It's not the same thing, really. It may be unreasonable for Rickenbacker to block people one their own page for seemingly innocuous comments, but it's still their page.
Online censorship is when big brother steps in and decides your comments aren't worth hearing, whether big brother takes the form of government or the social media platform you're on or their designated "fact checkers" or someone else.
I understand your opinion on this. I totally get that it looks that way to those who get banned or deleted. I've seen plenty of perfectly valid comments and accounts get killed.. generally incorrectly by accident, but it isn't because they are evil.
It's very complex actually, trying to host social media. Probably one of the most legally complex businesses in the world.
I work in software and internet stuff often, and making sure things are legal and acceptable where ever your website is to be view, that's all been part of my career experience. Social media companies have no choice but to do what they do, or they would disappear pretty fast.
The legal challenges that social media hosting companies have are nearly insurmountable, and ANYTHING that could be even misconstrued into a complaint becomes another of the thousands of ongoing legal battles they have to deal with, most of which or futile from the complainant's side, but still cost them dearly. So they are as proactive as they need to be to keep operating.
Also, legally speaking, they are private companies and, according to the terms and conditions we all agree to when we sign up, they can do whatever they want with our posts, since they own the posts, they own the content, and they host it around the world in countries that have very different laws than we do, so they have to jump fast based on algorithms using search words and phrases.
Sometimes they are wrong, and anybody has the right to complain if they are wrong and get reinstated. I've seen people do that often. It's mostly algorithms guessing what to delete, after all. However, social media companies are allowed to delete whatever they want, legally. The only way they can keep operating is to be too tough on posts than too lenient, in case something slips through that turns out to be a big problem for them to host.
It's not censorship, which is an entirely different circumstance in law. It is the only way real time posting can work online - there MUST be proactive, too tough, automated and manual deleting and warning etc. It's just social media - it's not supposed to be controversial content, and they must protect themselves.
