«My commitment to free speech even extends to not banning the account that follows my plane, even though that is a direct risk to personal safety.«. So said Elon Musk, on his Twitter account, just over a month ago, on November 7th. A forceful statement… questionable, but forceful, and with which he intended to make it clear that for him freedom of expression was an absolute and inalienable right, even when it could be above others, such as the right to one’s own security.
I say that his statement is questionable because, in reality, the only thing that Twitter account did was collect a type of information that is public and from which popular services such as FlightRadar24 and others feed. Aircraft, when in flight, permanently emit a signal with data about it (identifier, speed, altitude, etc.) and these data are collected by a vast network of antennas (both public and private), which allow carrying out carry out the monitoring of flights in real time.
And to make it even clearer how accessible it is, do you want to know where the data used in Elon Musk’s jet tracking account came from? Well, the ADB-S Exchange website. The information about the flights is only hidden in certain cases and specific geographies, mainly in those in which they are not friends, by God, of freedom of expression. In the rest of the world, as you can see with the multiple services of this type, you can and should know.
My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022
However, it seems that Elon Musk’s commitment to freedom of expression is a bit like the Guadiana, because of what appears and disappears. The difference is that the river does it for environmental and environmental reasons, while in the case of the new owner of Twitter, he seems to respond more to what seems right or wrong at all times. And I don’t know, tell me if I’m wrong, but a “commitment” that comes and goes based on convenience and/or personal mood is not a commitment, it’s more of a marketing campaign.
Just a few days ago, the creator of the Twitter account that tracked Elon Musk’s jet movements claimed that he had been privately informed that his account was suffering from a shadowbanIn other words, everything seemed to work fine for him, but in reality his messages were hidden from other users of the social network. And it might seem like an exaggeration, but given what happened today, it suddenly starts to seem a lot more likely.
Surely the justification of Musk and Twitter for this measure is its zero tolerance policy towards bots, No? Well, as an argument it sounds great… until we see data like the one SparkToro provides when auditing your account. Not to like bots at all, it seems that those who swell his legion of followers have not had as bad luck as the one who published the billionaire’s jet flights:
70.2%, seven out of ten followers. In other words, if the data provided by this online tool is completely accurate, of the 121.3 million supposed followers of Elon Musk on Twitter, “only” 36.9 million would be real. And yes, I have written only in quotes because close to 37 million is still a huge volume. But of course, it is striking that, in the fight against bots, the first account to fall was one that made it uncomfortable, and not the more than 84 million “suspicious” accounts according to said report that follow it.
Whoever wants to believe that the jet tracking account has fallen for being a bot account, believe it, it would be missing more. But to those who think it seems too much of a coincidence to be a simple coincidence, they (us, since I include myself in this group) favor the principle of parsimony or, as it is better known, Ockham’s razor. And of course, from the hand of him, an exercise in hypocrisy of those that serve to identify people more clearly.
“Free speech as long as it doesn’t bother me” is not free speech, no matter how hard one tries to twist arguments to try to justify it. And it seems that in those we are on Twitter, with the supposed champion of freedom of expression at the forefront. But hey, it’s Twitter, at least we have today’s responses to the November tweet, the one who is not consoled is because they don’t want to. Of course, the next time you consider reintroducing yourself as a defender of freedom of expression, you better remember what happened today … and shut your mouth.
