I think "moderation going away" is a gross exaggeration of what Musk has said he wants.
Twitter has had spam and crypto scams in replies for years now. Every tweet by Elon Musk has had scammy fake giveaways that steal people's financial info, from accounts that copy his profile picture and name. Anyone would agree Twitter's response has not been adequately effective, and he has complained about this for a while, and even said during today's TED event that he wants to stop this sort of spam.
If anything, I think it's more likely we'll see hardcore engineering efforts - I'm not sure why Twitter hasn't looked into some sort of perceptual hashing database for profile pictures of popular accounts, and hide replies from anyone who uses a similar profile picture.
This is obviously different from the political censorship, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, where I think Musk strongly disagrees with current leadership.
Parler/Gab failed in having approximately zero engineering efforts to prevent spam.
How are the two congruent though? How can you say "this type of speech (spam) is not allowed" but also say "I want less censorship and more 'free speech'" (whatever that means). Those two view points seem incompatible.
The moment you confess that some types of speech are harmful to your platform, it just becomes about defining where that line is, and naturally people will have differing opinions on whether they agree with those moderation decisions.
What part of "I want less censorship and more 'free speech'" implies that censorship needs to go to 0 and free speech needs to go to 100? Drawing somewhat arbitrary lines between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable is not the impossibly difficult task that people who make this argument like to think it is. The US first amendment excludes certain types of speech and it hasn't been a problem.
Censorship (automated or human or both) is not the same as spam filtering.
There might be some edge cases where some non-spam content gets caught in a spam filter.
But these should be two separate systems under different teams and leadership. And if your tweet was removed, you should know if this was antispam or censorship in order to craft an appeal effectively.
Twitter has had spam and crypto scams in replies for years now. Every tweet by Elon Musk has had scammy fake giveaways that steal people's financial info, from accounts that copy his profile picture and name. Anyone would agree Twitter's response has not been adequately effective, and he has complained about this for a while, and even said during today's TED event that he wants to stop this sort of spam.
If anything, I think it's more likely we'll see hardcore engineering efforts - I'm not sure why Twitter hasn't looked into some sort of perceptual hashing database for profile pictures of popular accounts, and hide replies from anyone who uses a similar profile picture.
This is obviously different from the political censorship, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, where I think Musk strongly disagrees with current leadership.
Parler/Gab failed in having approximately zero engineering efforts to prevent spam.