This week is Sunshine Week, and lots of people are writing about government transparency, which is very important. From federal agencies stiff-arming Freedom of Information Act requests, to government agencies punishing whistleblowers, to the Obama Administration’s new record in withholding public information, there’s a lot to talk about.

But it’s not just the government that matters. Plenty of private companies that deal with the public could do better with transparency than they do, and they’d be a lot more trusted if they did. The question is whether they care more about being trusted, or about what they can get away with. At the moment, it’s looking as if they’re more concerned with the latter.

Twitter, for example, recently launched an “anti-harassment” campaign featuring, as Ed Morrissey described it, the rather Orwellian-sounding Trust & Safety Council. Almost immediately thereafter, Twitter banned — without much of an explanation — Robert Stacy McCain, a prominent critic of one of the council’s members, Anita Sarkeesian. Shortly before that, Twitter had also de-verified gay conservative Milo Yiannopoulos, also a Sarkeesian critic. (The blue “verified” check mark is supposed to simply demonstrate that celebrity tweeters are the real thing, not to connote any sort of official endorsement, but, without explanation, Twitter took away Yiannopoulos’s, though he remains, in fact, the real Milo Yiannopoulos.)