Twitter can certainly kick whoever they want off their platform for whatever reason. However they don't know anything more about breaking news than the rest of us. They cannot have banned a breaking story because it isn't true, the reason being that they couldn't know.

If they banned a NYPost article based on the newspaper's reputation, that is a ban on a strictly political opinion.

This is the danger with censoring "fake news". Obviously there's a huge grey area, since I don't think many people would object to censoring falsehoods that are agreed upon to be harmful to the public, like claiming that 5G spreads COVID-19.

But with something like the Hunter Biden story, who exactly are these companies like Twitter to almost immediately censor such stories, whether they seem specious or not? Do they hire people specifically for their background in journalistic ethics?

Yes, they are private companies. We are also treating them as arbiters of truth and have handed a massive amount of power to them. They can absolutely censor what they want to censor, but that doesn't mean people are wrong for pointing out the bias and the danger present in exercising such strong armed control over what information people want access to.

By the way, telling people they can't see something only makes them want to see it more. Can we hardly blame people for distrusting Twitter because, for some reason, Twitter had an interest in hiding a story of political interest counted to their own?

If Twitter is only to sanction stories that they believe are true, then they are completely falling flat when it comes to the sheer amount of specious tripe that comes out of the mainstream media. I can't count on both hands the number of times I've read articles making claims based on a study, only to use Sci-hub to look up the actual study and find that it completely contradicts the claim some journalist was making.

The fig leaf they used to justify it was that it exposed an email from a public official (a Ukrainian gas executive) and was "hacked/unauthorized" material. Of course, journalists use unauthorized information all the time (Snowden, Trump's tax returns, etc.) without getting banned from Twitter.

The article was the 100% fact based. The facts laid out in it just happened to not line up with Twitter's preferred election outcome, so they silenced it.

So I would not say "entirely unsubstantiated" -

In fact I would read between the lines and be real - he's certainly seen the articles quoting emails and pics and such - if this was a setup / fake plant - he could of said 'hey that could be my laptop, but I never emailed X and never had a pic of Y - so the thing is false flag - He did say deny the content and owned up to the possibility that it was his hardware - so..

If I'm wrong and don't know the whole context I am open to consider whole truth, admittedly have not watched the whole interview (yet, and don't want to, but will if people say this or that)

At this point it certainly seems that twitter censored something as voting disinfomation or election manipulation - and that by censoring it twitter actually created disinformation / election manipulation.

With this, being such an important thing - I am okay if corrected and find out my current understanding is wrong.

should be more clear.

"He did not say, "I deny the content" - and owned up to the possibility that it was his hardware - so.

and the issues about the story that were brought up, were indeed 'the content' of the emails and such.. which did not get much public discourse.

The laptop story seems like the most probable explanation of this leak, given the documents and FBI correspondence provided. Most attempts I've seen to debunk it seem dishonest or misleading, like "the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015" as if anyone expected the PDF compilation of incriminating emails to be pre-made by Hunter.

While the email is real and the laptop story seems the most probable explanation, the email doesn't necessarily imply corruption on Joe Biden's part or even that he discussed anything business-related with Pozharskyi.

Regardless of the laptop though, there's clearly a double standard in what Twitter will block with or without proof. The Russian bounty program that was widely reported by the Washington Post and others during the election cycle was unsubstantiated, but no effort was made to block it.

You'd also have to decide whether you include Fox/CNN/MSNBC's opinion segments in the evaluation, or just the news sections. (Fox and MSNBC are especially screwed in this evaluation if you include the opinion hours.) After that, decide if "technically true but highly misleading" counts as factual or not.

The NY Post has a long history of being sensationalist and misleading - there's a reason it's considered a tabloid.

I simply find "the NY Post is a less credible organization than the AP" to be a very sustainable opinion.