The analogy is that Twitter can't censor stories that benefit republicans, but if the "reasons" for censoring always seem to work against republicans and are applied inconsistently, then perhaps things aren't as they seem.
The republicans have a serious problem, and it isn’t Twitter. Blaming media outlets for not paying attention to things is a well worn if dubious path. It’s hard to give credence to with this story given the provenance of the information and obvious problems.
No one is saying that New York Times has to publish the story. However, if someone wants to publish a story and announce it to their followers on a platform, citizens need to think long and hard before agreeing to "whatever the shareholders want goes."
The fact that they do not have a product they sell to the recipients of information at a positive price makes it harder for competitive alternatives to gain any traction at all. So, the fact that once a platform like this achieves a certain reach it is unlikely to be effectively challenged means we need to think hard about how much power we want them to have in terms of shaping the conversation: Both conversation we like and conversation we do not like ... It is not sufficient to think in terms of your affinity to the dominant forces. You have to think about what kind of society you want to be in when you are in the minority.
Cybernature is a new experience. As a species, we are working out what level of moderation we would like.
Explorers tends to be rough-and-ready sorts, and so veer towards the vitality side of things. They know how to make the chaos work for them. For good and/or evil. Since there isn’t the downside of “instadeath” of the physical world, more risk-taking, and thus more chaos, may be justified.
Settlers tend to like fences, highways, channel markings, flight corridors...structure. There are usually eventually more settlers in any area, so their view prevails in the long run.
(You can be an explorer in one area and a settler in another...it’s not some permanent psychological feature. You can demand political content freedom from de facto pseudocarrier monopolies while being happy with a locked-down OS for self-driving cars.)
In computing, the barrier to entry for exploration is so low and it is so new (in the long view) that the percentage of settlers is pretty low, hence the cultural bias toward freedom (including content) rather than control in these forums.
[Personally, I trust the American people to curate their own content. I expect the educational system to educate the citizenry to be skilled enough in critical thinking to be able to curate the content presented.
But I expect the marketplace of ideas to police itself against systematic biases and inaccuracies, either with effective editing of its own content and/or in actively and effectively supporting a “loyal opposition” to its views.
Twitter seems to be doing neither, because it’s much closer to being a de facto common carrier monopoly than a media channel. Common carrier monopolies had been accepted and successful for a hundred years in the US, but only with heavy Federal regulation. The hip, cool alternative: break them up.
Great truths from Gen X, the generation to which you can’t easily mass-market.]
Twitter and Facebook are getting closer to: the post not delivering your mail, or the power company turning off your electricity despite paying your bill, or the phone company cutting you off after you say the wrong thing...
In all of the situations, the principals have broad discretion to make choices about their property. Alice can turn away people with credit problems. Bob can require a specific handicap to play. Carlos can choose to not loan money to high risk professions.
They cannot say “no black people at my apartment complex”, “no golf if you are Jewish” or “no loan if you’re gay”.
You may prefer chaos, most people do not.