They did censor the original New York Post story. The media chose to ignore it, but the social media companies were censoring any links to the story, actively encouraged by Democratic Party operatives such as Schiff who were falsely labelling it as Russian disinformation and encouraging a blackout. This has potentially election moving consequences, so coercive Democratic influence over social media is absolutely a real threat to democracy.

Regarding your comment about a 1A-friendly platform, I don't advocate for a censorship-less social media platform. It's stupid on its face. But moderation should either be voluntary with no coercive influence of government (whether that influence is achieved by carrot or stick), or it should be defined by the legislative body (hate speech laws) instead of implied threat of regulation or via the executive branch.

Regarding the flagging of COVID misinformation, that's fairly lower on my list of worries, and it's not that I don't favor removing that toxic information, it's that the executive branch is the one coordinating it. The encouragement of political censorship (the Hunter Biden case above) is much higher on my list of concerns and much more directly anti-democratic.

And then they reversed their censorship. It's hard to make perfect decisions in real time. The information got out there, it was bogus, and they faced criticism for doing it in the first place.

So they chose to eliminate its effect on the election based (I would assume) on the bogus stuff about Hillary's email server four years earlier. And if this is the end of October surprises I can only say good riddance, but it probably won't be.

Try walking a mile in their shoes before holding them accountable to infallible behavior is my only suggestion here.

We're going to have to disagree about a first amendment friendly platform. I'm a huge fan of letting the marketplace of ideas work these things out lawsuits and all. I 100% expect a dumpster fire every single time, but then most tech companies end up dumpster fires anyway so why not? There's probably some epsilon incremental revenue pulling this off and capturing the single digit percentage audience that demands these things, no?

If Twitter's moderation team made that decision because they genuinely thought it was Russia disinfo, then I have no problem with it. But the waters are so muddied when we have a chorus of policymakers applying pressure and encouraging that decision, both through the rhetoric in that moment and leading up to it. It's that kind of behavior/rhetoric (similar to Trump's anti-trust threats) which is the threat to democracy, not the decision itself in the abstract which may have been perfectly defensible.

I can only conclude that Schiff et al were being intentionally dishonest about the Russian disinfo line in an attempt to apply the maximum amount of influence at the most critical time before the election. It was a cynical attempt by elected officials to sway an election through censorship. They knew it wasn't Russian disinfo at the time. Joe Biden's own comments revealed that knowledge about a day into the saga.