It has a central authority that can and has taken down community notes that were disagreeing with their narrative. Seems like the opposite of decentralization.
That piece reports that the note in question was not taken down by a central authority in Twitter, and was instead voted down. You gotta read the correction at the bottom.
this is not what vitalik is saying. he is saying that the output of the algorithm has not been modified after the fact. he explicitly mentions the possibility of vote brigading and fake accounts, both of which are well within elon's capabilities.
Was it? Vitalik's essay studies a case where that was alleged, and it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened. The note appearing then disappearing was organic and driven by user interactions. If you or Gizmodo want to claim otherwise, this is the standard of proof now expected. That's the power of decentralized systems - you can audit them!
Looking at that specific note, it's obvious that the note was extremely open to dispute and that's why it was voted down. You don't need to invoke the spectre of The Terrible Elon to explain that. The medical establishment has by their own admission created an endless torrent of false claims about vaccine safety, so it's something where you just aren't going to get bipartisan consensus about anything at all.
Well, the point of the article is that you can verify that claim because Twitter provide enough data to reproduce their calculations, so to claim otherwise you will have to assert that all the numbers and data being supplied are faked.