How was Twitter supposed to know that unless they independently investigated the story at the same time as NYPost before NYPost broke it?
This is the danger with censoring "fake news". Obviously there's a huge grey area, since I don't think many people would object to censoring falsehoods that are agreed upon to be harmful to the public, like claiming that 5G spreads COVID-19.
But with something like the Hunter Biden story, who exactly are these companies like Twitter to almost immediately censor such stories, whether they seem specious or not? Do they hire people specifically for their background in journalistic ethics?
Yes, they are private companies. We are also treating them as arbiters of truth and have handed a massive amount of power to them. They can absolutely censor what they want to censor, but that doesn't mean people are wrong for pointing out the bias and the danger present in exercising such strong armed control over what information people want access to.
By the way, telling people they can't see something only makes them want to see it more. Can we hardly blame people for distrusting Twitter because, for some reason, Twitter had an interest in hiding a story of political interest counted to their own?
If Twitter is only to sanction stories that they believe are true, then they are completely falling flat when it comes to the sheer amount of specious tripe that comes out of the mainstream media. I can't count on both hands the number of times I've read articles making claims based on a study, only to use Sci-hub to look up the actual study and find that it completely contradicts the claim some journalist was making.