Many people (at least on Twitter currently) are conflating a "request" with a "demand". Just because some tweets were flagged doesn't mean they were removed. If they were removed, they might have been against the Twitter ToS and this back channel operated as a batch "report tweet" button.

I "request" Twitter to remove Tweets all the time. Normally it's a spam message... sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't.

My point is that as an informal mechanism, there is no way to know what was happening. We have no idea how many requests were made, and of those, how many were approved/denied/etc...

That is an issue, but the request itself isn't...

(Now, if any of these parties had unrestricted, automatic "veto" power over tweets they didn't like, then that would be a major issue. But thus far, I haven't seen that... but I'm still reading)