As someone who doesn't like Twitter or Elon Musk, I have to vehimently disagree. Twitter completely failed at establishing an enforceable basis for moderation, which led to vague rulings and unhappy users who felt like they were being silenced. That's entirely Twitter's right as a company, mind you. But it's also a terrible track record for consistent enforcement of their TOS.
What Elon seems to be advocating for is "free speech" adhering closer to the precident set by US law. That comes with it's own set of consequences, but it's also a much better defined concept than Twitter's TOS violations. Since TechDirt doesn't give us an example of their definition of free speech, this whole article just reads like a nasal commendation of how shitty the internet is. Thanks TechDirt, you really cracked the case on this one.
Anyone seriously suggesting that First Amendment jurisprudence is a good basis for laying out content moderation guidelines is misinformed about what that would entail. Here's the thing: the jurisprudence says that no moderation is permissible. Hate speech is a good dividing line for when you realize the consequences: it's something that almost everyone will agree is something that should be moderated away while at the same time being emphatically constitutionally-protected free speech.
And that's the point of the article. There is no clear, bright-line, easily digestible definition of free speech. No matter where you try to draw the line, no matter how much detail you try to put in it, at the scale of a 100 million global users, you're going to have people who are upset at that line--and wanting to push it in both directions simultaneously. You may think that Musk is making the line better, but the point is that the same forces that pushed all the major social networks to the same place are going to result in pushing him to the exact same place as well.
I'm not sure he'll end up in the exact same place, certainly he wants to take a harder line on edge cases like kicking trump off, and I think he'll take the risk and hit to Twitter that comes along with doing so.
The thing I haven't seen mentioned about bringing Trump back though that is funny is that right now Twitter is the Musk show and if Trump comes back it will be the Trump-Musk show, and Trump's desires are not aligned with Musk's desires(at least not what they've both publicly expressed, some would say both Musk and Trump want to be able to silence their critics, though Trump is the only one who has said that publicly), for sure Trump will create some very public disputes.
See also: cascade of attention deficit teenagers
Pretty close to apt.
