The water and electric companies are regulated as public utilities largely because they are considered natural monopolies -- that is there is typically only one water or electricity distribution infrastructure for a given community.

Twitter is not a natural monopoly, not a monopoly, and it's not even clear that it will remain the incumbent leading platform.

The web would degrade into unusable garbage if every single platform was required to display every single person's mouth diarrhea.

Do you believe every website should be shut down if they don't have a comments section on every page? Should Google be forced to abandon PageRank because it censors shitty content?

When weblogs first started around 2000, one of the things I really liked about the community that briefly formed was that you had to reach out to make connections to people. I actually favored weblogs that didn't have comment sections at all for this. If some jerk decided to copy & paste your every post and troll as hard as possible in their own space, you could in fact go months without being aware of it, and even once you found out, all you had to do was... not visit it. No active action was required to avoid it.

Perhaps the core problem is that the "comment box" is a fundamentally unscalable tool. Instead of putting up a piece of content and letting everybody slap whatever they want on the end of it, maybe everybody needs to be given their own space, with no comment box. Maybe people should have to active seek out "comments" without having it pushed into their face. If "someone" built a system around that idea instead, perhaps we'd get a more stable structure.

(This, incidentally, harmonizes nicely with my other post that if you want to make money on this, you need to fundamentally rethink the whole situation and the entire incentive structure, not just create "X, but without ads!")

How about some form of transparency at least when deleting undesirable statements? It's not like you can go and tweet to your followers somewhere else.

Why do you believe Twitter us obligated to help you reach your followers?

So? You also can't get your indie movie on prime time TV.

It's like a privately owned shopping mall telling the anti-abortion protestors to move on.

The mall owners probably like free speech as a concept and may even be anti-abortion themselves, but people yelling and waving objectionable banners around upset the other customers and are interfering with the business the mall owners are trying to operate.

Twitter is a platform for people to communicate and you can't easily move your followers. This would be more like the giant local mall booting out shop operators based on their political views.

Twitter is a service that allows advertisers to spend money to put their ads in front of people. If people are using services of Twitter to upset their customers (i.e., the advertisers), it's only logical that Twitter will do something to address that.

> and you can't easily move your followers

So you mean people will keep using Twitter even if they delete some tweets?