Gene X Hwang knew his days on Twitter as @x were numbered.
“Elon had been kind of tweeting about X previously,” Hwang said. “So I kind of knew, you know, I had an inkling that this was going to happen. I didn’t really know when.”
Since 2007, Hwang’s username on the site was @x — but after Elon Musk renamed the social media platform to X earlier this week, it was only a matter of time before the company commandeered the handle.
The news came shortly after Hwang had competed in a pinball tournament in Canada. "So when I landed and fired up my phone, I just got all these messages and I was like: ‘What is what is going on?’ "
Hwang received an email from the company explaining that his account data would be preserved, and he’d get a new handle. It offered Hwang merchandise, a tour of its offices and a meeting with company management as compensation.
Hwang’s account is one of the latest casualties in the chaos following Musk’s takeover of the social media company. On Monday, Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo was replaced with the letter “X.”
The rebrand is the company’s next step in creating what Musk has called “the everything app.” Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino envision the platform becoming a U.S. parallel to WeChat — a hub for communication, banking and commerce that’s become a part of everyday life in China.
But experts are skeptical X will be able to become an “everything app.” “I’m not sure he has enough trust from his user base to get people to actually exchange money or attach any type of financial institution to his app,” Jennifer Grygiel, a professor at Syracuse University, told NPR.
Hwang is among those who have been looking for Twitter alternatives. “I’ve been checking out, you know, other options like Threads and Mastodon and Bluesky,” he said. “I’m still on Twitter for now, but … it’s changed a lot. So we’ll see how much longer I’m on there.” Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.
Yeah, legally it’s fine. Societiarily, it’s not really fine. If you are building a service and I put on my business cards this is the address you can reach me at through this service, removing that address without warning is unacceptable. If you want me to trust the service you are building is reliable and worthy of my business then you better be prepared to treat the data the service owns and the choices the users make with lots of respect.
For example, if your lemmy instance owner took your name and started using it for their own purposes without warning but sent you a quick message that read “I took your account name, but hey, as compensation you can just tell me what other handle you want and you can have it. Also, I know I am really awesome, so if you want to meet people who have talked to me, let me know and I can set that up.” What would you do? Would you stay on that instance or would you go find a service that you feel is reliable and trustworthy?
Honestly, I can probably safely assume you’d find another service because your account age is the same as mine and that is around the time that Reddit started to show they were not a trustworthy service. So kind of proof that this is legally fine but societally not going to instill trust.
I think we agree legally it’s fine, but I still disagree and think it’s ethically fine. Companies realize putting their point of contacts on third party services is risky and should be mitigating that.
Like a company should have their own email domain rather then Gmail. There are things you can digitally own, like the domain name itself because you purchase it and then have a contract with it.
If Twitter acted as a service where you buy your profile and make an agreement, that would be unethical at that point, and also illegal. Twitter users shouldn’t be under the impression they perpetually own their account handle, they haven’t paid anything and simply claimed it through a signup or username change. That’s not comparable to say, buying a domain, where that would be extremely unethical and pretty sure illegal. Also impersonation is bit of a funny topic to bring up with Twitter right now lol, considering how messed up the verification is.
I would agree with you if social media services were treated as like a utility and usernames were contracted as such. Which I actually do wish was a thing, it’d be a much healthier ecosystem with much stronger protections. But that’s a different topic.
You do sign a contract with any website when you make an account. It’s the terms of service. Now no, it doesn’t say in it that you are entitled to the account name you’ve picked but also it feels like you are still mixing up legal and ethical in some ways. Even if you feel like it’s ethically fine you are still giving examples of ways it would be illegal instead of unethical. It sounds like the only way you feel it would be unethical is that if it would be illegal.
That said, people also pay for Twitter now. Would it change anything in your mind if @X had been verified, purchased Twitter blue, and still had their account taken away without warning? Still legal. Terms of Service don’t state you can keep your account handle.
That said, there is still a social contract in a lot of people’s minds that when you create an account on a website that it’s your account and your data. Breaking the social contract is unethical and results in backlash. A lot of people left Reddit specifically because Reddit broke a social contract. The API they provided was free and the API being free was typical at the time. There isn’t any legal recourse you can take but you can certainly stop using their services. Which is why most people are here now on Lemmy.
So I don’t feel like you need a legal contract to break to be unethical and I don’t think the social contract is being upheld.
That said I do agree in some regards with you because Discord did this same thing on a mass scale. Everyone’s usernames were changed. There were 3 months of warning and the changes rolled out per-register date. So you could claim your new username before others if you had registered on the service sooner. I lost my username of choice because of it and frankly, I don’t like it but I don’t blame Discord for the change. They made their intentions clear as to why and gave lots of warning time. So really singling out a specific user and not giving them warning time is unjustified here. Not the actual changing of the username.
I just don’t understand where this expectation that accounts are owned are coming from. There’s no language anywhere in the signup that implies this, nor is it the case for any other website. I don’t know where this expectation is coming from.
If you’re playing a game of pick-up basketball, and your team is in the lead, and some guy on the other team says “Nevermind, I don’t want to lose. Give me my ball, I going home.” I’m curious how you would react. He owned the ball, and you signed no contract at the start of the game, so, what’s your take on his action?
That metaphor makes no sense here
Dang, I thought you could do better than that 😄
It’s literally a very similar situation. Morality does not equal legality. In fact, they’re rather opposite a good portion of the time.
Okay, I know at this point I’m not going to change your mind, but since I can’t rule out that you truly don’t understand how my basketball analogy relates to the Twitter action, here’s my best attempt at an explanation
In Twitter’s actions:
Ownership: Twitter owns the platform and has control over usernames, similar to how the person with the basketball owns the ball in the game.
Unfair action: Twitter took over a specific username without any prior warning or valid reason. This can be seen as an unfair move, as it disregards the user who previously claimed the username.
Moral implication: Just because twitter has the technical power and legal authority to control usernames doesn’t necessarily mean it is morally acceptable to take away a username from someone else arbitrarily. It’s a dick move because it shows a lack of consideration for the user who may have had an attachment to that username.
In the basketball analogy:
Ownership: The person who brought the basketball to the game owns the ball, just like Twitter owns the platform.
Unfair action: If the person who owns the ball suddenly decides to cancel the game and leave when their team is losing, it would be seen as an unfair and unsportsmanlike action.
Moral implication: Although the person has the right to take their ball and leave since they own it, doing so without warning and when their team is losing disregards the other players’ interests and ruins the fun for everyone else. It shows a lack of consideration for the fairness and enjoyment of the participants.
In both cases, the common thread is the concept of fairness and respect for others. Just because someone owns something (be a basketball or Twitter) doesn’t give them a free pass to act in an insensitive or inconsiderate manner. In a moral context, it’s important to consider the impact of one’s actions on others and to treat them with fairness and empathy, even if you have the right to do otherwise. Both situations address the significance of ethical behavior and being mindful of how our actions affect others, even when we have certain ownership rights.
It’s that people put time into their accounts and into the service. Those accounts create content and are the reason the service can make money. The social contract created is in part because users are the product of a lot of services. So the users feel like if they are the product they are entitled (somewhat rightfully) to simply have a reliable service that doesn’t change without notice. Again, this is a social contract, not a legal or written one.
It’s like in the playground. If you are building a sandcastle in the sandpit and someone comes and knocks it over. It’s not illegal. There was no written contract that said you owned that sand. In fact, it’s the opposite, that sand is provided for everyone to share. It doesn’t matter who knocked over your sandcastle, that person is still a jerk. Even if it was the owner of the sandpit. You spent time creating and forming something. That work is something you are entitled to. Yet someone takes it away without even a warning. Is that ethical? Is that okay? Can I just knock over your sandcastle without recourse just because I own the sand? I did say you could use it and there was a social contract created that you would use the sand and I would let you. I am technically still letting you use the sand but I am taking or destroying the work you put into building that sandcastle.
So really the question is, if I provide the raw materials for you to borrow and you do a ton of work with those materials, do I have the right to claim your work?
You have the right to take the materials back, and it would be foolish of me to rely on you not doing so without a contract. Even more foolish, if the contract explicitly stated your right to do so. If the contract also gave you a perpetual license to use the intellectual property of whatever I did… well, you still have to recognize that I did it, but otherwise you can exploit it in any way you want.
So essentially your stance is “well whatever the contract says is the rule, and because the contract is something both parties agree to, it can’t ever be unethical.”?
No, my stance is “reality is the rule”:
No contract, no agreeing or disagreeing, it simply happens and that’s it. You can call it unethical, unfair, unjust, whatever you want… it still happens and you don’t have a say in it.
A contract where both parties get to agree, is a make-believe luxury, you don’t get that with reality. Of course you can still call it unethical, unfair, unjust… but keep in mind the default alternative is no contract at all, or the rules of reality: whoever gets to control it, keeps it.
And that’s okay? I will genuinely never understand legalists. Just because an action is legal does not mean it’s just, and it’s incredible to me that people (and not even a small number of people, but a large portion of society) think that way.
Where did I say it’s “just”? It’s “as okay as we’ve managed to make it”, which keep in mind is far more okay than what happens without any laws at all. Having an “Agree” button with a contract, is a luxury we’ve got to through ages of spilt blood.
For whatever their other faults, companies like Google and Microsoft are very reliable and a very low risk.
X formerly known as Twitter is very unreliable and a huge risk. There’s a reason it’s hemorrhaging advertisers right now. It’s a poor business decision.
I think it’s fine for Musk to make poor business decision. I don’t own any stock in any Musk companies. It’s Musk’s free market right to make bad business choices that drive users and advertiser and businesses away. That’s the beauty of the free market. Businesses will find a better place to do business.