automated systems to be a part of URL that's meaningful, because hash is normally only used for addressing parts of the website that was loaded based on the previous part of the URL. If a particular Signal.me link was flagged for whatever legitimate reason (contained malware or illegal content) it's entirely reasonable that an automated system would strip the hash and block the whole domain (because the path part in this URL is just "/" and nothing else).
It'll be interesting to see whether they address and reverse it. If not, then we can be fairly sure this was intentional.
The thing is that, in a platform based on link sharing, it should be known which domains point to URL shorteners.
Even if you automate their handling, the algorithm should know that, if it bumps into a say signal.me, bit.ly or goo.gl URL, it should first do a GET and then apply the algorithm to whatever is provided in the Location header.
Not doing this for a widely used URL shortener like signal.me is just a show of technical incompetence.
As you point out, "honest mistake" can be used by sophisticated intentional aggressors to get away with their attacks.
For a long time, the advice was "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." but aggressors evolve to fit their surroundings. When the population largely follows this rule, it becomes a competitive advantage to fake incompetence.
Perhaps both malice and incompetence should be treated the same, especially regarding punishment, until proven otherwise. After all, robust systems are designed in such a way that a single mistake can't cause harm. If somebody fails to design a system so that multiple mistakes (how many depends on cost and severity) have to stack up, then he should be held responsible.
This ties in with something that took me far too long to recognize: Trust has two pillars.
One pillar is alignment of values, and therefore intent. The other pillar is competence.
These are the same issues faced by AI development, as well as representative government, or anything regulating a dynamic with competing elements or agents.
Yet our plurality voting system would be insufficient even to keep a car on the road and driving within the speed requirements. If only the founding fathers had recognized the need to have more information included in ballots so that negative campaigning wasn't as effective if not more effective than positive.
If we voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} weights, without duplication of non-zero values, the smartest, most constructive candidates would have a better chance. Each district would have its own blend of 3-4 viable parties, and the nation would be all the healthier for it. (Side note: Yes, this is still one person one vote--you could imagine voting with a single checkbox for a single permutation of all possible assignments of the scores, as an intermediate form.)
Back to your point, though: Yes, incompetence and malice can have the same effect in the short term. The long term is what determines the difference, both in effect and our responses to it.
I will go with "legitimate f-up" too. Elon Musk has been pretty vocal about Signal in the past, mostly positively. If blocking Signal URLs has been intentional, he would have probably have mentioned it somewhere.
Shortened URLs are dubious by default. It is also possible that there really is a lot of spam/scam happening on Signal right now with signal.me URLs as an entry point. I mean, why not? Every messaging platform can be used for that, even more so if end-to-end encrypted as it makes spam detection harder. In fact, one of the first messages I received on Signal was an obvious scam from a user pretending to be Amazon.
Are links to mastodon still banned on twitter? Because that was a thing after Musk took over. So much for being a free speech absolutist.
You're making the mistake of taking a (communal + antagonistic) narcissist at face value. They are known to lie to suit their current goals and when those goals are achieved, they will lie to suit their new goals, whether the lies are congruent with each other or not.
This is a guy who:
- publicly called a rescuer "pedo guy", then falsely claimed it's a common insult from South Africa
- in a private email called him a "child rapist" and made up allegations of a 12 yo bride
- hired a PI to dig up dirt on him (which failed to corroborate any of his allegations)
Western society really needs to destigmatize discussion of mental illness, including diagnosing public personalities based on their behavior. Give them an opportunity to defend themselves, sure, but at some point, they become a danger to others (usually not to themselves) and should be required to seek treatment or be committed to a mental institution.
The reason absolutely matter : a mistake can happen to anyone, and be fixed within a short time, while censorship is deliberate and will probably not be fixed
Same as every social platform, the network effect. The actual functionality really is secondary to the usage and culture of these. Very much affecting it, yes, but still secondary at the same time. Same with multiplayer games, hangout spots or third places, and the list goes on.
There are many circles where xitter is a default platform. For example, many anime-style nsfw artists publish there as a primary outlet, and many companies publish their most instant news there (like a service outage, change in the opening hours, things like that). That and many other such things are plenty to keep people there.
Stopped using X when Elon took over, and then finally deleted my account (which I had had for many years, was an early adopter of Twitter before it was highly popular) when Elon went full MAGA-nazi. No regrets.
Some people are smart, insightful, and for some reason insist on only posting on X. I don't see the harm in continuing to follow them, even if I do wish they'd choose a different site to post on
(I expect a lot of people also have less techie friends and family that only post on a single social media site - I've had accounts all over the place trying to keep track of some old friends)
I guess those smart, insightful people are staying on X because
- their targeting audience are on X
- they are rich and do not really care what the platform owner does
- they will be very happy to join the owner when offered such opportunities
For people who are the target audience of those people, I guess
- they voted for this, and they are happily watching the federal gov falling apart
- they convinced themselves that X is the place to grow / learn from smart and insightful people (I don't think one has to be on it for more than 10 min a day to grow & learn, unless one is a crypto trader)
- they convinced themselves that it is really nothing political about using X
It’s propped up by media companies, who have become addicted to the quick quote that a tweet provides. Any topic distilled down into 140 characters is always going to have multiple ways to interpret it, thus feeding the click bait pipeline with sufficient reactionary data.
It is a monument in the race to the bottom of “digestible/summarized content”.
I use it because it's one of a few platforms that's not censored to hell. Sure, it results in some unpleasant crap sometimes, but generally the feed is good.
its the only social media platform that isn't image and video heavy, can consistently have non-bot and non-fake and non-clickbait material of substance (if you curate who you you follow well), provides awesome filtering options out of the box for stuff like keywords (i literally had to make a browser extension to filter reddit crap out better), and has a lot of interesting people posting entertaining non-image stuff
caveat: i completely stay off anything political, i filter the absolute hell out of anything political, i block people constantly
i don't care that elon owns it because i don't buy into the outrageous hyperbole of him literally being the next hitler. i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible, and he accomplishes a lot of cool shit despite the bullshit.
not interested in debating people wanting to scream about elon and wont respond to comments about him, im just offering my unfiltered opinion about why I use X
> i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible
I don't disagree with you. But the big problem -- and the reason why people like me are so upset -- is that Elon is now in a much more powerful position than any of those other business leaders, a position in which he is directly impacting the lives of Americans whether they use his products or not. That's quite different than Bezos, Zuck, and all the rest. If he had stayed out of politics I wouldn't have much issue (I can choose not to use X, drive a Tesla, etc.)
Are you seriously asking that question? If so, I suggest looking at the nov election results. The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election).
It's not just about Trump though. I jumped ship the second Musk pushed the change to increase the weight of tweets made by a paying account. Also the first thing he did when he took over was cut the entire a11y team. Then he login-walled Twitter and broke the API. Reddit communities went crazy when the Reddit team paywalled their own API.
There's an incredibly long list of reasons to ditch x beyond musk's political activity
quite frankly, your argument is dishonest, whether intentionally or not. I do not trust anyone repeating online, and no one else should. Especially since its repeated verbatim every time it comes up, its clear that this is "the play" and propaganda.
> I suggest looking at the nov election results.
What should we be looking at exactly? How the curiously 100% flipped swing states voted? I agree, theres much to look at there.
> The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election
That is an outright lie.
No one knew Musk would be running amok dismantling government institutions like a rabid dog, while side stepping all government processes. Project 2025 had something like a 6% approval rating. What is being "implemented" right now is Project 2025.
The US is in a constitutional crisis, and the saving money is a farce to permanently disable the US as a functioning body.
You think the US is bankrupting you by stealing your money? Specifically: USAID, FAA, Government Watchdog agencies, and whatever other group that has been dismantled by now? Those are the high priority agencies stealing our hard earned money?
Not the guys who all of a sudden have a 100 billion dollars since 2010?
the people who ensure government is broken and stealing from you are now in charge. they recently requested $4.3 trillion in deficit spending for tax cuts and the dissolution of medicaid.
I saw your comment and saw it getting downvoted or flagged but it is useful to have a discussion so that others similarly inclined can potentially learn something that they obviously don't already understand. I reproduce that comment here in case it somehow disappears.
>i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money
If you're concerned about the federal government bankrupting "us" by stealing our money then ask yourself why one of the first things that happened was the firing of OIG personnel. The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size. They have the power to audit any recipient of taxpayer monies and to work with US Attorney federal prosecutors to prosecute those who steal, waste, or otherwise violate plan guidelines in disbursing money. US Attorneys will not even take a case to trial unless agency auditors can document in detail that a crime has occurred and that crime fits within prosecutorial guidelines and a conviction is nearly guaranteed. To take a case that has any weaknesses risks wasting public money prosecuting a case you might not win. The whole point is to make sure you have the evidence that forces the defendant to either make restitution or to spend some time in a federal lock-up.
It's suspicious to me that the first thing they do is fire all the people who not only can watch, but who have the Congressional mandate to seek out waste, fraud, and abuse of federal programs that disburse money to individuals, small businesses, cities and other non-federal entities, non-profits, and corporations.
Though I am not a doctor, I do think that you should seriously work on your mental health. Start by changing your diet to include less kool-aid as the sugar high you're on can cause metabolic changes that lead to seriously bad health outcomes.
My spouse has spent a career in a federal department working to insure that the money Congress allocates to specific programs ends up being spent for purposes that are allowed under the guidelines of those federal programs. If you think the federal government is the one stealing your money you are sadly mistaken.
Federal programs are full of fraud but the fraud occurs at the recipient end, not within the department.
If you or anyone else are so concerned about where your tax money goes then the last agency entity that you would eliminate would be the one charged with insuring that all the monies in all the programs administered by the agency are disbursed lawfully according to plan guidelines which were approved by Congress. These people, as part of their job, have to read and internalize all the nuances, conflicts with existing programs, and contradictions in all the programs that they serve as watchdog over and it is their skills that allow federal prosecutors to take fraud cases to trial and to convict those who have abused federal programs for personal gain.
You voted for someone who has a documented history of fraudulent use of federal money who made it a point in both of his administrations to remove the specific persons and agencies that would guarantee oversight so that they can do anything without worrying about accountability. Internalize that.
Signal.me links are just a way to easily send either a phone number or user name to someone else. No cryptographic identity. No protection of the phone number or user name. So to get around the ban a Signal user could simply send their phone number or user name over Twitter/X.
It seems that the encrypted username form does provide some identity protection in that it can be cancelled, but for as long as it is active it appears that someone can just ask the Signal server what the associated user name is.
The people involved probably should not be using Twitter/X for this sort of thing in the first place. Mastodon comes to mind as an alternative, but really, anything else.
OK, I couldn't find any specific documentation just floating around about group links. It appears that the base64 value is specific to the group and is only exposed through the link. I didn't see any way to munge the "signal.me" domain and fix it again. So for groups Twitter/X seems to have won.
Phone numbers and usernames are sent in the clear in signal.me links. So in this particular case, they can't be hidden. Perhaps it is not a good idea to post such links on a hostile system.
That's interesting, given that as an official government department they're subject to FOIA requests and as such have an obligation to persist their documentation.
Pretty sure it's because literally all the signal.me links are the same when you remove the part after the #.
When you perform an HTTP(S) request you never provide the part after the # in the request URL, it's only interpreted by the web browser itself. It's likely that their antispam thing does the same and ignores the hash altogether.
On a similar note: the Swedish armed forces just came out and recommended that people working for the military should use signal for their calls and messages for things that are not classified in any of the higher classifications.
I was curious because over here, the ownership of signal.me is pretty much obscured (behind Cloudflare and WHOIS privacy). Doing this for infrastructure domains is not a good idea because it encourages persistent overblocking because it makes manual review more difficult. At least there is official documentation mentioning signal.me: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320291-Fi...
(The page is in the Bing index, but it seems "signal.me" is treated as a stop word by the search engine.)
Tell me more. I live here and have never encountered a situation where I was not allowed to express my opinions in a systematic way. So I don't know but would be delighted to
Shoshana Zuboff was so right it is scary. The name ('Surveillance Capitalism') put me on the wrong foot as I already knew about the surveillance part. But what I found most scary was the part where the tech companies turned from surveillance to influence. Once you have these billions of people using only your platform to view the world, it is trivial alter their view of the world. And thereby changing policital currents, policies, opinions.... anything.
It is like the Bible before Martin Luther translated it into German, and all christians just had to accept blindly that whatever the priests said was written in the bible actually was. Most humans now have so little input other than whatever priests they follow we might as well be back in the dark ages.
The dark ages is the plan according to Curtis Yarvin, their “prophet”.
A network of techno-feudal states run by a joint-stock corporation headed by a CEO with absolute power. Like Hunger Games, fancy dress, bad tans, and all.
It’s really lame and shortsighted. Never mind philosophically broken.
In my opinion, Elon Musk initially endorsed Signal because of its strong encryption, security, and commitment to privacy. Now, he's blocking it for those very same reasons—what a blatant double standard!
On a related note, one of the key advantages of the modern internet—and more specifically, social media—is that everything you say publicly is archived. This means that if you ever do a complete 180° on your claims or principles, it can easily come back to haunt you. So, it's always wise to be mindful of what you say and stay true to your values.
He may use Signal, but he does not want people on X to advertise their presence on any competing platforms. It is a childish and protectionist policy, and in no way align with his Free Speech® claims.
It was the same when URLs to Mastodon/Fediverse instances was banned on X, in an attempt to hamper the network effect for those who migrated. Meta does the same with Pixelfed these days, to hamper migration away from Instagram.
Elon and Mark are all for competition and free markets, but as soon as alternatives that can't be bought and controlled pops up, they outright ban any mention of it on their platforms.
Signal links are odd, in that all the identifies are after the #, so to a spam filter this just looks like a single url, https://signal.me , being sent out in mass.
On X, only the "Signal.me" links are blocked. Other types of Signal links, such as call links, group invite links, Signal.org links, and link previews, are not blocked on the platform. [From Mistral]
This may come as a shock to him: Free Speech means to allow people to say something that he disagree with. Something that may hurt his interests or even his ego. Free speech is not to allow people to say things he agree with or don't care about.
While you’re correct as to his intentions, it’s still important to point out his hypocrisy as he called himself “a free speech absolutist,” and claimed to want Twitter to be part of that vision. He explicitly called left wing and right wing views as things he wants.
Yes, we know it was all lies but not putting out the evidence allows people like Musk and his acolytes to make it the new truth without a fight.
What makes you say that? I've started using X recently and I would argue it's pretty free, you see a lot more range of opinions than on a site like reddit. Aggressively pro-trans posts come across my feed all the time, including some right-wing content
“Free speech” disappeared almost immediately after the Twitter purchase. Along with all of Musks supporters changing from “we need free speech”, to “Musk owns the platform, he can do what he wants.”
Pre-Musk Twitter was more about free speech, except it was trying to fight bots, hate speech and disinformation.
The biggest problem with the term "Free Speech" is that almost everyone makes exceptions for things that they believe should be restricted/censored.
Therefore the only standard should be the legality of that speech in a particular country. In the US those things you put as exemptions are permitted. So pre-musk Twitter wasn't about free-speech as those exemptions are restrictions on speech that are greater than US law restricts (which isn't much tbh).
Generally you have a trade off on any of these platforms between what you can say without breaking terms of service and the popularity of that platform. Generally less popular platforms are less restrictive.
If you don't want your speech restricted, you should probably just go back to hosting your blog and using a mailing list.
I would argue it appeared after the Twitter purchase. Originally Twitter had been dying through excessive bans, now you can find major political influencers on both sides of the spectrum
Also how liberals were celebrating Elons "genius" just a decade ago will never not be funny to me, they also don't seem to mind Gates at all. I don't think they have much of a problem with oligarchy, they just want a liberal oligarchy instead.
Stop carrying water for the world’s richest person. Musk has claimed multiple times he’s a free speech absolutist and bought Twitter to make it the free speech platform.
I agree, it’s his platform and he can do what he wants within the law. But, how you or anyone else can continue to defend Musk when he has made clear multiple times he’s a lying hypocrite is beyond my understanding.
> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform
This is complicated massively by Elon's role at DOGE.
Twitter has the right to block whomever they want (and always did). But given "multiple federal workers...said they’ve moved sensitive conversations from text messages and Facebook Messenger to the encrypted messaging app Signal" [1], it's unclear whether this is a private or public action.
(Folks in this thread are complaining about Musk's hypocrisy in criticizing pre-Muskian Twitter for blocking accounts and content when he's doing the same thing. But again, that is eclipsed in importance by the corruption and abuse of power questions.)
People know this. This isn't confusing. The hypocracy being pointed out is when Elon Musk says that he is a free speech absolutist[1], yet consistently blocks his critics and competitors.
This is ignoring his very confused notion of what free speech is[2]
> By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
> I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
> If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Not only is this inconsistent with his 'free speech absolutist' views, and inconsistent with Twitter's actions, but it states that he's actually all for the government censoring people. That's not even non-absolutist free speech.
> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform.
Before the Internet this was not the case. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de facto allowed for political and religious speech regardless of property rights. In the very early days of the Internet things changed, when people tried to assert First Amendment claims on Compuserve chats. Compuserve claimed they weren't the public square, that they were a private service. I think they were correct, in that Compuserve was a very marginal private space and couldn't possibly have been "the public square". But precedent over this tiny service were eventually laundered into much larger and more critical bits of social infrastructure.
In contrast to Compuserve, Twitter and Facebook are definitely the public square. You cannot petition for a redress of grievances or lobby for policy changes without using them. And the political left delights in suppressing their opponents on them but files lawsuits claiming their rights are infringed when they aren't given access to every inch -- such as when they sued Trump for blocking them on his Twitter account:
When Democrats were barred from interacting even with a very small part of a platform, it is a critical First Amendment violation. When conservatives, racists, sexists, or whatever term you want to use are barred, well, it's a private company bigot.
This hypocrisy must quickly end, or we as a country will end up in a violent conflict. There must be open, public debate on every major platform, and Americans must be entitled to express their opinions because the only other alternative is violence.
This is what happens when a society allows narcissists in positions of power. It's a disease and when they refuse to seek treatment, it should make them ineligible for any leadership position, in both the private and public sector.
Nobody (sane) would allow a psychotic individual to run for president or become a CEO. This is the same thing, except they are less of a danger to themselves and more to others.
And of course they're able to craft more convincing lies. Mr. Musk never cared about free speech, only about being worshipped and the best way to achieve that is to say what people want to hear.
You’re reading too much into it. Stop thinking he’s playing 5D chess, he’s not even playing regular checkers. It’s well known he bought Twitter because he thought he would be forced to, he clearly tried to actively back out of the purchase.
Good point, and I strongly hold if you can explain something by incompetence, it's profoundly more likely to be true than cunning.
OTOH, I recall Elon's comment about "vote Dem in House and GOP in Senate, divided is better", something like that. Given his position as Donald's right hand man, that comment takes on new meaning.
The parent post is by and large correct, except for the right-hand man of Donald Trump stuff. Musk was indeed trying to buy influence, which is definitely not a "5D chess move" but simply common sense for extremely wealthy people if they can get away with it. He also wanted to ensure that he is always the center of attention and intended to use twitter as the marketing arm for his brand. He only wanted to back out once US and global economic indicators started going south and made his offer look ridiculously overpriced, and also made himself look like a sucker. And Musk does not like being the sucker. But his wanting to back out later doesn't cancel out his initial intentions. And once he was forced to buy it, he started playing high stakes poker and managed to turn it into a great investment for him personally by the end of 2024, becoming one of the most powerful men in the world in addition to being the richest. How long it will last might depend on how many consecutive presidential terms the Republicans can hold on to.
The righthand man for Trump stuff was never the intention initially. Musk went gaga for Trump rather late, he was a DeSantis supporter after all, with DeSantis launching his terrible presidential bid on Elon's twitter.
Instagram blocked telegram 8 years ago and nobody complained, the ban in still in place as far i know; trying to block the competition is fairly common, unfortunately
Well, Instagram never claimed to be a free speech network. Also Instagram is covered with content that sexually exploits children, and Telegram links to CSAM were pretty common.
Given that Telegram has very publicly failed at that kind of moderation, it is pretty defensible to block it. If only they would do something about the weirdo Instagram mommies that flood the network with pictures of their preteen daughters in swimsuit and leotards... It's gross what some people do for anything resembling Internet clout.
Signal could start doing some posts praising Musk and promoting Tesla or whatever scam he’s pushing at the given moment, that would unblock them really fast.
Pre-Musk Twitter was indeed bad, a sign of it’s time and dying. Now it’s even worse and quite pathetic.
I think it is critical to not forget the context of russian aligned bots getting free reign on Twitter, they are not being blocked, and Musk is keeping close ties to Putin.
This comment section has turned into something of a circle, it's cool to be mad nd all, but there was a comment expressing doubt at the details, wonder about a reason other than those stated, and asking if anyone independently verified, as I clicked it the comment was flagged to oblivion. No opportunity to engage with that viewpoint.
HN is always a mess when the subject contains Musk, Trump, Google, browsers or social media platforms in general.
I don't mind the slight political aspects of things, but reading a ton of hate and "I already deleted X" (pun intended) and "Just use Y other platform" (that no normal user can figure out) comments is just uninteresting and should stay on Reddit or wherever these nonproductive comments fit into.
I'd love to hear more about this case, the technical aspects and the follow-ups/investigations. Let's focus on that, no? Maybe it's just me.
Do all these commenters believe this nonsense? The conspiracy thinking has reached new peaks. Hard to take concerns of free speech seriously from people promoting platforms that routinely “moderate” any dissenting opinions (HN included).
Our ability for collective sense making seems to be permanently destroyed. Two people who seem to agree on everything point-by-point then reach different conclusions on the final step. Its bewildering.
How do you mean do we "believe this nonsense"? I don't use twitter regularly, but I have two accounts for reasons. I just signed in, I typed out a (fake) signal URL, and... posting was blocked.
It doesn't appear to be nonsense, it appears to be entirely true that any tweet with "signal.me" in it is blocked.
Occam's razor says they're blocking Signal. Hanlon's razor says they're just idiots. Either way: An important tool for communication is being blocked by twitter, which is both dangerous and not "nonsense".
Given Elon Musk's current propensity for authoritarianism and censorship, I'm leaning towards Occam's explanation. If you have evidence otherwise, I would genuinely like to see it, but honestly Hanlon's explanation that it's incompetence is not much better.
Everything political gets downvoted, from either side, but you're going to need better evidence than Musk and rumors for this fraud.
(There probably is some fraud! There is in any large money handling system! Japan had a problem with elderly people claiming pensions after they'd died, for example. It's just that you need a better standard of evidence before cutting off money that people are legally entitled to, because otherwise the fraud detection process is going to have false positives.)
Politics in general. Because everyone has an opinion, often based on their values rather than cold facts, and people do not like their values being questioned. The discussion is more civil than on other forums, but the difference is not night and day. Disappointing.
bsky is decentralized, in theory more so than Mastodon, which is federated (a variant of decentralization that requires you to trust the server admins of a server of your choice)
"In theory", because so far, there are very few nodes (one?), very few (if any?) alternative implementations, most is controlled and operated by a small team paid for by a.o. Jack Dorsey and other funds. Mastodon (using the ActivityPub protocol) has one main repo, managed by one person under a non-profit that also operates the biggest instance. But also has dozens of other implementations in other languages, with other niches, with more, less, other features and so on.
So, "best bet" would probably be to:
- Sign up at both a Mastodon and Bsky. Try them both for while.
- See which one fits your needs, style and practical needs best. Stick with that one.
I have and deactivated my account a day or two in -- that un-removable message up top that it will use your posts, likes, etc to train their models unsettled me. At least they were upfront about it, unlike Twitter/X.
I also didn't like that I had 30 different followers the moment I signed up.
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech?
I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
"Freedom of speech" on Twitter is nothing more than Newspeak for censorship. In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves, while allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant. It is a form of indirect censorship, through the self-censorship of minorities who fear speaking out. Then comes direct censorship, where certain terms or links are banned.
Aren't racists a minority who struggle to express themselves?
How did you come to these conclusions about the goals and future of Twitter? My naive expectation was that Musk is mostly interested in enriching and aggrandizing himself, and that a crusade against some social group is only interesting as long as it serves the primary interests.
Prior to Musk's purchase of Twitter, feminists who expressed the view that women and girls need single-sex spaces, and that males who identify as women aren't actually women and therefore shouldn't be allowed in these spaces, would be banned from the platform under the guise of "transphobia".
They were literally being silenced for expressing their criticism of the ideology of gender identity and how it is being used to disadvantage and oppress women and girls.
On X, however, they are free to state this without fear of censorship, due to the broadening of permissible speech on the platform. So while it might not be the "free speech absolutism" that Musk disingenuously claims, it's an improvement to the pre-Musk era of censorship.
Freedom of speech, at least in the US, is a concern specifically with the government censoring citizens' speech. The Twitter files are a recent example of the government partnering with private corps to censor, so that's a fair argument, but in general a private company can't violate free speech by deciding what kind of content they want allowed.
Is it shitty that they censor? Absolutely. But is it a constitutional violation? Not unless I've horribly misunderstood my rights for more than 35 years.
> In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves
This particular clause seens very unlikely. One could want an increase in racism and homophobia on a platform without specifically wanting there to be less black people (for example) speaking out. That the -isms cause said people to speak up less would likely be a (pleasant?) side effect rather than the primary goal.
"Free speech" on a centralized platform always seems fishy. One can't expect it from Elon at least. He always has extreme/polar thoughts on various subjects.
>Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors?
The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes; just increased geopolitical instability. Twitter has always been a social media platform, and definitionally it has therefore always increased extremism and populism. I find it incredibly disheartening that people think Twitter has only become a malevolent force under Musk. Musk's changes to the platform are certainly unsettling, but Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone.
> The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes
Tunisia is now arguably better off, but even beyond that: the longterm effects of such things aren't always immediately apparent. The French Revolution led to terror, then to an Empire and devastating wars and finally back to the old monarchy, but it cast a very long shadow on the 19th century and beyond.
The point is that social media was used by people to connect and organise which led to the overthrow of a number of dictators/military junta.
What has happened since is the old order has mostly reasserted itself - with a clamp down on social media, and mechanisms put in place to cut access if things get too fiesty.
Take Egypt - they kicked out a miltary juntu - forced elections - then the 'wrong' people won the elections and the military took over again, clamped down on the media and are in still in place today ( president has been in power for 10+ years with no signs of stepping down ) - and they are so representative of the people that the US think they might be able to persuade the Egyptian leader to take part in ethnic cleansing of it's neighbour.
Whether that's a good thing depends on whether you think people like el-Sisi know what's best for their country, whether the people agree or not.
At least at the time, we thought it could be a tool for populist uprisings in authoritarian countries. Now it seems like they just want to promote populist uprisings in democratic countries.
Twitter was a net positive for many. Millions of people around the world relied on it for timely news and updates in the absence of other avenues. This was particularly pertinent in places like Africa where state infrastructure wasn't able to provide or indeed, the middle east, where censorship prevented accurate news being disseminated.
So your assertion that "Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone" is not only false but an absurdly biased and frankly wrong view on how the world accesses information.
Also, the Arab spring overthrew several decades-long brutal dictatorships. Given that overthrowing The Taliban (lol) and Saddam is hailed as a positive of the trillions of dollars and millions of lives spent on the GWOT, at least give the people of the Middle East the courtesy of acknowledging the overthrow of Ben Ali, Assad, Mubarak and Gaddafi.
If your sycophants eat everything you'll throw at them there won't be any need for justification. Which completely baffles me. The US digital technology sector seems to be full of yes man and groupthink, and it's getting worse.
I think some people are so motivated by "hate" (for lack of a better word) they they pretty much would shoot their foot off with a sawed-off if someone told them it would "own the libs". It's like you say: there is not even need of justification, Musk is "our guy" and that's that.
There is plenty of criticism of Elon Musk coming coming from both sides of the political spectrum. I am consider myself right of centre and I hear plenty of criticisms of Elon Musk coming from the right. The complaints are completely different though.
The big problem with any of these discussions (especially online) is that a lot of people are intellectually lazy and assume the other-side is comprised of brain dead zealots who only support the most extreme positions.
You can also ignore any justification X gives, all the statements coming from Musk and the other tech companies and the government are untrustworthy or deceptive. But people are still hopeful in that Musk saying "free speech" actually gives them any reasing to keep using Twitter.
They won't. They'll lie, some will buy it up and they'll cary on. This behaviour is completely consistent with what they've been doing since purchase. Why start now?
If you capture a high enough proportion of the attention bandwidth, you cease having to answer questions or be accountable. It's quite scary how powerful this is.
There is so much censorship going on on Twitter through the use of dark patterns, that it's embarrassing to claim it to be something like a fortress of free speech.
Let alone the fact that you need to have a subscription in order to obtain a "somewhat fair" exposure. It's ridiculous.
Look up “leggi fascistissime”.
It’s appalling how people don’t see the obvious playbook that’s unfolding here, down to the claims of “defending democracy”
Most people are living automatons who find excuses in being too busy, too scared or too confident in believing "that's history, it can never happen again, we're living in a modern world" to notice things unfolding around, which is exactly what brought fascism to life back then.
It was a nothing burger because Twitter didn't blindly do everything they were asked to do, they rejected a bunch of the government requests. It's not weird for law enforcement to notify a platform of something suspicious they found on the platform.
The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.
> Security researchers at Mysk first noticed the issue on Sunday night, Feb. 16. They reached out to me via DM and we were able to confirm the various different ways (DM, post, profile bio, etc.) that X was blocking “Signal.me” links.
> Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors?
That was a pure US State Department/the Blob move, as soon as social media turned against them they were very quick into crying wolf and saying that said social media needs to be curtailed and protected against outside foreign influences.
I'm a mr. Calin Georgescu voter from Romania (you might have heard of him in VP Vance's recent speech held in Munich), so you can understand how come I view things this way.
If you just need to get all the emotions off your chest, feel free to continue, If you want to know what's actually getting blocked see the discussion here
Twitter is the most compliant social media platform for government take downs. The number of government take downs actually sharply increased under the new leadership.
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” ― Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Elon's proclamation that he is fighting "them" (deep state/democrats/...) has turned around and he is the same now. He is the USAID-ish funding for his cause. The cause could be different but the tools are the same, albeit in different names.
People have only that much power we give to them. If everyone stops using Twitter/X, it is nothing. Nobody buys Teslas - it is nothing. The list goes on since his # in wealthy ranks defines his position. Just make it drop.
The pussyfooting around this from some countries is genuinely surprising. Like, how are the Germans of all people confused about whether the oligarch courting their neo Nazis is a threat to their national security?
The closest to what Twitter used to be is Bsky. The model isn't perfect and some of its features are still not quite there, but it has replaced my Twitter usage entirely. And they've managed the large user surge pretty well. I've seen some developers I follow who cross post getting more engagement on Bsky than X despite a lower follower count there.
Most of the people you mentioned wouldn't risk their money for something like moral values so they haven't left X. A large number of interesting, less self motivated people have migrated already.
> Which platform provides the same network effect?
None, obviously - every network is unique. However, that doesn't contradict the premise. If one accepts that continuing to use twitter makes one "part of the problem", a desire to read PG's tweets doesn't seem like a meaningful justification. In my view, the only justification is "I don't care how twitter operates" or "I think twitter's new mission is good".
I mean, I suppose it really depends on what you want out of a social network. Some combo of mastodon and bluesky is fine for me, but then I didn't follow any of those people in the first place.
If you want celeb VCs, then, yeah, you're probably stuck with Twitter. Most people don't, though.
At this point you're actively contributing to the death of free speech if you're still active on X in any way. There are no excuses to use it still if you have any sort of functional moral compass.
Usually, posting on Twitter or quitting it has a very tiny, almost imperceptible effect on the larger world and it's certainly not something to get worked up about.
That's reversing the argument. I'm not saying quitting X is bad for X, I'm saying quitting X is good for you. Nobody's completely immune to whatever that sociological experiment is turning into and staying on X is likely to influence your ethics, morals and standards in an objectively negative way.
I think the only smaet business move for twitter right now is to ban all external links in posts, like Instagram and TikTok.
It was never much of a driver of traffic outside news and most news consumers that click have already left. And most news sources you'd want to click are behind paywalls The users that remain are more likely to watch Twitter videos and read those long-ass tweets, out of loyalty to Papa Elon.
Agreed. Most twitter posts I see anyway is stolen content without a single link to attribute it. Almost seems like posting a link to the source there is bad manners.
The logical explanation to me is that most of the Signal contacts shared tend to be for drugs or CSAM trading, so they went for the nuclear approach to make moderation easier.
Give me a break, open telegram, which is still in the clear for comrade musk and he publicly advocated for comrade durov and tell me how long it will take you to find anything from prostitution to weapons, drugs and human trafficking. It's all about punishing people who can question musk & co's authoritarian desires.
Feds can request info from Telegram. Additionally, Telegram has evolved past a simple messenger application. A massive amount of projects, most of them being crypto projects, use Telegram as their primary method of communication and announcements. It is also a very popular messenger in India and parts of Europe. They can block Signal because they can get away with it. If it means banning a bunch of CSAM traders and drug dealers, even if it includes a few users and privacy nerds, they're still winning in terms of easing up their moderation efforts without significant outcry. I believe this block will be lifted, even if Signal users a minority, they are a loud minority. This could have very well been a mistake.
Can’t really tell what most of you are complaining about. You can say anything on X (short of doxing and inciting violence and things that are against the law), you can follow or block anyone on X.
If they ban Signal links, a competitor platform, that’s a shame, but whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.
Seems like some people think a “free speech platform” would be some sort of moderated debating space where opinions you dislike are silenced on your behalf and the downstream political ramifications are things that you personally enjoy, or else it’s not free speech but “fascism” (lol).
Somehow I don’t believe this, it is too much out of character, even if it fits so nicely with how we want to see Elon. Did anyone here actually confirm this? I never used Twitter nor X or id check myself.
sure, use the goog's to site-search twitter.com and signal.me, here's one: https://x.com/harris/status/1764683829455843464 and it says the malware after you click the obfuscated signal.me url
edit:
the url's are still visible in the mouse-over text popup, and the obfuscated site-redirection url does have the url in the address bar - but only time will tell before those vanish
honestly, any site that visibly displays one url as a hyperlink (underlines ect) and links to another site is practicing in malware style link hijacking. stop using those sites
I'm not defending Twitter or their policy in any way (disclaimer: I left Twitter the moment Elmo took over. I despise his hypocrisy and his fascist ideas)
But this could be a "legitimate f-up". Normally, most of these unsafe-url protection and detection is automated in something with the scale of Twitter.
Just like URL-shorteners often are (were?) "seemingly randomly" banned, because a portion of the shared urls are pointing at malware/phishing/otherwise banned content, all urls from this shortener get banned. It may be that signal.me is simply picking up on amount of illegitimate links. Signal is clearly growing strong. Therefore signal.me links' are increasingly seen by Twitter. Most legitimate links, but the amount of illegitimate links will then also increase.
This would trigger an automated ban¹.
The real problem then is that even if it was deliberate (conspiracy theory: Mark messaged Elon: Pls help me curb the growth of the biggest competitor of Whatsapp?) twitter can easily hide behind "overzealous automation, sorry".
¹ Especially if this automation isn't maintained properly, finetuned and kept being tweaked by teams of experts - many of which left or were layd off after the aquisition of Twitter.
I think you buried the lede in your footnote here. Even if it is just a mistake, it's a pretty avoidable one by having a human in the loop to review changes to start blocking URLs to such a commonly linked site. If he thinks that it's "efficient" not to retain enough people to be able to notice that URL fragments and hashtags use the same symbol, he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near an "office of government efficiency", much less in charge of it.
Humans aren’t in the loop for automated bans. That has no relationship to staffing size.
This is likely a problem with the link banning algo not treating signal.me as high volume enough to prevent an automated ban.
That same logic most definitely exists at well-staffed companies and the internet is full of stories of people getting screwed by these systems. Google sinking legit companies with no recourse, locking out Gmail users who had decades of their life there, etc.
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[flagged]
You might be onto something, I noticed that all the banned links were in the format:
https://signal.me/#eu/fdy5h1miMifXa...
The URL hash (the part after #) is often not considered by automated systems to be a part of URL that's meaningful, because hash is normally only used for addressing parts of the website that was loaded based on the previous part of the URL. If a particular Signal.me link was flagged for whatever legitimate reason (contained malware or illegal content) it's entirely reasonable that an automated system would strip the hash and block the whole domain (because the path part in this URL is just "/" and nothing else).
It'll be interesting to see whether they address and reverse it. If not, then we can be fairly sure this was intentional.
You can actually post links of the form https://signal.me/asdf. But https://signal.me/#asdf is blocked. That supports you point of view, I guess?
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The purpose of a system is what it does.
After a review, the program works as coded.
"The purpose of a system is what it does."
This is only true for systems that works perfectly. If the implementation if flawed, the system can do something different from its purpose.
Claiming "The purpose of a system is what it does." is like claiming that software bugs do not exist.
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Seems reductive.
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Three issues with believing this: 1. How long does it take to undo this though even if it might be an automated screwup?
2. Why it isn’t getting banned on other social networks and only on X?
3. Didn’t X previously block Substack and Mastodon URLs?
The thing is that, in a platform based on link sharing, it should be known which domains point to URL shorteners.
Even if you automate their handling, the algorithm should know that, if it bumps into a say signal.me, bit.ly or goo.gl URL, it should first do a GET and then apply the algorithm to whatever is provided in the Location header.
Not doing this for a widely used URL shortener like signal.me is just a show of technical incompetence.
As you point out, "honest mistake" can be used by sophisticated intentional aggressors to get away with their attacks.
For a long time, the advice was "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." but aggressors evolve to fit their surroundings. When the population largely follows this rule, it becomes a competitive advantage to fake incompetence.
Perhaps both malice and incompetence should be treated the same, especially regarding punishment, until proven otherwise. After all, robust systems are designed in such a way that a single mistake can't cause harm. If somebody fails to design a system so that multiple mistakes (how many depends on cost and severity) have to stack up, then he should be held responsible.
This ties in with something that took me far too long to recognize: Trust has two pillars.
One pillar is alignment of values, and therefore intent. The other pillar is competence.
These are the same issues faced by AI development, as well as representative government, or anything regulating a dynamic with competing elements or agents.
Yet our plurality voting system would be insufficient even to keep a car on the road and driving within the speed requirements. If only the founding fathers had recognized the need to have more information included in ballots so that negative campaigning wasn't as effective if not more effective than positive.
If we voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} weights, without duplication of non-zero values, the smartest, most constructive candidates would have a better chance. Each district would have its own blend of 3-4 viable parties, and the nation would be all the healthier for it. (Side note: Yes, this is still one person one vote--you could imagine voting with a single checkbox for a single permutation of all possible assignments of the scores, as an intermediate form.)
Back to your point, though: Yes, incompetence and malice can have the same effect in the short term. The long term is what determines the difference, both in effect and our responses to it.
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I like to add the statement, "Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice."
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"Mark messaged Elon: Pls help me curb the growth of the biggest competitor of Whatsapp?"
Didn't they wanted to beat each other up in the public?
I would have prefered that concept and not shady deals. (and while it is of course possible, I really doubt it in this case)
> Didn't they wanted to beat each other up in the public?
Isn't that like ultimate bro code for "I love you man"?
I will go with "legitimate f-up" too. Elon Musk has been pretty vocal about Signal in the past, mostly positively. If blocking Signal URLs has been intentional, he would have probably have mentioned it somewhere.
Shortened URLs are dubious by default. It is also possible that there really is a lot of spam/scam happening on Signal right now with signal.me URLs as an entry point. I mean, why not? Every messaging platform can be used for that, even more so if end-to-end encrypted as it makes spam detection harder. In fact, one of the first messages I received on Signal was an obvious scam from a user pretending to be Amazon.
Are links to mastodon still banned on twitter? Because that was a thing after Musk took over. So much for being a free speech absolutist.
You're making the mistake of taking a (communal + antagonistic) narcissist at face value. They are known to lie to suit their current goals and when those goals are achieved, they will lie to suit their new goals, whether the lies are congruent with each other or not.
This is a guy who:
- publicly called a rescuer "pedo guy", then falsely claimed it's a common insult from South Africa
- in a private email called him a "child rapist" and made up allegations of a 12 yo bride
- hired a PI to dig up dirt on him (which failed to corroborate any of his allegations)
Western society really needs to destigmatize discussion of mental illness, including diagnosing public personalities based on their behavior. Give them an opportunity to defend themselves, sure, but at some point, they become a danger to others (usually not to themselves) and should be required to seek treatment or be committed to a mental institution.
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I mean, this has been going on for years at this point (for instance see https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-...). At some point you have to stop extending the benefit of the doubt.
does the reason matter? regardless of whether it is a mistake or or censorship, the end result is the same.
The reason absolutely matter : a mistake can happen to anyone, and be fixed within a short time, while censorship is deliberate and will probably not be fixed
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Do people in the US still use X? If yes, why? What keeps you on the platform (so the owner is a tiny step closer to destroying your own country)?
Same as every social platform, the network effect. The actual functionality really is secondary to the usage and culture of these. Very much affecting it, yes, but still secondary at the same time. Same with multiplayer games, hangout spots or third places, and the list goes on.
There are many circles where xitter is a default platform. For example, many anime-style nsfw artists publish there as a primary outlet, and many companies publish their most instant news there (like a service outage, change in the opening hours, things like that). That and many other such things are plenty to keep people there.
Stopped using X when Elon took over, and then finally deleted my account (which I had had for many years, was an early adopter of Twitter before it was highly popular) when Elon went full MAGA-nazi. No regrets.
Even the European Union still has X as their primary platform: https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en
OP meant people though, not organizations, which I assume are not that easy to migrate.
In the end it's a void question though. users will flock to where opinions resonate with theirs.
> If yes, why?
Some people are smart, insightful, and for some reason insist on only posting on X. I don't see the harm in continuing to follow them, even if I do wish they'd choose a different site to post on
(I expect a lot of people also have less techie friends and family that only post on a single social media site - I've had accounts all over the place trying to keep track of some old friends)
I guess those smart, insightful people are staying on X because
- their targeting audience are on X
- they are rich and do not really care what the platform owner does
- they will be very happy to join the owner when offered such opportunities
For people who are the target audience of those people, I guess
- they voted for this, and they are happily watching the federal gov falling apart
- they convinced themselves that X is the place to grow / learn from smart and insightful people (I don't think one has to be on it for more than 10 min a day to grow & learn, unless one is a crypto trader)
- they convinced themselves that it is really nothing political about using X
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Ironically, it's still the best platform in terms of reach for countering the propaganda of Elon and those like him.
It’s propped up by media companies, who have become addicted to the quick quote that a tweet provides. Any topic distilled down into 140 characters is always going to have multiple ways to interpret it, thus feeding the click bait pipeline with sufficient reactionary data.
It is a monument in the race to the bottom of “digestible/summarized content”.
I use it because it's one of a few platforms that's not censored to hell. Sure, it results in some unpleasant crap sometimes, but generally the feed is good.
Garbage platform run by garbage people.
its the only social media platform that isn't image and video heavy, can consistently have non-bot and non-fake and non-clickbait material of substance (if you curate who you you follow well), provides awesome filtering options out of the box for stuff like keywords (i literally had to make a browser extension to filter reddit crap out better), and has a lot of interesting people posting entertaining non-image stuff
caveat: i completely stay off anything political, i filter the absolute hell out of anything political, i block people constantly
i don't care that elon owns it because i don't buy into the outrageous hyperbole of him literally being the next hitler. i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible, and he accomplishes a lot of cool shit despite the bullshit.
not interested in debating people wanting to scream about elon and wont respond to comments about him, im just offering my unfiltered opinion about why I use X
> i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible
I don't disagree with you. But the big problem -- and the reason why people like me are so upset -- is that Elon is now in a much more powerful position than any of those other business leaders, a position in which he is directly impacting the lives of Americans whether they use his products or not. That's quite different than Bezos, Zuck, and all the rest. If he had stayed out of politics I wouldn't have much issue (I can choose not to use X, drive a Tesla, etc.)
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mind sharing your feed?
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> Do people in the US still use X? If yes, why?
Are you seriously asking that question? If so, I suggest looking at the nov election results. The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election).
I feel only MAGA are happy & comfortable staying on X, voting for trump != maga
hence the question
It's not just about Trump though. I jumped ship the second Musk pushed the change to increase the weight of tweets made by a paying account. Also the first thing he did when he took over was cut the entire a11y team. Then he login-walled Twitter and broke the API. Reddit communities went crazy when the Reddit team paywalled their own API.
There's an incredibly long list of reasons to ditch x beyond musk's political activity
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quite frankly, your argument is dishonest, whether intentionally or not. I do not trust anyone repeating online, and no one else should. Especially since its repeated verbatim every time it comes up, its clear that this is "the play" and propaganda.
> I suggest looking at the nov election results.
What should we be looking at exactly? How the curiously 100% flipped swing states voted? I agree, theres much to look at there.
> The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election
That is an outright lie.
No one knew Musk would be running amok dismantling government institutions like a rabid dog, while side stepping all government processes. Project 2025 had something like a 6% approval rating. What is being "implemented" right now is Project 2025.
The US is in a constitutional crisis, and the saving money is a farce to permanently disable the US as a functioning body.
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i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money
You think the US is bankrupting you by stealing your money? Specifically: USAID, FAA, Government Watchdog agencies, and whatever other group that has been dismantled by now? Those are the high priority agencies stealing our hard earned money?
Not the guys who all of a sudden have a 100 billion dollars since 2010?
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I’m reminded of this line from Stewart Lee, when talking about the disillusioned British working class voting for radical political parties/causes:
“A protest vote for UKIP is like shitting your hotel bed as a protest against bad service, then realising you now have to sleep in a shitted bed.”
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Do you expect that money will be worth very much after the entity that issues it is destroyed?
the people who ensure government is broken and stealing from you are now in charge. they recently requested $4.3 trillion in deficit spending for tax cuts and the dissolution of medicaid.
This aspect of America has always struck me as the most bizarre: the most vicious enemies of the American state are Americans.
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You voted for a $4T increase in deficit as a tax gift for billionaires, to save you money?
Please explain the logic.
Then federated governments with local currencies, or what?
I saw your comment and saw it getting downvoted or flagged but it is useful to have a discussion so that others similarly inclined can potentially learn something that they obviously don't already understand. I reproduce that comment here in case it somehow disappears.
>i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money
If you're concerned about the federal government bankrupting "us" by stealing our money then ask yourself why one of the first things that happened was the firing of OIG personnel. The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size. They have the power to audit any recipient of taxpayer monies and to work with US Attorney federal prosecutors to prosecute those who steal, waste, or otherwise violate plan guidelines in disbursing money. US Attorneys will not even take a case to trial unless agency auditors can document in detail that a crime has occurred and that crime fits within prosecutorial guidelines and a conviction is nearly guaranteed. To take a case that has any weaknesses risks wasting public money prosecuting a case you might not win. The whole point is to make sure you have the evidence that forces the defendant to either make restitution or to spend some time in a federal lock-up.
It's suspicious to me that the first thing they do is fire all the people who not only can watch, but who have the Congressional mandate to seek out waste, fraud, and abuse of federal programs that disburse money to individuals, small businesses, cities and other non-federal entities, non-profits, and corporations.
Though I am not a doctor, I do think that you should seriously work on your mental health. Start by changing your diet to include less kool-aid as the sugar high you're on can cause metabolic changes that lead to seriously bad health outcomes.
My spouse has spent a career in a federal department working to insure that the money Congress allocates to specific programs ends up being spent for purposes that are allowed under the guidelines of those federal programs. If you think the federal government is the one stealing your money you are sadly mistaken.
Federal programs are full of fraud but the fraud occurs at the recipient end, not within the department.
If you or anyone else are so concerned about where your tax money goes then the last agency entity that you would eliminate would be the one charged with insuring that all the monies in all the programs administered by the agency are disbursed lawfully according to plan guidelines which were approved by Congress. These people, as part of their job, have to read and internalize all the nuances, conflicts with existing programs, and contradictions in all the programs that they serve as watchdog over and it is their skills that allow federal prosecutors to take fraud cases to trial and to convict those who have abused federal programs for personal gain.
You voted for someone who has a documented history of fraudulent use of federal money who made it a point in both of his administrations to remove the specific persons and agencies that would guarantee oversight so that they can do anything without worrying about accountability. Internalize that.
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= Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face
This make me curious about exactly what "signal.me" links were all about. The details appear to be available here:
* https://signal.miraheze.org/wiki/Signal.me_URLs
* https://signal.miraheze.org/wiki/Usernames#Username_links
Signal.me links are just a way to easily send either a phone number or user name to someone else. No cryptographic identity. No protection of the phone number or user name. So to get around the ban a Signal user could simply send their phone number or user name over Twitter/X.
It seems that the encrypted username form does provide some identity protection in that it can be cancelled, but for as long as it is active it appears that someone can just ask the Signal server what the associated user name is.
The people involved probably should not be using Twitter/X for this sort of thing in the first place. Mastodon comes to mind as an alternative, but really, anything else.
signal.me links are used to join (and advertise) Signal groups
No. Signal groups are advertised with signal.group URLs.
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OK, I couldn't find any specific documentation just floating around about group links. It appears that the base64 value is specific to the group and is only exposed through the link. I didn't see any way to munge the "signal.me" domain and fix it again. So for groups Twitter/X seems to have won.
> The people involved probably should not be using Twitter/X for this sort of thing in the first place.
Usernames don't necessarily link someone with their real identity, and phone numbers can be hidden.
This isn't the weirdest apology I've ever heard for the behavior of Elon Musk and X's censorship policies, but it's definitely in the top 5.
Phone numbers and usernames are sent in the clear in signal.me links. So in this particular case, they can't be hidden. Perhaps it is not a good idea to post such links on a hostile system.
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Particularly ironic given that DOGE is reported to be using Signal as its comms platform. [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873
That's interesting, given that as an official government department they're subject to FOIA requests and as such have an obligation to persist their documentation.
They declared that the DOGE stuff is official presidential records and thus not subject to FOIA.
https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-doge-records-public-inf...
Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the right one: they're fascists and the rules are not applicable to them.
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If you think they're going to follow FOIA law I have a bridge to sell you.
* Unless you're secretary of state.
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Elon personally uses Signal, I would assume this is a legitimate mistake which will be fixed soon if it hasn't already
I can’t edit the original comment but it looks like sharing signal links is back, but some now have a spam warning. https://x.com/jeremiahdjohns/status/1891554583756845526?s=46
Pretty sure it's because literally all the signal.me links are the same when you remove the part after the #.
When you perform an HTTP(S) request you never provide the part after the # in the request URL, it's only interpreted by the web browser itself. It's likely that their antispam thing does the same and ignores the hash altogether.
————
Example of link (blocked): https://signal.me/#eu/P01wpUmC4nT2BBTwMrPAw7Nxcp81055tKHGbYw...
Without the hash (blocked): https://signal.me/
There is no blocking if you add any letters in the path (e.g. “abc”): https://signal.me/abc#eu/P01wpUmC4nT2BBTwMrPAw7Nxcp81055tKHG...
I had some time in the morning so built a simple site to share Signal links on X:
https://link-in-a-box.vercel.app
If you think someone might benefit from it, please share. Also, spam if you have feedback!
This comment keeps going up and then getting downvoted -- if you have time to leave some feedback - I'd appreciate it.
People already started using this thing, so if there's an issue with it, I'd like to respond/apply fixes if needed.
On a similar note: the Swedish armed forces just came out and recommended that people working for the military should use signal for their calls and messages for things that are not classified in any of the higher classifications.
https://cornucopia.se/2025/02/forsvarsmakten-infor-krav-pa-s... (Swedish)
Free speech for thee but not for me.
Some free speech is more free than some free speech. /s
This free speech absolutism thing is brutal.
I was curious because over here, the ownership of signal.me is pretty much obscured (behind Cloudflare and WHOIS privacy). Doing this for infrastructure domains is not a good idea because it encourages persistent overblocking because it makes manual review more difficult. At least there is official documentation mentioning signal.me: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320291-Fi...
(The page is in the Bing index, but it seems "signal.me" is treated as a stop word by the search engine.)
And Vance is lecturing the EU about free speech. The EU might be very happy with blocking encrypted services, just as Musk is.
Nobody is required to use X. False dichotomy
The US is playing with fire. Most of Wall Street's valuation is at stake.
That is the point, crash the economy and pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar.
Tariff the world, devalue the dollar
Wallstreet is a tumor, but the scope of this biopsy seems to be all wrong.
And few days ago JD Vance went to Munich to say to EU leaders that they "there is a problem of freedom of speech in Europe"...
There obviously are problems with freedom of speech in Europe.
Everyone knows it.
Tell me more. I live here and have never encountered a situation where I was not allowed to express my opinions in a systematic way. So I don't know but would be delighted to
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The US ranks #55 in press freedom, all positions in the top 10 are EU countries.
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Shoshana Zuboff was so right it is scary. The name ('Surveillance Capitalism') put me on the wrong foot as I already knew about the surveillance part. But what I found most scary was the part where the tech companies turned from surveillance to influence. Once you have these billions of people using only your platform to view the world, it is trivial alter their view of the world. And thereby changing policital currents, policies, opinions.... anything.
It is like the Bible before Martin Luther translated it into German, and all christians just had to accept blindly that whatever the priests said was written in the bible actually was. Most humans now have so little input other than whatever priests they follow we might as well be back in the dark ages.
The dark ages is the plan according to Curtis Yarvin, their “prophet”.
A network of techno-feudal states run by a joint-stock corporation headed by a CEO with absolute power. Like Hunger Games, fancy dress, bad tans, and all.
It’s really lame and shortsighted. Never mind philosophically broken.
When will they start to block wikipedia links?
Ironically, three years ago, Musk encouraged the use of Signal and tweeted: "Use Signal", https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153
Edit:
In my opinion, Elon Musk initially endorsed Signal because of its strong encryption, security, and commitment to privacy. Now, he's blocking it for those very same reasons—what a blatant double standard!
On a related note, one of the key advantages of the modern internet—and more specifically, social media—is that everything you say publicly is archived. This means that if you ever do a complete 180° on your claims or principles, it can easily come back to haunt you. So, it's always wise to be mindful of what you say and stay true to your values.
He may use Signal, but he does not want people on X to advertise their presence on any competing platforms. It is a childish and protectionist policy, and in no way align with his Free Speech® claims.
It was the same when URLs to Mastodon/Fediverse instances was banned on X, in an attempt to hamper the network effect for those who migrated. Meta does the same with Pixelfed these days, to hamper migration away from Instagram.
Elon and Mark are all for competition and free markets, but as soon as alternatives that can't be bought and controlled pops up, they outright ban any mention of it on their platforms.
It's probably just a spam filter going awry.
Signal links are odd, in that all the identifies are after the #, so to a spam filter this just looks like a single url, https://signal.me , being sent out in mass.
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Don't the DOGE dweebs use Signal?
Though I think they were forced to stop.
On X, only the "Signal.me" links are blocked. Other types of Signal links, such as call links, group invite links, Signal.org links, and link previews, are not blocked on the platform. [From Mistral]
what does „from mistral“ mean in your comment?
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Remember the promises they made about Web 2.0 (interoperability, APIs, etc.)?
The stripped those promises from us, tried to flog memecoins to steal from us and now pushing AI garbage onto us.
Signal group chat links still work as do signal.org links. It's only signal.me links that are blocked.
So much for Elons "Free Speech"!
This may come as a shock to him: Free Speech means to allow people to say something that he disagree with. Something that may hurt his interests or even his ego. Free speech is not to allow people to say things he agree with or don't care about.
There never was any demand for free speech from him. He just wanted to advance his fascist agenda and used whatever means he had at his disposal.
While you’re correct as to his intentions, it’s still important to point out his hypocrisy as he called himself “a free speech absolutist,” and claimed to want Twitter to be part of that vision. He explicitly called left wing and right wing views as things he wants.
Yes, we know it was all lies but not putting out the evidence allows people like Musk and his acolytes to make it the new truth without a fight.
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He belongs to these people that misunderstood freedom of opinion to mean that nobody gets to criticize their opinion.
No, he did not misunderstand. This is 100% malice.
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Go make a brand new Twitter account and check how "free" speech is.
Immediately you get one very specific "sect" of free speech.
What makes you say that? I've started using X recently and I would argue it's pretty free, you see a lot more range of opinions than on a site like reddit. Aggressively pro-trans posts come across my feed all the time, including some right-wing content
“Free speech” disappeared almost immediately after the Twitter purchase. Along with all of Musks supporters changing from “we need free speech”, to “Musk owns the platform, he can do what he wants.”
Pre-Musk Twitter was more about free speech, except it was trying to fight bots, hate speech and disinformation.
The biggest problem with the term "Free Speech" is that almost everyone makes exceptions for things that they believe should be restricted/censored.
Therefore the only standard should be the legality of that speech in a particular country. In the US those things you put as exemptions are permitted. So pre-musk Twitter wasn't about free-speech as those exemptions are restrictions on speech that are greater than US law restricts (which isn't much tbh).
Generally you have a trade off on any of these platforms between what you can say without breaking terms of service and the popularity of that platform. Generally less popular platforms are less restrictive.
If you don't want your speech restricted, you should probably just go back to hosting your blog and using a mailing list.
I would argue it appeared after the Twitter purchase. Originally Twitter had been dying through excessive bans, now you can find major political influencers on both sides of the spectrum
> about free speech, except it was trying to fight bots, hate speech
> about free speech
> fight hate speech
Do you realize how absurd you sound?
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It certainly does not come as a shock to him. He knows what he is doing.
The funny thing is if he was Russian he would be called an "oligarch" in every news piece. Since he's American he's an entrepreneur :)
Also how liberals were celebrating Elons "genius" just a decade ago will never not be funny to me, they also don't seem to mind Gates at all. I don't think they have much of a problem with oligarchy, they just want a liberal oligarchy instead.
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Not a surprise to him, he doesn't care.
It's a mistake to treat people with mental disorders as having an internally consistent view of the world. Or as actually believing what they say.
They are paperclip optimizers, this one optimizing for worship and power. In other words he has the antagonistic and communal subtypes: https://www.verywellhealth.com/narcissistic-personality-diso...
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No see all speech is free but some speech is more free than others.
/s
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> You can still say anything you like on X
You cannot even say the word "cisgender" on X.
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You can't criticize Elon on X...
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Except that Musk claims to be a "free speech absolutist", and part of the noise he made around buying Twitter was to stop censorship.
Not that it's news that he's a hypocrite.
When has Signal called for a violent overthrow of the US government?
Good of you to admit that Musk is as bad as what you hated in the past.
I would even argue he's worse.
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> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform.
Correct. It still makes him a liar, given what he claimed before the purchase to have meant:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/06/elon-musk...
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
Plus this pair:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/musk-threatens-to-sue-adl-for-...
vs.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/tesla-boss-elon-m...
Stop carrying water for the world’s richest person. Musk has claimed multiple times he’s a free speech absolutist and bought Twitter to make it the free speech platform.
I agree, it’s his platform and he can do what he wants within the law. But, how you or anyone else can continue to defend Musk when he has made clear multiple times he’s a lying hypocrite is beyond my understanding.
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> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform
This is complicated massively by Elon's role at DOGE.
Twitter has the right to block whomever they want (and always did). But given "multiple federal workers...said they’ve moved sensitive conversations from text messages and Facebook Messenger to the encrypted messaging app Signal" [1], it's unclear whether this is a private or public action.
(Folks in this thread are complaining about Musk's hypocrisy in criticizing pre-Muskian Twitter for blocking accounts and content when he's doing the same thing. But again, that is eclipsed in importance by the corruption and abuse of power questions.)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/610951/federal-workers-privacy...
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You're equivocating. Elon didn't just say that he believed in free speech, he said that Twitter would be a platform for free speech.
People know this. This isn't confusing. The hypocracy being pointed out is when Elon Musk says that he is a free speech absolutist[1], yet consistently blocks his critics and competitors.
This is ignoring his very confused notion of what free speech is[2]
> By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
> I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
> If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Not only is this inconsistent with his 'free speech absolutist' views, and inconsistent with Twitter's actions, but it states that he's actually all for the government censoring people. That's not even non-absolutist free speech.
[1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600
[2]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
Nobody has an issue with this stance. It is that before he was the owner and as part of his argument for becoming owner, Elon had a different stance.
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> If I own a platform I’m not under any obligation to allow you to say whatever you like on that platform.
Before the Internet this was not the case. In Marsh v. Alabama, it was ruled (in line with all previous precedent) that privately owned roadways and sidewalks had to allow religious pamphleters, even though it is private property. The court asserted that anywhere that is the forum for public discussion is de facto allowed for political and religious speech regardless of property rights. In the very early days of the Internet things changed, when people tried to assert First Amendment claims on Compuserve chats. Compuserve claimed they weren't the public square, that they were a private service. I think they were correct, in that Compuserve was a very marginal private space and couldn't possibly have been "the public square". But precedent over this tiny service were eventually laundered into much larger and more critical bits of social infrastructure.
In contrast to Compuserve, Twitter and Facebook are definitely the public square. You cannot petition for a redress of grievances or lobby for policy changes without using them. And the political left delights in suppressing their opponents on them but files lawsuits claiming their rights are infringed when they aren't given access to every inch -- such as when they sued Trump for blocking them on his Twitter account:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-dismisses-trump-t...
When Democrats were barred from interacting even with a very small part of a platform, it is a critical First Amendment violation. When conservatives, racists, sexists, or whatever term you want to use are barred, well, it's a private company bigot.
This hypocrisy must quickly end, or we as a country will end up in a violent conflict. There must be open, public debate on every major platform, and Americans must be entitled to express their opinions because the only other alternative is violence.
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That must be the free speech some american politicians are lecturing the world about...
This is what happens when a society allows narcissists in positions of power. It's a disease and when they refuse to seek treatment, it should make them ineligible for any leadership position, in both the private and public sector.
Nobody (sane) would allow a psychotic individual to run for president or become a CEO. This is the same thing, except they are less of a danger to themselves and more to others.
And of course they're able to craft more convincing lies. Mr. Musk never cared about free speech, only about being worshipped and the best way to achieve that is to say what people want to hear.
I legit thought the desktop signal app had some bug on X11 and not wayland.
Can this be titled clearly?
Looking at the thread here.
Trust in society is being eradicated and that's how authoritarian regimes win.
Great video to understand what's going on: https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0?si=1LP6QsbFgIvpfIay
It's sad
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You’re reading too much into it. Stop thinking he’s playing 5D chess, he’s not even playing regular checkers. It’s well known he bought Twitter because he thought he would be forced to, he clearly tried to actively back out of the purchase.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...
Good point, and I strongly hold if you can explain something by incompetence, it's profoundly more likely to be true than cunning.
OTOH, I recall Elon's comment about "vote Dem in House and GOP in Senate, divided is better", something like that. Given his position as Donald's right hand man, that comment takes on new meaning.
The parent post is by and large correct, except for the right-hand man of Donald Trump stuff. Musk was indeed trying to buy influence, which is definitely not a "5D chess move" but simply common sense for extremely wealthy people if they can get away with it. He also wanted to ensure that he is always the center of attention and intended to use twitter as the marketing arm for his brand. He only wanted to back out once US and global economic indicators started going south and made his offer look ridiculously overpriced, and also made himself look like a sucker. And Musk does not like being the sucker. But his wanting to back out later doesn't cancel out his initial intentions. And once he was forced to buy it, he started playing high stakes poker and managed to turn it into a great investment for him personally by the end of 2024, becoming one of the most powerful men in the world in addition to being the richest. How long it will last might depend on how many consecutive presidential terms the Republicans can hold on to.
The righthand man for Trump stuff was never the intention initially. Musk went gaga for Trump rather late, he was a DeSantis supporter after all, with DeSantis launching his terrible presidential bid on Elon's twitter.
He tried to weasel out of the purchase, until it was obvious he would lose the court battle.
>both times was asked to complete ten captchas, about five minutes of pure captcha work
If you were using a VPN, this might have been why.
Direct connection, nothing special or fancy.
All that free speech is a bit too much for dear Elon apparently.
Instagram blocked telegram 8 years ago and nobody complained, the ban in still in place as far i know; trying to block the competition is fairly common, unfortunately
Well, Instagram never claimed to be a free speech network. Also Instagram is covered with content that sexually exploits children, and Telegram links to CSAM were pretty common.
Given that Telegram has very publicly failed at that kind of moderation, it is pretty defensible to block it. If only they would do something about the weirdo Instagram mommies that flood the network with pictures of their preteen daughters in swimsuit and leotards... It's gross what some people do for anything resembling Internet clout.
Free speech absolutists, am I right?
It would really cut down on spam/scams if they also blocked links to Instagram, telegram, and the onlyfans redirect sites...
So the Public Town Square with Freedom of Speech has become the most censored, and private social network out there?
Signal could start doing some posts praising Musk and promoting Tesla or whatever scam he’s pushing at the given moment, that would unblock them really fast.
Pre-Musk Twitter was indeed bad, a sign of it’s time and dying. Now it’s even worse and quite pathetic.
I think it is critical to not forget the context of russian aligned bots getting free reign on Twitter, they are not being blocked, and Musk is keeping close ties to Putin.
I think there should be a pinned post about Elon Musk at the top of HN and all posts and comments about Elon Musk should go there.
Can it be at the bottom instead?
If it's at the bottom, people will keep submitting more Elon Musk news.
This is incredibly stupid if true
do we know why?
is X susceptible to DDOS?
This comment section has turned into something of a circle, it's cool to be mad nd all, but there was a comment expressing doubt at the details, wonder about a reason other than those stated, and asking if anyone independently verified, as I clicked it the comment was flagged to oblivion. No opportunity to engage with that viewpoint.
HN is always a mess when the subject contains Musk, Trump, Google, browsers or social media platforms in general.
I don't mind the slight political aspects of things, but reading a ton of hate and "I already deleted X" (pun intended) and "Just use Y other platform" (that no normal user can figure out) comments is just uninteresting and should stay on Reddit or wherever these nonproductive comments fit into.
I'd love to hear more about this case, the technical aspects and the follow-ups/investigations. Let's focus on that, no? Maybe it's just me.
You get to moderate up or down. Otherwise people say what they want.
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Do all these commenters believe this nonsense? The conspiracy thinking has reached new peaks. Hard to take concerns of free speech seriously from people promoting platforms that routinely “moderate” any dissenting opinions (HN included).
Our ability for collective sense making seems to be permanently destroyed. Two people who seem to agree on everything point-by-point then reach different conclusions on the final step. Its bewildering.
up/down vote is the laziest form of moderation. you get what you pay for.
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How do you mean do we "believe this nonsense"? I don't use twitter regularly, but I have two accounts for reasons. I just signed in, I typed out a (fake) signal URL, and... posting was blocked.
It doesn't appear to be nonsense, it appears to be entirely true that any tweet with "signal.me" in it is blocked.
Occam's razor says they're blocking Signal. Hanlon's razor says they're just idiots. Either way: An important tool for communication is being blocked by twitter, which is both dangerous and not "nonsense".
Given Elon Musk's current propensity for authoritarianism and censorship, I'm leaning towards Occam's explanation. If you have evidence otherwise, I would genuinely like to see it, but honestly Hanlon's explanation that it's incompetence is not much better.
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Apparently the 150 year old Social Security recipients were due to a COBOL quirk where the zero datetime is 1875. Interesting, but not fraud.
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Everything political gets downvoted, from either side, but you're going to need better evidence than Musk and rumors for this fraud.
(There probably is some fraud! There is in any large money handling system! Japan had a problem with elderly people claiming pensions after they'd died, for example. It's just that you need a better standard of evidence before cutting off money that people are legally entitled to, because otherwise the fraud detection process is going to have false positives.)
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There are certain topics that you can't discuss on Hacker News reasonably and social media is one of them.
Politics in general. Because everyone has an opinion, often based on their values rather than cold facts, and people do not like their values being questioned. The discussion is more civil than on other forums, but the difference is not night and day. Disappointing.
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Everyone reading this -- sign up for Bluesky, help it build up a larger network effect, so it can outcompete X. It already has 30m users.
The secret to happiness is not to leave X and join Bluesky, but simply to leave X.
These platforms are massively net-negative for the vast majority of people.
Go outside!
Who owns bsky? What prevents a random billionaire to buy it and use it their election platform? Mastodon just feels as a safer bet...
Bluesky is owned by cryptocurrency grifters. It's disheartening to see people flock to it like it's the greener pasture.
At best it's less toxic, but only marginally. They implemented even more dunk mechanisms that X has, so it's primed to be a terrible place long-term.
User-owned, federated social media is absolutely the safest bet if you want low toxicity and freedom from corporate control.
bsky is decentralized, in theory more so than Mastodon, which is federated (a variant of decentralization that requires you to trust the server admins of a server of your choice)
"In theory", because so far, there are very few nodes (one?), very few (if any?) alternative implementations, most is controlled and operated by a small team paid for by a.o. Jack Dorsey and other funds. Mastodon (using the ActivityPub protocol) has one main repo, managed by one person under a non-profit that also operates the biggest instance. But also has dozens of other implementations in other languages, with other niches, with more, less, other features and so on.
So, "best bet" would probably be to:
- Sign up at both a Mastodon and Bsky. Try them both for while.
- See which one fits your needs, style and practical needs best. Stick with that one.
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I have and deactivated my account a day or two in -- that un-removable message up top that it will use your posts, likes, etc to train their models unsettled me. At least they were upfront about it, unlike Twitter/X.
I also didn't like that I had 30 different followers the moment I signed up.
Bsky doesn't train AIs using your data. They're warning you that your data may be scraped and used as such by third parties.
Do they believe free in free speech, or will I also be banned/blocked from saying things there?
>>Do they believe free in free speech
No they don't, blue-sky belongs to the former twitter owner, aka THE BUBBLE ;)
BTW: He was not welcomed at FOSDEM because he is billionaire, when a movement eats itself ;)
https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares...
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bsky still lacks basic security features like 2FA (beyond an email code) (andOAuth implementation), which puts me off from actively using it...
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech?
I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
"Freedom of speech" on Twitter is nothing more than Newspeak for censorship. In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves, while allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant. It is a form of indirect censorship, through the self-censorship of minorities who fear speaking out. Then comes direct censorship, where certain terms or links are banned.
> allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant
Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?
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Aren't racists a minority who struggle to express themselves?
How did you come to these conclusions about the goals and future of Twitter? My naive expectation was that Musk is mostly interested in enriching and aggrandizing himself, and that a crusade against some social group is only interesting as long as it serves the primary interests.
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Name it X because old Twitter is dead.
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Just because some people use "freedom of speech" as a veil, doesn't make it bad.
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Prior to Musk's purchase of Twitter, feminists who expressed the view that women and girls need single-sex spaces, and that males who identify as women aren't actually women and therefore shouldn't be allowed in these spaces, would be banned from the platform under the guise of "transphobia".
They were literally being silenced for expressing their criticism of the ideology of gender identity and how it is being used to disadvantage and oppress women and girls.
On X, however, they are free to state this without fear of censorship, due to the broadening of permissible speech on the platform. So while it might not be the "free speech absolutism" that Musk disingenuously claims, it's an improvement to the pre-Musk era of censorship.
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Freedom of speech, at least in the US, is a concern specifically with the government censoring citizens' speech. The Twitter files are a recent example of the government partnering with private corps to censor, so that's a fair argument, but in general a private company can't violate free speech by deciding what kind of content they want allowed.
Is it shitty that they censor? Absolutely. But is it a constitutional violation? Not unless I've horribly misunderstood my rights for more than 35 years.
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> In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves
This particular clause seens very unlikely. One could want an increase in racism and homophobia on a platform without specifically wanting there to be less black people (for example) speaking out. That the -isms cause said people to speak up less would likely be a (pleasant?) side effect rather than the primary goal.
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> I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
It took 6 weeks for that milk to rot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...
X/Twitter should publicly provide a suspension reason - that would help a lot in verifying whether the account did/did not break TOS.
A justification [0] of sorts is provided for the journalist suspensions:
> Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...
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A couple of journalists broke Twitters rule on doxxing, and were briefly suspended.
Wikipedia cops a lot of criticism for being politically biased. The fact it has a whole article around this seems to support that.
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> I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this,
They won't. They will say they're the champion of free speech, and that'll be enough for the fan base.
"Free speech" on a centralized platform always seems fishy. One can't expect it from Elon at least. He always has extreme/polar thoughts on various subjects.
If they were actual gaslights, self-powered gaslighting would solve the world's energy issues.
>Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors?
The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes; just increased geopolitical instability. Twitter has always been a social media platform, and definitionally it has therefore always increased extremism and populism. I find it incredibly disheartening that people think Twitter has only become a malevolent force under Musk. Musk's changes to the platform are certainly unsettling, but Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone.
> The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes
Tunisia is now arguably better off, but even beyond that: the longterm effects of such things aren't always immediately apparent. The French Revolution led to terror, then to an Empire and devastating wars and finally back to the old monarchy, but it cast a very long shadow on the 19th century and beyond.
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The point is that social media was used by people to connect and organise which led to the overthrow of a number of dictators/military junta.
What has happened since is the old order has mostly reasserted itself - with a clamp down on social media, and mechanisms put in place to cut access if things get too fiesty.
Take Egypt - they kicked out a miltary juntu - forced elections - then the 'wrong' people won the elections and the military took over again, clamped down on the media and are in still in place today ( president has been in power for 10+ years with no signs of stepping down ) - and they are so representative of the people that the US think they might be able to persuade the Egyptian leader to take part in ethnic cleansing of it's neighbour.
Whether that's a good thing depends on whether you think people like el-Sisi know what's best for their country, whether the people agree or not.
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At least at the time, we thought it could be a tool for populist uprisings in authoritarian countries. Now it seems like they just want to promote populist uprisings in democratic countries.
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Twitter was a net positive for many. Millions of people around the world relied on it for timely news and updates in the absence of other avenues. This was particularly pertinent in places like Africa where state infrastructure wasn't able to provide or indeed, the middle east, where censorship prevented accurate news being disseminated.
So your assertion that "Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone" is not only false but an absurdly biased and frankly wrong view on how the world accesses information.
Also, the Arab spring overthrew several decades-long brutal dictatorships. Given that overthrowing The Taliban (lol) and Saddam is hailed as a positive of the trillions of dollars and millions of lives spent on the GWOT, at least give the people of the Middle East the courtesy of acknowledging the overthrow of Ben Ali, Assad, Mubarak and Gaddafi.
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If your sycophants eat everything you'll throw at them there won't be any need for justification. Which completely baffles me. The US digital technology sector seems to be full of yes man and groupthink, and it's getting worse.
I think some people are so motivated by "hate" (for lack of a better word) they they pretty much would shoot their foot off with a sawed-off if someone told them it would "own the libs". It's like you say: there is not even need of justification, Musk is "our guy" and that's that.
There is plenty of criticism of Elon Musk coming coming from both sides of the political spectrum. I am consider myself right of centre and I hear plenty of criticisms of Elon Musk coming from the right. The complaints are completely different though.
The big problem with any of these discussions (especially online) is that a lot of people are intellectually lazy and assume the other-side is comprised of brain dead zealots who only support the most extreme positions.
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You can also ignore any justification X gives, all the statements coming from Musk and the other tech companies and the government are untrustworthy or deceptive. But people are still hopeful in that Musk saying "free speech" actually gives them any reasing to keep using Twitter.
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They won't. They'll lie, some will buy it up and they'll cary on. This behaviour is completely consistent with what they've been doing since purchase. Why start now?
They haven't had proper PR since the end of 2023. They don't respond, if it blows up you might get an one-liner Elon tweet.
If you capture a high enough proportion of the attention bandwidth, you cease having to answer questions or be accountable. It's quite scary how powerful this is.
There is so much censorship going on on Twitter through the use of dark patterns, that it's embarrassing to claim it to be something like a fortress of free speech.
Let alone the fact that you need to have a subscription in order to obtain a "somewhat fair" exposure. It's ridiculous.
FYI I had some time in the morning so built a simple site to share Signal links on X:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43078736
No one is a free specch absolutist; those who say use it as a cover to not clearly state their values and what they stand for.
Nah I think the ship has sailed on lip service. He is/was all about defending the "right" kind of free speech, anyway.
They don't have to pretend anymore. The man saluted at an inauguration, I think all pretense has left the building.
Absolutely no one should be surprised anymore. It was all a projection.
when a 'leader' takes away your rights he will claim its to protect you.
Maybe it was a mistake?
Twitter appears to make a lot of mistakes of this sort. Tsk. Very careless.
I mean, who knows, they may claim that; I believe they did after the period where they banned people for using the dread word 'mastodon': https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-...
But c'mon, now, if you believe that you'll believe anything.
I mean, I think at this point everyone knows that, in this context, 'free speech' should be read as 'speech that Musk likes'.
(This is the case for most people who go on about 'free speech' a lot, really.)
Look up “leggi fascistissime”. It’s appalling how people don’t see the obvious playbook that’s unfolding here, down to the claims of “defending democracy”
Most people are living automatons who find excuses in being too busy, too scared or too confident in believing "that's history, it can never happen again, we're living in a modern world" to notice things unfolding around, which is exactly what brought fascism to life back then.
> [...] Twitter [...]
X is not Twitter.
Twitter was a tool for free speech. X is a tool for Nazi propaganda.
I think people still haven't come to terms with that.
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> Remember how he exposed government meddling with twitter and everyone called it nothing burger.
Please provide actual evidence of said government meddling with Twitter.
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It was a nothing burger because Twitter didn't blindly do everything they were asked to do, they rejected a bunch of the government requests. It's not weird for law enforcement to notify a platform of something suspicious they found on the platform.
The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.
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That's because it was a nothingburger.
Remember how Taibbi got an agency name wrong and used that to make a bunch of conjectures that didn't actually align to reality?
If you don't, maybe you should refresh your memory.
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> Security researchers at Mysk first noticed the issue on Sunday night, Feb. 16. They reached out to me via DM and we were able to confirm the various different ways (DM, post, profile bio, etc.) that X was blocking “Signal.me” links.
From the article, no they can't.
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> Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors?
That was a pure US State Department/the Blob move, as soon as social media turned against them they were very quick into crying wolf and saying that said social media needs to be curtailed and protected against outside foreign influences.
I'm a mr. Calin Georgescu voter from Romania (you might have heard of him in VP Vance's recent speech held in Munich), so you can understand how come I view things this way.
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I blocked twitter embeds on all my forums today. I'm so done with him.
If you just need to get all the emotions off your chest, feel free to continue, If you want to know what's actually getting blocked see the discussion here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077124
Why link a comment in the same thread? What does this add?
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I don't want my news filtered by state actors before I read it.
At this point in time President Musk is the ultimate state actor.
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Twitter is the most compliant social media platform for government take downs. The number of government take downs actually sharply increased under the new leadership.
So why are you on a platform OWNED by a "state actor"?
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Elon Musk is a state actor. The biggest one in fact.
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“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” ― Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Elon's proclamation that he is fighting "them" (deep state/democrats/...) has turned around and he is the same now. He is the USAID-ish funding for his cause. The cause could be different but the tools are the same, albeit in different names.
People have only that much power we give to them. If everyone stops using Twitter/X, it is nothing. Nobody buys Teslas - it is nothing. The list goes on since his # in wealthy ranks defines his position. Just make it drop.
Xitter is the least of the issues considering his tie to China and Russia and the all-you-can-eat buffet happening right now in the US government.
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There really should be a bigger campaign for everyone to sell their Tesla shares. As you said, take away his money and he goes away.
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The scary part is that most US citizens seem to support Mump. I think Trump has never been that high in popularity, right?
> Nobody buys Teslas - it is nothing
The pussyfooting around this from some countries is genuinely surprising. Like, how are the Germans of all people confused about whether the oligarch courting their neo Nazis is a threat to their national security?
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Which platform provides the same network effect? Bsky? Mastodon?
I don't see the popular Twitter personalities there such as naval, balajis, paulg, etc. or folks from TOPT, etc.
The closest to what Twitter used to be is Bsky. The model isn't perfect and some of its features are still not quite there, but it has replaced my Twitter usage entirely. And they've managed the large user surge pretty well. I've seen some developers I follow who cross post getting more engagement on Bsky than X despite a lower follower count there.
Most of the people you mentioned wouldn't risk their money for something like moral values so they haven't left X. A large number of interesting, less self motivated people have migrated already.
> Which platform provides the same network effect?
None, obviously - every network is unique. However, that doesn't contradict the premise. If one accepts that continuing to use twitter makes one "part of the problem", a desire to read PG's tweets doesn't seem like a meaningful justification. In my view, the only justification is "I don't care how twitter operates" or "I think twitter's new mission is good".
I don't benefit from being plugged into any of that. Do you?
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I have no idea who those people are.
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I mean, I suppose it really depends on what you want out of a social network. Some combo of mastodon and bluesky is fine for me, but then I didn't follow any of those people in the first place.
If you want celeb VCs, then, yeah, you're probably stuck with Twitter. Most people don't, though.
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So? Who's using Twitter anyway?
At this point you're actively contributing to the death of free speech if you're still active on X in any way. There are no excuses to use it still if you have any sort of functional moral compass.
No, this is just mood affiliation.
Usually, posting on Twitter or quitting it has a very tiny, almost imperceptible effect on the larger world and it's certainly not something to get worked up about.
That's reversing the argument. I'm not saying quitting X is bad for X, I'm saying quitting X is good for you. Nobody's completely immune to whatever that sociological experiment is turning into and staying on X is likely to influence your ethics, morals and standards in an objectively negative way.
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No raindrop…
Some much people commenting about Elon Musk "free speech" declarations. There was never free speech on Twitter. Not before him, not after him.
Tags like #coup, #protest and so on will be next.
"cisgender" was banned a while ago already, probably one of many 'shadowbanned' terms that the king doesn't like.
The situation is insane
People, why are you still on X? It is a disinformation site. Move to Bluesky or Threads.
I think the only smaet business move for twitter right now is to ban all external links in posts, like Instagram and TikTok.
It was never much of a driver of traffic outside news and most news consumers that click have already left. And most news sources you'd want to click are behind paywalls The users that remain are more likely to watch Twitter videos and read those long-ass tweets, out of loyalty to Papa Elon.
Agreed. Most twitter posts I see anyway is stolen content without a single link to attribute it. Almost seems like posting a link to the source there is bad manners.
I guess they’ll be moving to BlueSky or Mastodon…
It's free speech, but only if Musk approves of it.
probably to ensure integrity. they need to fight fraud and abuse on a massive scale. nothing to see here
The logical explanation to me is that most of the Signal contacts shared tend to be for drugs or CSAM trading, so they went for the nuclear approach to make moderation easier.
Give me a break, open telegram, which is still in the clear for comrade musk and he publicly advocated for comrade durov and tell me how long it will take you to find anything from prostitution to weapons, drugs and human trafficking. It's all about punishing people who can question musk & co's authoritarian desires.
Feds can request info from Telegram. Additionally, Telegram has evolved past a simple messenger application. A massive amount of projects, most of them being crypto projects, use Telegram as their primary method of communication and announcements. It is also a very popular messenger in India and parts of Europe. They can block Signal because they can get away with it. If it means banning a bunch of CSAM traders and drug dealers, even if it includes a few users and privacy nerds, they're still winning in terms of easing up their moderation efforts without significant outcry. I believe this block will be lifted, even if Signal users a minority, they are a loud minority. This could have very well been a mistake.
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Is that true?
I’ve never used signal.
Telegram is overwhelmingly the app of choice for drug dealers with Whatsapp coming second, at least on a direct to customer level.
No clue about CSAM but I'd really doubt it considering it requires a phone number.
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Can’t really tell what most of you are complaining about. You can say anything on X (short of doxing and inciting violence and things that are against the law), you can follow or block anyone on X.
If they ban Signal links, a competitor platform, that’s a shame, but whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.
Seems like some people think a “free speech platform” would be some sort of moderated debating space where opinions you dislike are silenced on your behalf and the downstream political ramifications are things that you personally enjoy, or else it’s not free speech but “fascism” (lol).
> whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.
Except one of them allows Elon to read what you write, the other doesn't.
try saying "cisgender."
A quick search for the word shows numerous X posts using it in the last few hours.
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Somehow I don’t believe this, it is too much out of character, even if it fits so nicely with how we want to see Elon. Did anyone here actually confirm this? I never used Twitter nor X or id check myself.
It's entirely consistent with Musk's character I observed the last couple of years.
> it is too much out of character
But it's not the first time they banned links to other social media?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041985
sure, use the goog's to site-search twitter.com and signal.me, here's one: https://x.com/harris/status/1764683829455843464 and it says the malware after you click the obfuscated signal.me url
here is another: https://x.com/tomwarren
edit: the url's are still visible in the mouse-over text popup, and the obfuscated site-redirection url does have the url in the address bar - but only time will tell before those vanish
honestly, any site that visibly displays one url as a hyperlink (underlines ect) and links to another site is practicing in malware style link hijacking. stop using those sites
It is perfectly in character. It’s not the first time he blocked people or services he personally doesn’t like.
> it is too much out of character
I’m curious what you’re basing this on if you’ve never used X?
How could I understand Elon's character from using X? I get it from his biography, and other things I read about him.
it is very consistent of how Elon Musk has been behaving for the last 20 years.