In reply to Paul Lawley-Jones.

That is still censorship in the general sense. If you want to recognize a distinction between state and private censorship, the distinction is not based on how totally the speaker is suppressed, how they are being suppressed, or who is doing the suppressing. The distinction is based on whether the space in which the speech occurred is public or private. There is a lot of legal protection for free expression in public speech, but not for private speech. The internet is not a commons; it is not a public sphere. It is a network of private spaces controlled by states and private entities who can justify any censorship they do the same way we justify it if we ban comments -- by treating their piece of the net or your access to it as their private jurisdiction. The internet is free to the extent that states and private companies let us treat it as a public space, but they tend to treat it as a private one as soon as someone does something they dislike. (Same as us on our blogs.)