Harassment is breaking Twitter's free speech experiment

What happens when “free speech” requires censorship?

Twitter’s announcement that it’s doubling its character limit to give users up to 280 characters per tweet made headlines this week. It was a PR campaign to show off new features that they hope will entice new users onto the platform. What it doesn’t address are the challenges facing current users and their safety on Twitter. Underneath the attention-grabbing, cosmetic changes, the platform is grappling with a much more fundamental question: When and why should it regulate hateful speech?

At its inception, Twitter was designed to be a kind of radical experiment in free speech. Users could tweet anonymously, could contact high-profile users without first getting their permission, and rarely had to worry about Twitter censoring their content. In the preambleto Twitter’s original rules, the company stated, “each user is responsible for the content he or she provides … we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances described below.”