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Notes -
Sometimes I feel like living in a different universe.
First, Dorsey twitter absolutely worked together with many agencies in many countries far above what is was required to do, shown trivially by the fact that Musk Twitter refuses to do so and is nevertheless existing. This was shown in the twitter files, but they are hardly necessary; Here in Germany, our local Blockwarte voluntarily complain about nothing but how much better they could "work together with" Dorsey Twitter to combat "misinformation" than with Musk Twitter. This also goes for the UK. Even beyond western countries, where Musk Twitter is far more resistant to censorship efforts and which have far more resources to staff liaison bureaucrats and as such are a much greater threat to open discourse, Dorsey Twitter was also more than happy to go along with censorship in non-western countries as long as it fit with their left-leaning preconceptions, such as in Brazil or South Africa.
Second, the moderation staff of Dorsey Twitter not only was much, much larger and could handle much greater throughput, but pretty much everyone is primarily complaining about who is allowed to continue posting, and voluntarily leaves due to it, as opposed to being banned. I've seen a lot of people and institutes around me make a big show about posting how they're leaving X and going to bluesky. Not a single one of them was banned, and almost none of them complained about any person ban or topics ban whatsoever, either. It's always about how now that this or that category of person is unbanned, they can't in good conscience stay there. At most they point at some nebulous alleged algorithmic boosting which they have no evidence for but are sure has to exist (and which, ironically, provably existed under Dorsey Twitter, it was just going another way). I don't think it's a coincidence that X discourse has moved closer to the notorious chan-style discourse.
Third, the kind of topics that could get you banned on Dorsey Twitter was incredibly broad, and frequently included taking even milquetoast center right opinions ("there are only two genders") or very basic common-sense observations ("the covid vaccine, just like many other vaccines, has a heightened likelihood of complications for people with autoimmune diseases and as such may not be worth it especially for young people with an autoimmune disease"). People went to other places since they either already were banned or felt they would get banned if they openly discussed the topics they care about.
I'm certainly not happy about how trigger-happy Musk is about criticism of himself or how he runs his company, but in practice it's not only an incredibly limited topic, it also would have gotten you banned on Dorsey Twitter as well, even labelling it similarly as "misinformation" or "conspiracy theories". On doxxing I'm also more split, since this was weaponized pretty hard on Dorsey Twitter.
Also on the Vance talk, I'm an academic who has lived his entire life in Europe (mostly Germany and a few years UK), and I think he's just objectively correct about his statements, not just directionally but also literally, so there's that I guess. It was very moving to see that if we want to have a course-correction, we will have some allies in foreign governments that will help us and stand by us. That's a fairly straightforward foreign policy strategy. The norm-breaking criticism is also pretty hilarious to me, since visiting american democratic politicians love talking about right-wing dangers in Europe which is totally OK, but once it's american republican politicians talking about left-wing dangers it's suddenly a dangerous break with norms.
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