Ok, how is it not equivalent? Without that info we can refute, and you’re telling people to just believe you.

I don’t find it very persuasive for people to baldly post “that’s different” when my whole idea is that the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine.

>the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine

In practice, the line exists, whether or not it's clear to you, it is clear to Facebook, because they already (and always will) act differently depending on their judgment of which side something falls on.

There are things that are totally outside the pale, and then there is the practice of curating peoples' feeds amongst the stuff that is allowed.

Some people specifically don't like the second thing, even if it would lead to some metric declining.

So we're not disputing the principle at all but merely arguing over the degrees to which it should be applied. QED.

What principle? Are you saying you weren't disputing the principle that there are two different kinds of things that people call "censorship", in practice and in theory?

It is a difference in kind, not degree.

You can have an arbitrary number of rules, enforced by human and machine, for acceptable behavior in a forum. I think that's basically the case on HN or reddit.

But if you have an optimizer that filters and reorders things on top of that, then any particular item that is moved or removed is not against any rule. And nobody can really say why, even if they are informed of what happened.

The latter thing is what many people, including me, think is terrible, and the distinction is not fuzzy even if you can call it all "censorship" or "curation".