Frankly, they should do this much more when officials lie (which the current administration has demonstrably done ad infinitum for four years). There's no reason at all for them to help officials lie about important matters.

As a private platform, it's certainly a matter of whether or not they are helping you do something rather than whether or not they are preventing you from doing something. If we want a reliable avenue for public communication, Silicon Valley ain't gonna give it to us, and they shouldn't.

It would be another thing to prevent people from stating that someone else had said something (given that the statement did actually happen). Sometimes, Twitter does block all posts that even mention a topic. This is definitely a bad approach, and I think they do tend to rectify it when this happens, but they still screw it up pretty often.

Setting aside the speculation at the end, this summarizes the issues with the story: https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/14/suspect-provenance-of-hunt...

Things are changing, I don't think we can point to prior behavior of these companies as the line they're going to hold in the future.