Indeed, some things are perfectly legal in one country but illegal in another so an unique, global moderation policy would have to follow the smallest common denominator among all countries served, which would obviously minimise the extent of allowed content.
How do you feel about deleting post that criticise Iranian politics and ban accounts showing support to protests in Iran? Only for the Iranian audience of course. Then how do you feel providing the list of accounts who shared certain images and messages to Iranian courts, knowing that some of them would be executed?
I hate pulling the nazi argument but you might have been asked for the list of those who celebrated some jewish holiday, if the holocaust was happening today. Completely legal and you can't miss the German market right?
It's the most obvious and overused thing but it might happen today too.
Musk never spent 30 seconds thinking about any of this.
In the same way you have privacy setting, I think social networks need to enforce geographic settings too. If you want to publish tweets publicly to a global audience then you as a user need to ensure you're posting content that complies with all global speech laws, otherwise you can't complain if the platform is forced to censor or remove your content / account.
I think US citizens should be able post anything that's legal to other US citizens, but the idea that you should then expect Twitter to be forced to publish that content in all geographies because of the US free speech rights seems absurd. While I might personally I think "Ye" should be allowed to post Swastikas to Twitter, in reality that's against the law in many countries.
Then you have the advertisement issue. I'm not even sure how you build a platform that respects internal speech laws which would also be advertiser friendly. Again, it seems like the business model is structurally broken if we value free speech above advertiser friendly speech.
Social media has been eating up advertising by skirting in between the lines, acting as if they don't censor and are mere platforms (and thus aren't liable for falsehoods spread via them) while censoring and curating content heavily to ensure advertising cash keeps rolling in.
I think it is time for (and with recent legislation proposals in the EU, am hopeful for) changes that either severely limit the type of advertising and control these wanna he platforms can accept and exert or simply makes them legally for spreading falsehoods and endangering the public via users they choose to jot exert their editorial control over.
Also, rumor has it that what Ye posted is actually the official logo for some weird UFO religion called Raelism. (Be warned that the Wikipedia article on them prominently displays that logo. You'll probably want to not look at it and/or engage at your own pace, so as to avoid any offense.)
This hits home one of the things I consider to be a problem with the single platform approach.
Swastika's are actually not legal in some parts of the world, in others they're taken as a symbol of peace.
When there is content moderation it feels weirdly totalitarian because the political stances of (say: Europe) are wildly different than the polarised extremes of the USA.
A platform should not moderate content, twitter (and facebook) want the perks of being a platform (being not legally culpable for content moderation) and the perks of being a closed community (strict moderation on issues they perceive as problematic, usually to investors).
This is having your cake and eating it too.
Twitter should not be a platform, it is beholden to a global standard and rules and culture are too diverse.
The same is true with Facebook.