Should Twitter have blocked all the accounts sharing the Panama Papers?

In a hypothetical alternate world in which individuals / organizations were publishing the raw Panama Papers? Yes, I would think their accounts should get banned.

Fortunately, as with the Trump tax returns, the journalists handling the Panama Papers did not engage in such unscrupulous behavior.

Pretty sure the NY Post did not post raw data dumps of the laptops. Though many people on the left were clamoring for them to dump all the data to enable the emails to be verified.

Also, many used the absence of raw data to cast doubt on the authenticity of the information released by the NY Post.

They published private pictures and screenshots of private emails.

And there are easy ways to establish authenticity without publishing raw data e.g. providing third party journalists with access to the data.

The keyword not being exercised here is "uniformly"

If the laptop became property of the repair shop, how would that be illicitly obtained?

I don't think that owning the hardware means you own or can publish personal data contained on the hardware.

Perhaps Hunter Biden should send out some DMCA claims. Then twitter/Facebook/etc could have their cake and eat it too, censor that content without getting blame for it being censored.

But perhaps there is a fair use argument to be made?

If you abandon something you have no expectation of privacy. It's why both the FBI and private investigators can go through your garbage.

Except theres clear evidence of the FBI's acquisition of the laptop / data.

We can question the framing of data selected from the laptop, but the laptop itself has never been in dispute.

Oh, I am sure that a physical laptop was produced, but it's not Biden's.

That presumes the story about the laptop is true. And a lot of details in the story don’t quite make sense.

But still, how is Twitter even supposed to judge whether a story is trustworthy? No clue.

Will this apply this to the discussion about the claim that Trump paid $750 in taxes?

Would this apply to the Trump access hollywood tape (grab them by the...)?

No. The access Hollywood tape wasn't made by Trump, and no one published the private tax returns. Had they published the original tax returns, rather than describing them, it would have been different.

So why wasn't the NYT punished for publishing info from Trump's tax returns? The laptop story could at least be true. There is no way for the NYT to receive Trump's tax returns without someone committing a crime.

NYT didn't publish Trump's tax returns, they published prose about supposed contents of Trump's tax returns. If the articles had PDFs of the documents at the bottom, Twitter should probably block them too. But they don't.

Which is even worse, because apparently they literally spread fake news due to their not understanding how estimated tax payments work.

So, they illegally obtained something and then misreported on it without giving people the ability to verify their claims. I’m not even sure why they’re allowed to be on twitter in that case.

And why do you think that's a meaningful distinction?

No, I didn't publish a picture of your credit card, just the numbers on it.

Journalists have been dealing with this for a long time. For instance they don't release information about minors accused of a crime even if they have access to it, but they do discuss the events that happened. Seems pretty straightforward to me.