Suppression is a bigger scandal than the actual story

I fear Taibbi is right, the suppression by Twitter, irrespective of the merits and veracity of NY Post's report, will now normalize all kinds of behavior by platforms of all kinds big and small. Which will then incentivize governments to take on the platforms. This also raises issues of unequal treatment - say the NY Post report was factually wrong - why pick on the NY Post only? Why not the hundreds of other "news organizations" peddling unverified and factually incorrect reports on Twitter.

I wish it did not come to this. I feel this action will uncork second order effects which we will come to rue for a long time.

Edit: This story was flagged which is unbelievable.

I certainly hear a lot more talk about the suppression than the actual story (excluding the non-stop spew from Trump, I tuned him out a long time ago), so Twitterbook's attempts at suppression seem to have backfired. Taibbi may think it's under-reported, but even my non-tech acquaintances know about this scandal.

There is no clear principles or policies for censorship or suppression for economic or political reasons. Until there is, we must look each case as single instance.

That case was hilariously crude attempt at influencing and creating false narratives. The whole thing collapsed quickly but it still had huge impact. Mixing something real and something false makes people accept falsehoods.

Censoring obvious falsehoods like in this case is not the scandal. The lack of policy principles is. Twitter could have reduced the frequency the links show in the feeds dramatically and nobody would notice. It would be there when you look at it, but it would not propagate. In fact, that's what Twitter and Facebook are doing for commercial reasons.

Yeah the censorship is bad and further reduces trust in the media and tech companies (though its already at zero for many people). But isn't the story here that the vice presidents son was being paid millions of dollars by chinese, ukrainian, and other companies for .. something? It's not his business accumen, right? What could they possibly be paying him for other than access to his dad? Is there any other reasonable explanation for these "business arrangements?"

I think you're right, but I don't think the previous status quo was tenable either, and maybe even more problematic. Disclaimer: these are opinions.

We allow mainstream press, owned by allies of a politician, to make outlandish claims unverified in the weeks leading up to an election. This has always been "correctable" in the past, in a world where articles could be retracted or condemned, particularly by even more mainstream outlets (because there is a spectrum from tabloid journalism to "respectable"). With social media, the genie is out the bottle with that initial statement, and there's no way to set the record straight anymore, let alone in two weeks before an election.

I realize that I used a ton of loaded terms here. That reflects a couple of opinions that I hold: that there is value in institutions, that truth is a social construct, that maintaining order in people's lives has intrinsic value. Folks are free to disagree, but please be clear about whether it's with the premise or the conclusion.