After apparently showing mercy against an account that Tweeted the live location of his private jet, which he had tried to get removed in the past – Elon Musk has now performed a 180 and banned @ElonJet account. At the same time, Musk is overseeing an update in Twitter’s platform policies that will outlaw live location tracking entirely. That could spell trouble.
Tweet Rules Rule!
First up is discussing the rule change – following an incident involving his young son, Elon Musk decided that it was time to drop the hammer, calling on his team to implement new rules around location tracking.
“When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended.”
Based on Musk, a stalker had used location tracking data to follow his car, which resulted in the man stopping the car and jumping on its hood, while his son was inside. Musk wasn’t actually in the car, but the incident was enough to highlight the dangers of location tracking to him, which led him to decide to take immediate action against the @ElonJet account specifically.
Despite the account not really playing a particular part in the decision and data tracking not specifically extending to car tracking, Elon decided to push through with his plans. However, changing the platform’s rules at such a scale might introduce certain unprecedented challenges to the whole Twitter 2.0 transition. As an example, based on this wording, a government could potentially call on Twitter to ban all Tweets that include, say, footage from a protest, which was actually what Twitter did last year under the request of the Indian Government. As reported by Time:
“Farmers used tractors to tear down police barricades, and videos of police attacking protesting farmers circulated on social media.”
Of course, there will always be a certain level of disconnect between governments and Social Media; we all know how politics works after all, so, effectively, this new clause would stipulate that any live or real-time update that includes any other person besides the account holder will be considered a violation, thus prone to takedowns. Though this isn’t the intent of the rule, without specific wording, it could apply to vast swaths of use cases and might end up being used as a form of censorship instead.
The Wrap
In essence, Twitter’s team rushed through an update that could have far-reaching implications, seemingly at the whim of its new and rather impulsive owner. Also, there’s a ludicrous amount of irony since this announcement came after only a day after Twitter has also been considering a new push to force users to share their location information to assist with ad targeting in the app.
So, ‘Free Speech’ on Twitter? Perhaps, but maybe not as free as you would like. Will that be workable? Well, it doesn’t really matter since it seems like the final say will be highly dependent on Twitter’s Top Twit anyway.
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