Summary of the ElonJet story
It probably really is about doxxing
Musk’s “free-speech” Twitter 2.0 has suspended the @ElonJet account that tracks the location of Elon Musk’s private jet. I thought I’d write some notes.
All airplanes (legally) flying over the United States have transponders that broadcast their identity and location, using unencrypted radio signals known as “ADS-B”. For about $20, you can attach a dongle to your computer to receive these broadcasts in a roughly 100 mile radius around you. With some free software, you can automatically upload this in real time to tracking websites. Community websites tracking flights around the world using their transponders.
If you know the plane’s identifier (the thing printed in big letters on its side), you can track the plane live on these sites. We know N628TS is Elon Musk’s private jet, so we can look for it on sites like ADSBexchange.com. Some sites like FlightAware.com will remove such tracking at the request of an airplane owner, for privacy. Some won’t.
The picture below shows Elon flying down from San Francisco to appear on Dave Chappelle’s show, where he was famously booed.
Techies can easily write scripts (tiny programs) to scrape such websites like ADSBexchange and post the location to Twitter. This is exactly what a Jack Sweeney did as a teenager, creating the account @ElonJet and a website.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he promised not to censor the account:
Today, though, “free-speech” Twitter 2.0 suspended the @ElonJet account (then unsuspended for an hour, then re-suspended).
According to Musk, this wasn’t an arbitrary suspension of the account, but a change in the rules on “doxxing”. Doxxing now includes real-time updates of people’s physical location.
Apparently, this was due to an incident where a stalker went after his kid named “X AE A-XII”, though affectionately known as “lil X”. Presumably, Musk is somehow connecting this event with the ADS-B tracking from the previous day.
Is this doxxing? The answer is: yes, no, maybe.
Giving somebody’s location, address, work, etc. so that stalkers/harassers can find them is doxxing. This includes when that information is already public. Even if other people can easily google the information, or find it on a website, seeing people post your data is still threatening.
Maybe nobody cares about Elon Musk’s feelings, but people also like to track Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the U.S. House. Her home was recently broken into and her husband assaulted because a conspiracy-theorist wanted to attack her physically. On Jan6, insurrections were hunting for her in the Capitol.
There’s good reason to think that maybe providing real-time location info for celebrities isn’t a good idea. A consistent principle would need to apply to all celebrities, not just your favorites but also the ones you hate.
But on the other hand, it’s obvious we aren’t coming up with a neutral principle here. It’s just Musk working backwards. It’s a pretense that this would ever be the rule at Twitter if it weren’t Musk’s own jet involved.
Whether it fits the definition of “doxxing” is a different question than whether it violates the law. Elon is threatening legal action against Sweeney. An example is this California law that may or may not fit:
(a) Every person who, with intent to place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family, by means of an electronic communication device, and without consent of the other person, and for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment, by a third party, electronically distributes, publishes, e-mails, hyperlinks, or makes available for downloading, personal identifying information, including, but not limited to, a digital image of another person, or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person, which would be likely to incite or produce that unlawful action, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail, by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
Elon obviously believes the effect of the @ElonJet account is to cause harassment, but he’d have to prove that was Sweeney’s intent.
The lesson here is Musk’s capriciousness. He’s not forming principles about privacy and censorship. He’s instead just making them up as he goes along. He’s fitting the principles to the latest policy he wants, rather than fitting policy to principles. One moment it’s an important principle of free-speech, and another moment it isn’t, because yolo.