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Comment by roryisok | Hacker News Reader

Another cool feature could be not enabling people to start nuclear war on the service.

This might get down voted as trolling, but the real trolling is going on between Donald Trump and North Korea. The fact that twitter continues to allow the racism, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, climate change denial and warmongering of the most high profile account they have to go unchecked is ridiculously unethical. Instead of taking a stand against the erosion of Western ethical standards they're profiting from it

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Are you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?

That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you object to CNN writing about them?

And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all possibility of ever understanding about half the people in the country.

Surely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing The most powerful man in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase tension between hostile nuclear powers?

Surely?

This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those rules. Unfortunately, twitter seems to have none.

There is a difference, which is why I didn't talk about the 1st amendment or government protected free speech, so you seem to not be replying to my actual comment.

All I'm saying is, if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules. Also, let's be clear on this - even if Twitter for some insane reason decided to censor President Trump, it's not like he has a lack of microphones around. As much as we techies love Twitter and other companies, there really are other solutions around, and I think POTUS specifically would be able to get his message out even without Twitter.

> you seem to not be replying to my actual comment.

Sorry, I was sort of replying to both yours and the comment below it. neither of them mentioned free speech but it was sure to come up.

> if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules

So if I run a micro-blogging service and I make a rule which says "hey, nobody's allowed to be racist on here, ok?" and then Donald Trump signs up and says something racist, my rules are wrong because he's the president? Where's the logic in that? If the president breaks the law, is there something wrong with that law too?

So we're clear here, twitter does not have any such rule. I'm suggesting it should.

> You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?

Given his output that frequently and flagrantly breaks their TOC? Yes. And I'd go further - they should permaban him for the things he's repeatedly said over the last 5 years.

I'm currently living in China, and I see things disappear from social media ALL THE TIME. It's not pleasant or proper, it's just scary to have someone else decide what you can or cannot see.

Say whatever you want, I'll make my own decisions about whether I'll believe you, hopefully without the aid of censorship, thank you very much.

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