Reading that post, the OP linked an unsourced Imgur album with blatant lies like "10,000 people were incinerated and hosed down drains" spliced between actual photos of the protest is fucking wild. The 10,000 figure was reported once then immediately retracted, the fact that OP was posting blatant propaganda as fact was conveniently left out as "tankie censorship".
Let's put that into perspective: US intelligence officially puts the number below 900. The OP was saying it's over 10,000. It's an order of magnitude above the 3 letter agencies of the US.
Have you read through the thread? Tons of examples of admin abuse. I fully expect to cop another ban for this comment thread soon.
Also, I would disagree with calling defederation 'censorship'. Nobody was prevented from speaking up. Refusal to engage with somebody you disagree with is not censorship.
Preventing people from interacting with whole instances is the ultimate form of censorship. Deleting comments is nothing compared to literally deleting all the users from one instance.
Well yeah, but it stops people on other instances seeing deliberately biased comment sections. Effectively disallowing discussion about China bad and other issues on many major posts. If you defederate it forces people to make new posts and not use the compromised ones.
It's like if we had an alt-right instance regularly getting on the front page, then banning LGBTQ+ discussion on any of those posts, and only allowing bigoted opinions through