Look carefully at what Twitter is saying to justify censoring the Biden story. If applied consistently, it’d mean that some of history’s most consequential journalism — the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks’ war logs, Snowden docs, Panama Papers, our Brazil Archive — would be banned.

So much of the important journalism you read is based on a source providing to journalists “content obtained without authorization.”

Beyond the above examples, why doesn’t Twitter ban links to the NYT’s stories based on Trump’s tax returns, “obtained without authorization?”

Please don’t be deceived. The authoritarian mindset expressed below — celebrating mass censorship of journalism they dislike — is absolutely a significant strain in current US liberalism, which is why so many of them cheered the stunning censorship yesterday:

There is literally zero daylight between many, arguably most, national journalists reporting on the election and the Biden campaign. Does this sound like a journalist or a DNC operative? And, of course, they’re going to the RUSSIA playbook again based on anonymous CIA claims. https://twitter.com/timjgraham/status/1316698131082379264

For liberals arguing that tech giants are just private corporations who can do as they please — a free-market absolutism not even radical libertarians espouse — read @matthewstoller in the NYT today on their monopolistic hold over the flow of information: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opinion/tech-monopoly-democracy-journalism.html