It wasn’t too long ago that Twitter (TWTR) was one of my Freedom Portfolio holdings that I thought had the most upside and was most excited about. In fact, it was just a little over 6 months ago where one of my recklessly bold predictions was that Twitter would get to half the market cap of Facebook (FB). My thinking was that the impact of Twitter didn’t match its market cap and that Twitter as a platform was far more useful and important than Facebook or Instagram. I frankly still think that is true. So why is the headline of this piece “Selling Twitter” and not “Doubling Down on Twitter”?

There are two main reasons.

Decreased Ambitions

Part of the reason my enthusiasm for Twitter had been waning for a bit is because they no longer seem to focused on growth and instead seem focused on monetizing the audience they already have. The company seems to be getting increasingly profitable, which is good, and I wouldn’t be shocked if this was a market beater going forward, but there doesn’t seem to be any grand ambitions at Twitter anymore, and they seem content with the user base and core functionality that they have now. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it’s not the reason why I saw potential in the company. There don’t seem to be any more grand experiments like buying the rights to Thursday Night Football. Instead of being focused on adding more users, they seem more focused on purging ones that they already have. Which brings me to my larger concern…

At War With Itself

Twitter has gotten increasingly involved in the messy area of policing the content on their platform. While that’s likely a good thing in terms of cracking down on toxic and abusive behavior, it does put them in an extremely difficult spot of picking and choosing which speech is acceptable and which isn’t. I think the degree to which Twitter is now deciding which content is acceptable on its platform and which isn’t is opening up a Pandora’s Box that they’ll find incredibly difficult to close. Once you’ve banned a controversial figure, how do you justify letting them back on your platform?

But the real difficult question is: Where do you draw the line? Everybody’s line is different, and now social media companies are trying to draw a single definitive one for everybody. There is no way this ends well and is bound to end up ultimately angering everybody.

For example: Just yesterday YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet (GOOG), managed to get itself in a bunch of trouble over how it handled a conservative comedian named Steven Crowder who a Vox journalist named Carlos Maza has accused of harassing him. I desperately don’t want to delve into politics and therefore don’t want to weigh in on the merits of the charge, but what is important is how the way that YouTube handled things managed to anger both sides. In a 24 hour period, they at first they refused to do anything, since Crowder’s videos didn’t appear to violate any of their terms of service. However, they pretty quickly seemed to bow to the Heckler’s Veto and half-reversed course and temporarily de-monetized his channel. Liberals are incensed that YouTube didn’t go further and ban him altogether, while conservatives are angry that he was punished at all and are calling for leftist comedians who direct vile language at conservatives to be treated similarly. Now, things like “VoxAdpocalypse” are trending across social media.

This is the inevitable future of content regulation on social media that I am worried about. It’s an incredibly easy slippery slope to slide down. If somebody like Crowder should be de-monetized (or eventually banned), then what about people like Sarah Jeong, who had some controversy over anti-white jokes? What about the non-PC jokes of Family Guy and South Park?

Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter live and die based on content and engagement. Some of these recent moves to regulate content is putting these companies on a path to be at war with the content and engagement that they need to survive. That’s not a good place to be, and it is why I, with some reluctance, am no longer a Twitter investor.