You're damn right it's quite the news. It's managed to fly into my 'trends' on FB and I've been looking at multiple thread-based comments to see a fair amount of people discussing, lamenting, and raging at the hypothetical (until further notice) censorship decision.
OP is definitely right to advise everyone that Kotaku is not the most reliable source, however knowing NoA, it's not an entirely unrealistic decision.
If they're going the route of censoring this, I'd rather they just notify individuals in-game and let them control whether they want to have the Skinship function On/Off. All that aside, this is making for some heated discussion on multiple sites (Siliconera, Neogaf, NintendoEverything, Kotaku, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and it's getting entertaining.