Twitter is of course currently known as a source of Truth and Harmony.
"anything not illegal is allowed" sounds decent to me; if you want stuff illegal, make it illegal. If you want unwritten laws dreamt up by anonymous elites and enforced for random reason, go talk to Tipper Gore and the PMRC.
Try to talk about popular movies are TV shows and you get things like this on such sites [1]. Want to discuss an episode of PBS Space Time such as this one [2]. Don't be surprised if this is the discussion you get [3].
What almost always happens on such forums is that the people there who aren't racists, sexists, antisemites, inane conspiracy theorists etc., leave, and the forum ends up being largely just such people.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201225021055/https://voat.co/v...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlXdsyctD50
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20201223123156/https://voat.co/v...
Voat suffered from a flood of toxicity caused by Reddit banning toxic behaviors. From what I could tell, it was practically uninhabited before.
Reddit itself was largely "anything not illegal is allowed" at the time (in part due to lax enforcement of the few rules they had), and was largely fine. The toxic communities sequestered themselves for the most part.
Twitter would probably be much the same. The greater issue they'd have is the same Reddit had; it's hard to sell any advertising on a site where you can't guarantee ads won't show up next to racist/sexist/etc diatribes.
And there are numerous forums where that standard is applied; Twitter just happens not to be one of them because they like money.
Any remotely reasonable approach here has the state deciding which attributes can be used for moderation decision and which can't, which also isn't feasible.
Can't you already do this on Twitter? You just need to mark it as sensitive.
> That spammers and bots can't be banned?
It would be like 4chan I assume, spam/bots are banned.
Twitter is based in the US, the 1st Amendment protects hate speech such as explicit support for genocide. I don't consider a social network full of genocide promotion to be a good thing.
The exceptions to this were carved out in a court case regarding Compuserve, which was a subscription-only service. The stare decisis in this instance is on far shakier ground than Roe was.
The compuserve case led to section 230 of the CDA being created, but again that doesn't have to do with Marsh v Alabama. To have that apply, you'd need to make the argument that Twitter both is, and intends to be a public square, and well, the fact that they have posted moderation policies makes it clear that they don't.
In contrast, the historical statements of Twitter make it very clear that they intended to be the public square, e.g. "free speech wing of the free speech party." Additionally, the assertions and decisions of the state in regards to social media indicate massive influence over politics that far exceeds any city street. They say people are denied their rights of free expression because Trump blocked them on Twitter, and that Russia successfully manipulated our elections because a few Russians bought a tiny amount of Facebook ads.
Sidewalks of random streets are considered to be "the public square" in US law (broadly because random streets are usually publicly owned. You need things like gates and signs and such to revoke such an assumption). The Marsh v. Alabama ruling relied on the fact that the town didn't try to make its streets un-square like, and in fact encouraged public square-like use!
Notable here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Corp._v._Tanner, which in the case of a private entity that isn't literally acting like a municipality, they can kick you out!
> In contrast, the historical statements of Twitter make it very clear that they intended to be the public square, e.g. "free speech wing of the free speech party."
You will be hard pressed to take a single statement, made by a minor executive who acts outside of US jurisdiction, in 2012, as superior to the actual user agreements that Twitter has (and had at the time) in the US.