I don’t give them such benefit of the doubt because occams razor in this case is that the company has a vindictive and childish billionaire at the helm, with a history of prioritizing edgy and spiteful actions.
I couldn't even duplicate it for multiple NYT links on the site (last night). People were jumping to conclusions based on personal tests etc.
Anyways, usual sh*tshow all around, just kind of wary/embarassing to see it jump out of a random Tell HN: thread on here to news sites.
Instead of downvoting me this time, I would appreciate some discussion of how the alleged throttling is somehow so much worse than the actual censorship of an important news story about blatant corruption and multiple criminal acts by a politician's son that abused his father's position of privilege for personal gain.
One difference is transparency.
In the prior administration NY Post case, twitter leadership responded to the issue, acknowledged that the company made a mistake, and both pledged and acted to refrain from repeating the behavior. In the current case twitter has failed to acknowledge, discuss, or commit to any future actions.
Think about the kind of outages and system failures we see at any large SaaS provider. At scale, mistakes will happen, including bad ones. How the organization responds and what sort of transparency it provides tells us whether we can trust that organization going forward. Was there a post-mortem? Are there next steps?
Denial that the mistake happened and denial that the mistake was a problem is the worst response an organization can have after an incident. The current Twitter administration is thus far taking that path. The prior administration owned its mistake and corrected for it. That is the difference.