Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a response to someone who compared Saudi Arabia jailing Wikipedia administrators to the FBI content flagging revealed in the Twitter Files:
One involves a government jailing people for years if not decades for saying unflattering things about the people in charge.
The other involves a government sending notices of potential TOS violations and letting the platform decide what if anything they want to do about the users involved.
There's some sort of difference here but I just can't put my finger on it...
In second place, it's an anonymous comment about the January 6th Committee finding that Twitter bent over backwards to protect Trump conservatives, in large part because they feared angering Republicans:
And that is how the more extreme politicians gain power, by having people fear going against them.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from discussitlive about the claims that sharing the location of Elon Musk's jet is doxxing:
Look, aircraft transmit their location[1] to anyone that cares to listen on 1,090 megahertz. Latitude, Longitude, height, speed, direction, if it's on auto pilot or not and with what major modes, all of that, en-clear, no encryption, signal can be picked up for 500 miles with a good antenna.
If someone is planning something nefarious for Musk's aircraft, do you think they'd bother with a tweet where it is, or monitor it over a large independent network, or gasp! with $100 worth of parts it takes to pick it up and decode it?
News Flash: You can do the same thing with cargo ships at sea too[2].
[1] Depends on the aircraft and the ADSB beacon equipment exactly what all is broadcast.
[2] Although not with the same settings.
Next, it's another comment from That One Guy, this time about Musk firing more Trust & Safety staff at Twitter:
It's like Elon is systematically firing anyone who knows more about social media platforms than him and finding out that that's damn near everyone working there...
Of all the employees that should be last to be thrown out the door from any social media platform the people being paid to find and get rid of heinous content involving children so that hopefully as few other people as possible have to see it' should really be up there at the top, which makes the fact that he keeps firing them look all sorts of terrible at best.
Forget racism, sexism, harassment or toxic users, if there's one sort of content that no advertisers are going to want to share a platform with it's the content that he seems to be utterly indifferent towards, so well played if he wants to make the previous exodus of advertisers look downright glacial in pace I guess.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is glenn with another comment about the Twitter firings:
Clearly, Musk plans to implement Full Self-Driving mode with twitter (expect more crashes, lots of burning).
In second place, it's Samuel Abram jumping in on a thread where one commenter demanded we stop writing about a subject, another asked or else what?", and Samuel had the answer:
Or else he'll huff and puff and hold his breath and get real mad.
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous response to someone deploying the common Musk-apologist refrain of insisting his critics could never run a business as well as him:
I've never lost two hundred billion dollars in a year in any business I've ever run. Therefore, I can run a business better than Mr. Musk.
Finally, it's an anonymous comment about Congress deciding to waste a bunch of time examining the Twitter Files:
To be perfectly honest, considering the rest of what Congress likes to get up to, I'm not sure that diverting them for two years onto a complete nothingburger is really a bad thing.
That's all for this week, folks!