Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

You can support our podcast by visiting Patreon.com

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I'm Jonathan Kay speaking to you from Toronto in what I hope is now my mostly normal non-Raspy pre-Covid voice.

Now normally I don't like talking too much about Twitter on this show. I mean many of us think

about Twitter way too much as it is. But with Elon Musk buying Twitter and lots of people

either freaking out about it or rubbing their

hands with glee, there's no avoiding this kind of Twitter-centric discussion.

And I'm very fortunate to have with me as a guest someone who probably knows more about online free speech and content moderation

than anyone I know. His name is Jim Rutt, a big thinker and veteran American entrepreneur

who's been fascinated and involved with online communities since the days of Ronald Reagan.

And I'm talking Ronald Reagan's first term, which began in 1980.

We're talking Miracle on Ice, the very first CNN broadcast, the assassination of

John Lennon, the eruption of Mount St Helens. While all that stuff was happening, Jim Rutte was settling arguments online.

Now, I need scarcely tell you that these were the days before Twitter, and Facebook,

and even Friendster, MySpace, and the World Wide Web itself. In our conversation, Rut tells me about online services I've never even heard of.

For four decades, Rut has been setting and implementing content moderation policies at all of these platforms.

And as a result, he's learned the hard way about what kind of speech can be allowed and what

can't.

...