Every "free speech" website has lots of moderation. But the moderation is hard to spot when users are anonymous or admin actions are hidden.

People shouldn't confuse an ideological stance with an operational strategy.

I may be confused by what you are saying. What is the point of a company having an ideological stance if "free speech", if they are violating that all the time by censoring? How is that different from paying lip service to free speech like many companies?

> "Does this mean HN is preventing people from talking?"

I see this not particularly clever argument against the "free speech absolutist" strawman frequently enough that it's getting stale. Can people really not distinguish between the free speech issues involved in suppressing legal but controversial speech (e.g. "We support $DEPLORABLE_CANDIDATE and their $BAD_POLICY.") versus the entirely separate issues of suppressing illegal or unwanted speech (e.g. threats, spam)? This simplistic binary "all or nothing" thinking cannot capture the nuances involved in the complex philosophical and legal quagmire that is the principle of freedom of speech.

Beyond that, it's particularly ironic to attempt to use HN as the example given that the HN moderation team has tried very hard to be evenhanded on controversial threads while enforcing the rules to the extent that they routinely get accused of favoritism by all sides.