It's pathetic, imo, that companies like twitter and facebook pretend to take a principled stand, when they chose not to take that same stand EARLIER when it was riskier to do so (but made a lot more sense).

What happened here is opportunistic, not principled. There were plenty of other cases i can think of where companies did take riskier stands after evaluating pros and cons (cloudflare springs to mind). Those you can call principled.