Updating our rules against hateful conduct

You are of course correct in a grand sense, but there's this weird gray area philosophically where someone builds a town square and says "everyone come and talk in my square"...until the hear what you are speaking about!

The problem is likely greater in our corporate/mercantilist system where some state-sponsored and some natural monopolies develop. Totally get and appreciate the private property of the corporation argument...it is their town square after all...but when there is only one that is 'allowed' to succeed, what happens?

This then leads to specific tactical rules we have on the books in the US like FTC and even FCC regs, where some may protest unfair commerce.

IANAL but I can see this is a real mess. Also, what is the ROI for Twitter when it comes to policing this? We know FB has been having problems.

The examples given seem pretty clear - calling people rats, viruses, maggots, etc.

Excommunication isn't the solution. Isn't it enough to hide these comments by default, as on HN?

> So e.g. you can freely say that the Bible is stupid but can't say the same thing about its believers.

From the examples they give, I think you can still call them stupid. (After all, being stupid is very much part of the human condition. It's hardly a dehumanizing descriptor.) You just can't call them rats, maggots, viruses, etc. and advocate for their extermination/removal.

Bingo. In that case you have to pick a winner and loser. Then you suppress the loser and promote the winner.

Which is the whole point.

These issues of free speech have been around for a very long time, especially with regards to religious speech, which is at the bedrock of free speech, and the Western liberal tradition espouses free speech principles not because it didn't realize someone might get offended, but because it's better than the option of having powerful people/institutions pick winners and losers and decide what is acceptable to say.

Under current rules, if enforced across the board, a modern Martin Luther's 95 tweet stream would be banned because it hurt someone's feelings or criticized their religion. Exposes of Jehovah's Witnesses would be banned. Atheist tracts would be banned. The whole system is unworkable, which is why it wont work -- it wont be enforced across the board. What will happen is that Twitter will adopt de-facto 'protected religions' that cannot be criticized -- say Islam -- and then it will pick the losers -- say Christianity.