TWITTER’S EX-‘TRUST AND SAFETY’ HEAD IN THE NYT: MUSK BETTER WATCH OUT. Paywalled, because for people who hate free markets, NYT sure does like its revenue. But a couple of his points (excerpted here) while good ones, have easy solutions:

Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator took to the site to remind Mr. Musk that, in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly… Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it has been loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.

For the nominally “free” world, this has a solution so obvious that the fact nobody ever suggests it is itself disturbing: censor the tweet content as required by law but have it still remain on the timeline with a notice saying “This tweet is blocked due to local laws.” (Do it here, too!) If governments want to pass laws requiring the censorship be secret, let them try.

There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about, but which may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple…. In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter, saying with consternation that he had searched for “#boobs” in the Twitter app and was presented with … exactly what you’d expect. Another time, on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days-old tweets containing an English-language racial slur, asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service.

First, tell me more about how Apple likes to blackmail app developers over allowing free expression. (Maybe Congress would like to know about that too.) Second, throwing Twitter out of the app store for free speech is just too dumb a move for Apple to make. They can do it to smaller, less politically important apps, but we live in a country where we put Microsoft through the antitrust wringer for bundling a browser with Windows. Apple’s app store is a cash geyser; they can’t afford to risk getting it trustbusted just to shut down the Babylon Bee again.