Technology

So, I don't use Twitter. But as I can tell, here are some of the the sources of friction:

• The rebranding to X threw out brand value.

• Policy shifts didn't make some people -- who wanted the other policies, which I understand to generally be more-content-restrictive -- happy.

• Twitter laid off a bunch of expensive human moderators who were censoring content.

So, speaking personally, I'm pretty hard in favor of speech being permissive. I don't want someone preventing me from seeing someone's speech. I want to make those decisions myself.

However, there are people who don't agree; they'd prefer to have their environment have content moderation.

What the changes did was basically force people into a more-permissive environment, which some did not like.

With the benefit of hindsight, what I think Twitter should have done is the following:

• Keep Twitter active.

• Start charging for or otherwise monetizing Twitter sufficiently to cover human moderator costs.

• Start up X.com. Provide a seamless migration path to X.

• Gateway all Twitter content to X.com. Don't do the reverse (or maybe do so on a limited basis, like having particularly popular content flow back, but filtered or human-curated). Maybe have some mechanism for Twitter users to request that X feeds be gatewayed back to Twitter.

That solves a number of problems:

• People who want a place that have censored content have that option. The default is for the environment to remain the same.

• People who don't want heavy moderation can have that, and aren't having to pay for someone else's moderation.

• If a country wants to ban X (like, most of the regulatory yelling I hear about X seems to be coming from the EU) they can do that. People in the EU can still use Twitter.

• It'd even be possible to make other content-filtering variants attached to X, because I guarantee that some countries have different ideas of what they think should be permitted in public discourse.

• The brand value doesn't go away; I've seen many people point out that Twitter is a very-recognizable brand.

I suggested that something vaguely similar might be a good idea, back when the EU started passing some of their content restrictions. Didn't involve the X.com stuff, though; that came later.

Like, the problem here is basically that there are different social norms and regulatory regimes around the world. Trying to create one global identical set of policies is invariably going to make some users and some countries annoyed. But...that's not really necessary to have at least some level of global intercommunication.