This is a super interesting little story about the dynamics of freelancing in print journalism. Print journalism is interesting in the same way college teaching jobs are interesting: a great deal of the work is done by an underclass of marginally employed people (freelancers with no contract in journalism, adjuncts with no tenure in academia). The "fully employed" level (staff reporter, tenured professor) is extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

In that environment, buyers/employers have extraordinary coercive power over labor. Here, it was used to punish someone simply for RT'ing a critical thread on Twitter.

Freelancers in our field do not as a rule have this problem: competent freelancers command higher rates than full-time staff, and most freelancers (at least in mainstream markets like major US metros) are freelancers by choice.†

Obviously, we all face coercive power from buyers and employers, even in our supremely privileged field. We should organize to deal with that. But as a consultant, my advice to economically insecure freelancers worried about pissing off clients is to raise your rates and move as quickly as you can to a career steady state where you're not overly alarmed by the irrationality of any one client.

† Heading off a super-unproductive argument: being a freelancer because it's the only way you do personally meaningful development work rather than being a back office line of business maintenance programmer at a regional insurance firm is, compared to the predicament of a freelance journalist, a choice; the choice a journalist gets is whether to remain a journalist at all, or whether to transition to an entirely separate field like PR.