Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.

Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs, are still around (despite being compositionally a different population, mostly).

Sure, if you like cat mutilation and transphobia and white supremacist propoganda. But you be you.

It's not illegal either.

And then someone gave a valid response.

And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."

This response is a non-sequitor.

Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.

And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.

The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.

As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.

The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.

So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.

It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.

> When you call the police

In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.

People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.

To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.

It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.

There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.

Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.

After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.

Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.

Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.

That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.

But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.

For the average user who enjoys free speech more than not, Twitter is better now.

You're wrong about the "average user" enjoying "free speech", of course. That's the view Twitter started out on, "the free speech wing of the free speech party". But they learned that certain kinds of speech drove away users and made it hard to sell ads, so for very good business reasons, they decided to take away the "free speech" of people to, say, shout the n-word at black people. [1]

I believe you enjoy it more, of course. But other people enjoy it less. You and Musk are making the same mistake in thinking a thing that you like is a thing that everybody will like. Running a social network means you have to create something that is liked by a very wide variety of people. And a lot of people who wave the "free speech" banner just turn out to want no constraints on their own speech, while having much less concern about creating a place where a wide variety of people can safely speak up and be heard.

[1] Something that surged under Musk's new "free speech" regime. e.g., https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/tech/twitter-hate-speech/inde...