No, other clients -- including forks of our open source client -- can opt out of our censorship (if we're really going to call it that). I mention infrastructure takedowns in my other comment. If we ever cross the line on that layer, you can run your own infra, which again is open-source.
> our censorship (if we're really going to call it that)
With the possible exception of spam filtering, yes, we should call it that. I'm sure I would agree with many of those censorship decisions, such as e.g. YCombinators decision to censor things harming intellectual curiosity, but just because we agree with some censorship, doesn't make it not censorship. It's important to keep language free of little lies like using milder terms when we want to present something in a better light, because these little lies add up and become habits of both speech and thought.
Are people confused by why we mean by moderation? Did we lie and call it "speech amplification?" I should think people would be significantly more confused if we began talking about our robust solution to censorship, because by connotation people interpret censorship to be the suppression of criticism and interpret moderation to be the suppression of disruptive behavior, even if by denotation they both involve the same thing.
If we're going to discuss the intricacies of language, we should factor in its connotations as deeply as the denotations. If you think an act of moderation or a company policy has crossed the line into censorship, I think it's more than appropriate to say so. In fact, I'd encourage it. But speaking personally, I don't want to chat in a forum without moderation, and I don't think you add clarity by casting such a wide net. I think you lose it.
Censorship is a broad thing, usually mandated by a government. Individuals or even companies making decisions for their own platforms is not the same thing.
Yes it is a broad thing, and yes government and private censorship are not the same, but they are both censorship, at least according to the wikipedia and ACLU definitions [1,2].
And given the volume of posts censored and users banned by social media, where most public debate happens these days, most censorship is now by private companies.
