Sit down, child, and let an adult teach you something for once.

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information

Under the definition you give, moderation can’t be censorship. Moderation doesn’t suppress speech — it merely tells the speaker they can’t/won’t be allowed to express that speech on a given platform. Twitter booting someone for saying the n-word doesn’t stop that someone from going to a whole other platform and saying the n-word there. If you can’t say it on Twitter but you can say it literally anywhere else (regardless of the social consequences), your speech hasn’t been suppressed.

In other words? Moderation is a platform/service owner or operator saying “we don’t do that here”. Personal discretion is an individual telling themselves “I won’t do that here”. Editorial discretion is an editor saying “we won’t print that here”, either to themselves or to a writer. Censorship is someone saying “you won’t do that anywhere” alongside threats or actions meant to suppress speech.

Moderate ; “tending toward the mean or average amount or dimension”

Picking a definition that doesn’t apply to the context of this discussion makes you look foolish — doubly so when you use a definition for the wrong form of a word. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the definitions of the verb form of moderate is “monitor (an internet forum or online discussion) for inappropriate or offensive content”.

I don see how allowing over a year of racially motivated violence to exist on public-facing platforms does not get moderation.

No platform gets moderation 100% correct. (Read this site more often; it publishes a whole series of posts on the matter.) And some sites moderate what we colloquially call “hate speech” differently than others. So long as the speech is legal, government authorities can do nothing but monitor that speech. Don’t like that fact? You’ll need to do away with at least the First Amendment for any real change on that front. I doubt you’ll root for that.

Or how news stories in the public interest can be wiped from social media.

The New York Post had a tweet deleted and (I think) had its account temporarily suspended by Twitter over the initial “Hunter Biden’s (alleged) laptop” story. Twitter never banned the account, users could discuss the story and share the link to the story, and the story itself never disappeared from the Post’s website. Now, how was that story “wiped from social media” again? ????

How any questioning of the federal government is considered treason when those same people spent 4 years questioning the government and distorting policy facts.

Your opinion of what constitutes “treason” is irrelevant to this discussion.

It stops being acceptable moderation and begins being intentional censorship when half the story (and half the population) is flat out wiped away.

Nobody has an absolute, unassailable, irrefutable legal right to use any social media platform — Twitter, Gab, Reddit, whatever. If a given service wants to ban anyone who identifies as a supporter/voter/member of a given political party, that service can do so without legal fault. And if people want to then abandon that service for one that is less of a political circlejerk, they’re free to turn 360° and moonwalk to a new service while flipping off the old one.

Moderation is supposed to keep a middle ground. To eliminate extremes. Not to pick and choose.

Moderation is supposed to cultivate a community. A moderator who wants to cultivate a community where people of color don’t have to fear being driven off by racists is under no legal, moral, or ethical obligation to allow racist language — no matter how benign — into that community for the sake of “neutrality”.

What is happening with the likes of facebook and twitter is beyond moderation. It’s selective censorship.

I’d probably agree with you…if Facebook and Twitter were censoring speech by actively suppressing it outside of Facebook and Twitter (respectively). But neither service has the power to control speech on platforms other than their own. They can’t censor me here, after all. And as you yourself said, “a private company can do as it wants” — so if Facebook wants to ban links to certain sites or certain words and phrases from being posted on Facebook, it has every right to do exactly that.

(That would normally lead into One Simple Question, but I’ll circle back to that later.)

If a platform suddenly blocked Democrats from posting and put up notices saying that comments from Biden can’t be trusted because fox doesn’t agree or because he’s no longer capable of congruent mental functioning: you’d (likely based on stance) be screaming your head off.

Eh, more laughing that screaming. Such a service would be ridicule-worthy, regardless of size. (And i wouldn’t be surprised if at least one instance running Mastodon or a fork thereof actually does run on such bullshit.)

So long as the speech on that platform doesn’t cross a line into threats of imminent violence or provable defamation, the platform should have every right to allow whatever speech it wants, no matter how heinous (or ridiculous).

I don’t care who’s being [moderated].

Sure you don’t~.

All good he postings about 230 and platform moderation? Happy when it’s to a rival? Call it moderation if you want.

Parler went on a banning spree soon after a bunch of people with left-leaning political beliefs signed up and tested how fast Parler would ban them. While Parler can claim it was banning trolls, the fact that it largely went after “liberals” says a lot. And plenty of us here will maintain that Parler had the absolute right to make that dumbassed call.

if it were exactly identically implemented against the Biden administration and Democrats it would be censorship then, right?

Two things.

1. That rhetorical gimmick is bullshit.
2. Wrong.

There’s a fine line between maintaining moderation and slipping into censorship.

Unless a service has the power to suppress speech outside of said service or tries to use the law as a means of suppressing speech, that line is far, far wider than you seem to believe.

Social media as a whole has gone over the line. And it must be held accountable for the damage it has done.

And how do you propose holding it accountable without pissing all over the First Amendment and Section 230? Or, to ask that One Simple Question that nobody ever really wants to answer…

Yes or no: Do you believe the government should have the legal right to compel any privately owned interactive web service into hosting legally protected speech that the owners/operators of said service don’t want to host?

(By the way: Don’t bother replying if you can’t answer that One Simple Question. You won’t be worth taking seriously if you can’t do even that, and I’ve dealt with enough bullshit here in the past month to finally realize that obstinate, obtuse, intentionally ignorant cowards are no longer worth my time.)