The Post story is a bad example for being an outlier. The same story was rejected by numerous other press outlets for being a likely fraud. It is only remarkable in the the Post, over the objections of several of their own journalists, decided to print an extraordinarily dubious story that has crumbled under scrutiny.
The article is disingenuous: "One wonders why Twitter staff didn’t respect the traditional privileges of journalists." No, one does not wonder. The story collapsed as quickly as every news outlet, including Fox News, that rejected it had supposed it would.
This is not a story of journalism being manhandled by big bad tech. This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards and not allowing a false story to propagate.
> This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards
But why, the Post is in fact a newspaper. Why do you want Twitter (which is not a newspaper) to make editorial decisions about what gets published or not, rather than actual newspapers?
Twitter didn’t make an editorial decision about what was published. The Post published their story, on their own site and in their own tabloid, without interference from anybody. Twitter had no control over that. Twitter did have control of whether they wanted the story to be amplified on their site, and—like most news agencies who evaluated the story using traditional journalistic standards and found it raised too many red flags—they apparently decided that they did not.
Because Twitter, as a US corporation, has free speech rights. This allows to say whatever it wants and enforce whatever community standards it wants on the content in their network.
In purely business terms, it is probably in their long-term best interests not to go along with the alt-right disinformation campaign. The internet is littered with the corpses of companies that catered to that vile crowd.
I'm not asking why Twitter was allowed to do that, I am well aware that Twitter is a private company, believe it or not. I'm asking you want them to do that. Why are we better off if Jack Dorsey decides what articles people read?
Yes, I do want curating from most of my news sources. Nobody(a) has the time do do full background checks on all the stories we read. That curation of relevancy and truth was one of the most important functions of newspapers and it is good that it is appearing in the online variants.
There will always be the unfiltered version out somewhere, the internet is not centralized.
(a) yes, some people will lie and claim to be able to research and determine the "truth" all they read themselves. Dunning-Kruger has something to say to those people.
Twitter is not a news source or aggregation network. It's a social network and specifically not a publisher with editorial control.
Exercising control over people's communications (especially when Twitter's CEO calls social media a human right) is a major problem and is not a position they should be in.
I absolutely agree that curation is good, but my question is why do you trust twitter to curate more than an actual newspaper? Did the unnamed bureacracy at Twitter talk to the reporters at the Post to determine whether their methods were sound? Do they have training and education to follow journalistic standards?
Similarly, do you want Gmail to decide which emails you should read? If you subscribe to my newsletter, and Google decides they don't like what I'm saying, should they make sure you don't see it? If I publish an anti-government newsletter through the mail, should the post office decide not to send it? What about my ISP? Should they have a say in what I read?
The article is disingenuous: "One wonders why Twitter staff didn’t respect the traditional privileges of journalists." No, one does not wonder. The story collapsed as quickly as every news outlet, including Fox News, that rejected it had supposed it would.
This is not a story of journalism being manhandled by big bad tech. This is the story of Twitter going along with journalistic standards and not allowing a false story to propagate.