Like pretty much any journalist who compulsively wastes too much of their life on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of unpleasant experiences with the site. In part, that’s because I’m Jewish, and I occasionally find my mentions flooded by antisemitic trolls who think it’s the height of wit to throw an echo around my name—as in “we see you (((weissmann)))”—in response to some tweet they don’t like. It’s a hazard of the site that you learn to live with.
Thankfully, Twitter’s Nazi problem has felt a little less severe in recent years. Back during the 2016 election, when Donald Trump’s first run for the White House helped turn social media into a white supremacist jamboree, having some anonymous groyper tell me to jump in an oven was just another day at the office. These days, something I say really has to go viral and reach a large swath of right-wing accounts before the bigoted shitposters start to show up in numbers…
If Musk actually applied a First Amendment standard to Twitter’s content moderation, the vast majority of this material would stay up. Under the Constitution, Americans are essentially allowed to indulge in all the hate speech they like, and can advocate violence as long as it doesn’t cross the line into direct threats against individuals or incitement to immediate action. (So you can talk about how great you think it is to burn churches and synagogues, as long as you don’t tell a crowd to go burn down a Black church or synagogue down the street.) “I would say the vast majority of the speech that is currently banned [on Twitter] could not be banned under the First Amendment,” Catherine Ross, a law professor at George Washington University who studies free speech issues, told me.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member