The US does not have laws requiring moderation except for illegal content (like child porn) and DMCA takedowns.

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.

That's right, but other countries do and I've seen plenty of local companies spending advertising dollars on Twitter and targeting local users.

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.

If you read what Musk says now or years ago he actually is very much for moderation, but not censorship or banning people of the platform. In a way Musk is for something similar to HN point system.

I get that, but the line between moderation and censorship is very culture and topic dependent.

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.

HN is a bad analogy because it has a lot of invisible moderation tools used by the all-powerful moderators, including:

- 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.

Hn is like Gab though, the users feel aligned with the management ideologically so they don't mind being censored by them.