Twitter’s new rules blur the line between extremists speakers and their speech.

Although these are tempting questions to ask, the far more interesting issue here isn’t which users Twitter should ban or deverify. We should instead focus on how Twitter’s new rules blur the line between extremist speakers and their speech. This is a subtle but crucial shift in the way Twitter governs who can be a part of its platform and what can get you kicked off it. Twitter’s new approach has changed the rules of the game. The platform’s content moderators, who already faced a daunting task in policing offensive tweets, must now make complex judgments about what people are doing offline, including whether they’re associating with odious groups or individuals. And Twitter’s users can now flag entire accounts at the click of a button. No longer does Twitter care only about harmful speech on its platform—it’s now targeting hateful people and their hateful conduct. This shift puts the platform knee-deep in the quagmire of moral signaling, of telling the world whom the company favors and disfavors, of answering the public’s calls to delegitimize bigots for their bigotry.