So just to get today straight, the @nypost reported a leaked email in which a Ukrainian businessman thanked Hunter Biden for brokering a meeting with Joe. Joe's campaign denied that any meeting was on the schedule, then admitted that Joe *might* have interacted with him.

Based on a variety of shoddy rationales, both Twitter and Facebook prevented dissemination of the story PRIOR to any fact-check. Twitter started suspending people who tweeted out the link. This is pure, unbridled insanity.

Now Twitter is trying to walk back its original rationale. Good luck. The American people were asked to give these social media companies the benefit of the doubt, and to trust in the workings of the free market above the predations of any government board.

That's a good long-term argument. The problem is that our politics is no longer long-term. Which means that tolerance for competition -- and the time competition requires to set up alternatives -- has been dramatically eroded.

The Left has no qualms about using government to control social media. Many conservatives do. When social media companies act as partisan censors on behalf of the Left, then, they're spitting in the eye of the very people they require to stand up against government control.

That's a game that isn't going to end well. Not for social media companies. Not for free and open competition. And not for our politics.

Let's also be clear about one particularly horrifying fact: the social media crackdown on the @nypost story is the kind of action our journalistic betters have been *begging* for. Our press aren't First Amendment advocates. They're openly in favor of censorship.

Ever since Clinton lost in 2016, many in the press have suggested that free dissemination on social media is the problem. They have pressured social media to re-impose, from the top down, the sort of monopoly on informational dissemination that existed pre-internet.

This is the kind of crap pushed weekly by Kara Swisher and Kevin Roose at The New York Times. They routinely tweet out lists of highly-trafficked pages on Facebook in order to not-so-subtly imply that Facebook is gaming the system on behalf of conservatives and Trump.

It's a lie. And it's an obvious lie. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is that social media companies close off access to non-traditional-media, thereby recreating the oligarchy of the mainstream media.

That's not journalism. It's partisan activism. It should be treated as such.