I very much do agree with you with regards to giving more trust to companies (or individual journalists) with a good track record. My issue is mostly that Twitter isn't using that as a policy (at least not as a stated policy) but a more vague thing like "can't contain information gained by unauthorized access" and then applies that selectively.

I kind of understand why they don't, because that would likely be hard to quantify and you'd have to decide what basket a company goes into, which would act as a gate keeper (if you don't have a good track record, or none at all, you can't publish visibly) and they'd likely have to constantly monitor for changes. Not something that scales well or can be automated, and definitely something where they'd get roasted each time the NYT commits a faux pas.

> If the current publishers don't suffer any repercussions for anything, how will it be different if Twitter is considered the publisher?

True. In a post-fact world, consequences for publishers reporting falsehoods might need to come back on the table. On the one hand that's a problem because it stifles reporting, on the other hand they have been playing very loose and saying "oops, sorry, we'll do better next time, promise" every time doesn't work.