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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. They are not legally required to provide service to anyone.

But indiscriminately providing services to everyone (within the laws of your country), without booting people based on a personal agenda, is the ABC of gaining the trust of your users.

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But people aren't leaving twitter because they perceive it as favoring one side. People are leaving because they are being flooded with hateful, abusive comments from trolls and their bots. So it seems the key to gaining trust is creating a place where users don't experience rampant abuse.

It depends on what you mean by 'personal agenda'. If someone is directing hate speech at other users, would it be pursuing a personal agenda to ban or otherwise sanction that user?

It's not always easy to draw a line on conduct, but I think there is plenty of behavior on Twitter that 99% of people could easily identify as toxic.

Wrong. A respected editorial standard allows for even more trust.

Example: Do you trust Washington Post or Twitter more?

Twitter and it’s not even close. A journalists synthesis of what he thinks the evidence is carries no weight. Twitter is like a mini trial. You hear the testimony from the horse’s mouth, people cite documentary evidence, and you weigh credibility to reach a conclusion.

So you trust the Russian troll bots on Twitter?

That's absolutely not what rayiner wrote.

Trial witnesses need to have their identity confirmed. You can't do that on twitter.

Comparing a centralized, unified group like a newspaper writing team with a diffuse, decentralized mob like Twitter makes me question your sincerity.

Twitter is a single corporation. It can choose to limit the scope of its published tweets if it wishes, via stronger editorial rules.

It could also choose to open a steel factory and produce I beams -- why are we not criticizing its low steel output?

Twitter would immediately lose all utility to me if it transitioned out of the business of being a forum/socialization platform to a poorly sourced algorothmic newspaper. (They're flirting with it -- and frankly, it doesn't seem to be going well, because that's not what people want.)

It seems outright disingenuous to suggest that Twitter and the NYT are in the same business, and seems to be based entirely around a false equivalence about "publish". There are multiple kinds of businesses that publish things, and the solution to problems in one domain aren't just to be a differemt type of business.

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