If Twitter started doing no (or very little) moderation it would suddenly be in conflict with many laws around the globe including the EU and the US.
That did fly a few years ago but I doubt it does today.
Other shareholders might not be to thrilled about them being banned
Most platforms fail miserably at removing the former and just automate the latter. Twitter could spend a small fraction of their current moderation budget and still be in compliance with US law.
Of course Twitter is free to leave those markets at any time but I don't think other shareholders besides Musk would appreciate that.
Even in America, some brands were not that interested appearing next to fringe/extreme (though legal) content. And advertisers are the real customers of Twitter and all social media after all.
That's obviously true for authoritarian countries like China but even in "the West" there are competing definitions of what constitutes free speech.
If you want to operate in those countries (at scale) you need to localize your moderation policies and therefore "take a stance". Cost of doing business globally.
- banning
- shadow-banning
- deleting offensive messages
- detaching off-topic threads
The only difference with HN is that their rules are different. Everything else is very similar to Twitter.
Dorsey chose not to ban Trump, and then he did. That was a huge change for Twitter, and it didn't seem to rock the boat at the company at all.
Twitter also didn't ban politicians at all for a long time. That was another major policy change that Musk could simply revert back.
This is (probably) a good example of why it's hard. Dorsey understood that banning Trump would have been problematic, so he didn't. He, and probably others, worked to change the company internally to be somewhere where they could do that. Rather than do it and then deal with the fallout he worked to steer the company to be more open to being to be somewhere without Trump. Then he could ban Trump without the fallout.
That's how you change a company. Buying a big chunk of it and then issuing decrees about how it works now is much less likely to work. No doubt Elon understands that completely, and has no intention of doing it. He'll work to move Twitter in the direction he wants, maybe with the help of others, until he can then claim to have changed it overnight or something. He's not silly.
Not really. One of the hard things about changing the course of a company is that you actually need people to do the things you want them to do. That means actually being hands on and checking things are getting done. Otherwise people will nod and agree in meetings and then just carry on as they were before. This is especially hard if people are resistant to the changes you want to make.
Taking over and issuing commands doesn't work unless people have nowhere else to go. If Elon tried that at Twitter there would probably be an exodus of engineering and ops people.