I think this is probably something that looks worse than it is. I can't see them flat out lying. I suspect they've been talking to marketing who said something like "we really wish you wouldn't publish this but if you're going to please..." followed by some requests as to how the information is presented. They then expressed that sentiment as "Twitter has given us the green light".
(Still a bit of misrepresentation but not the flat out lie it appears to be)
I could be wrong. But in a world where the CEO of Twitter can so quickly call B#S* I can't envision a scenario where TechCrunch doesn't have some explanation
I'm not sure how this could look a lot worse than it already is. If they asked really nicely and just annoyed Twitter into allowing this to be published, TechCrunch's actions are still appalling.
There's no way around it: what TechCrunch is doing is incentivizing the kinds of attacks Twitter is dealing with. Twitter will survive this, but a lot of the kinds of companies represented on Hacker News won't.
(Still a bit of misrepresentation but not the flat out lie it appears to be)
I could be wrong. But in a world where the CEO of Twitter can so quickly call B#S* I can't envision a scenario where TechCrunch doesn't have some explanation