In other words, "should big tech do things like this"
Rather than "{thing X} is wrong and big tech is suppressing news of that exact thing. Let's talk about whether thing X is really wrong, or whether it's really newsworthy"
If they want more money, the answer is yes.
If they have a moral and ethical code which values freedom of expression as a human right, then the answer is no.
As far as the "oppressive regimes" statement, it is political - but also the actions of these governments towards their respective minority group have been well studied, and for a lack of better words, oppressive. There are other words, like genocidal, that have also been used to describe these actions, but I hesitated to use them on this forum.
My post should have been clearer in that I do not wish to break Hacker News tradition in discussing the underlying political issues that don't relate to technology, but only the pressuring-tech-companies-into-censorship issue. It's still political, but I think it invites much fewer flame wars.
That being said I do think there is a finer tech ethics issue here:
If a government asks you to censor or remove content, do you do it?
Looking at Google in China and Australia, answer seems to be “yes, in that government’s jurisdiction”.
Examples OP cited are different in that Google and Facebook seem to have censored the content wholesale, across the world.
I agree this is an interesting topic and a real issue, but with words like "oppressive regimes", and "Big Tech all too easily puts commerce over conscience.", I don't see how this can be approached from a non-political angle.
edit: Not to throw it on the words that were used, but I think this is an inherently political issue.