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.