They’re not? I feel like Twitter is wildly unpopular outside the US.

The US has more than 30% of its population on there, the third highest- India has about 20 million of its 1 billion+ people.

I was looking at this one - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...

That supports the claim “Most people on Twitter are not in the US”.

It says there are 206 million active Twitter users, 77 million of them in the USA. That’s less than half of them.

It's a significant plurality though and Twitter is most exposed to US laws.

Are these active usage numbers? I wonder how many of us have created one in the past but never use it. Or what the monthly actives are.

Of my family and friends I only know of 2 who use it actively though most have an account.

What would make it more unpopular outside the US than inside the US?

It just never caught on outside the US like Facebook/Instagram did.

From my small Eastern European country - no one I know uses Twitter, Reddit is more popular than it. That’s anecdotal, of course.

Can you elaborate on your point? Are you talking about Russian bot accounts, or that people in other countries may have views which are not suitable for Americans, or what exactly?

If your only rule for how to moderate your platform is "what is legal", how do you scale that out internationally where there are significantly varying standard for what legal speech is?

It's easy to point to 'oppressive' countries like China (where twitter is banned), or Turkey[1], or India[2] as examples of where speech can be severely limited, but there are many limitations to speech in other countries like Germany, Canada, France, Australia, UK.

When you make a globally available website, how do you "follow the law" when the laws of various countries are not compatible with each other? Do you geolock all tweets - Canada twitter is vastly different to US twitter? That doesn't sound scalable good!

[1]: https://www.article19.org/resources/turkey-twitter-becomes-l...

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/6/22564768/twitter-india-leg...

Many countries actually have very restrictive legal limits on speech

Indeed; China doesn't like references to a certain children's cartoon / book character, and nearly two billion people do not take kindly to any kind of disrespect aimed at their prophet.

You can also look north to Canada where the American notion of “free speech” does not apply. There are reasonable limits on hate speech, obscenity, defamation and the like.

How does Canada define hate speech and obscenity? Both of those are categories of speech ripe for 'think of the children' authoritarianism.

US has by far the most liberal freedom of speech (and I consider it very much superior compared to other countries' implementation)

Musk's Twitter is certainly going to clash hard with Europe's recently adopted Digital Services Act.

But who is suggesting that Musk is going to enforce non-US laws on Twitter more than it currently does? He seems to be for the opposite of that.