It’s wild that I was able to sit in a Twitter Spaces tonight and listen live as the platform’s owner attempted to defend his decision to suspend journalists from the platform for talking about an account that shared his jet’s publicly available travel acitivities.
It’s continually interesting to follow, in real time, the destruction of a social media platform for which there really is not yet a direct replacement or competitor.
We’re seeing Elon begin to block links to Mastodon instances, Instagram accounts, and potentially other platforms.
He’s trying hard to control what he bought.
The most ironic aspect of tonight’s events? He sat in a Twitter Spaces room where two (maybe more) of the accounts with which he was speaking were ones that he had suspended just hours before.
He can’t even adequately control and implement suspension across his platform’s features and tools. It begs the question of what else he isn’t doing, and what he’ll be unable to do next…
Update (12/16/2022, 8am CT):
As of this morning, Elon Musk has taken the whole of Spaces offline claiming a “legacy” error. He’s basically upset that he got called out with a valid line of questioning from journalists on his own platform about his own insane actions.
What’s interesting is how this pans out under EU’s new laws – the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act – which are supposed to combat these types of one-sided actions by platforms and promote transparency.
Update (12/17/2022, 11am CT):
Elon Musk ran a Twitter poll asking users whether or not he should “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time” with the options of “Now” or “in 7 days”. The final poll results revealed that 58.7% of respondents wanted accounts restored “now”, while 41.3% said “in seven days.”
It’s worth noting the inaccurately drafted poll question. People were quick to point out that sharing a flight tracking information, even if a personal jet, was simply sharing already publicly available data. Additionally, there’s the argument that Elon wasn’t always on the jet, so it didn’t rise to the level of being a “real-time” or “exact location” of Elon, or anyone else that may have similar tracking activity happening.