> Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation.
Moderation is far more than that. Moderation depends on context - for example, deleting a comment like "$political-party is better than their opponents" from r/programming is "against freedom of speech", but is an example of good moderation, because political discourse is off topic on that forum.
Moderation is about setting the tone and scope of discussion. For many kinds of forums, this includes deleting comments that the moderators find outrageous, silly, inflammatory, and off-topic. Removing things that don't conform to their own views is however a faux pas, moderators are supposed to be neutral in the on-topic discussions, as their name suggests. False/fake are a more complex discussion, as there is no universal source of truth of course.
Now, for a completely open forum, such as Twitter or Facebook, moderation doesn't really make sense, since no discussion or tone is off-topic a priori (except of course for removing illegal speech).
But blocking political speech equally from one subreddit, is different then say blocking an article about a presidential son's laptop from multiple entire platforms.
As I said, I don't think this concept of moderation works when applied to an open discussion forum such as Facebook or Twitter, where nothing is actually off-topic, and where people generally feel that they are communicating with friends and followers and can thus set any tone their own community accepts.
But still, if the Hunter Biden laptop story were removed from the Linux Kernel Mailing List, from StackOverflow and from LWN.net (entire platforms), I wouldn't accuse these particular platforms of censorship.
Moderation is far more than that. Moderation depends on context - for example, deleting a comment like "$political-party is better than their opponents" from r/programming is "against freedom of speech", but is an example of good moderation, because political discourse is off topic on that forum.
Moderation is about setting the tone and scope of discussion. For many kinds of forums, this includes deleting comments that the moderators find outrageous, silly, inflammatory, and off-topic. Removing things that don't conform to their own views is however a faux pas, moderators are supposed to be neutral in the on-topic discussions, as their name suggests. False/fake are a more complex discussion, as there is no universal source of truth of course.
Now, for a completely open forum, such as Twitter or Facebook, moderation doesn't really make sense, since no discussion or tone is off-topic a priori (except of course for removing illegal speech).