Anyone who wants to read them can view them elsewhere.
You are projecting your abilities and desires upon "everyone".
"Anyone" who wants to read them can read them. That is a false statement.
Anyone with the technical ability, or willingness to learn how can read them.
Just like anyone could technically file a Freedom of Information Act request and supposedly get the information they want. This is an extreme example as it is far more difficult and slow to get a response, and it may be redacted all over the place. Yet it shows that ANYONE can submit a FOIA request.
If there are barriers then the perception can be of censorship.
If you note my original comment you responded to I carefully chose that word "perception".
You can argue that they were not censored all you want. That won't stop the average person from saying they were censored and that negative press spreading all over the place.
My proposal is to make it so there is something built into the platform that makes your statement TRUE.
"Anyone who wants to read them can view them elsewhere."
The difference is I don't believe elsewhere is necessary. If there were an unobtrusive icon telling you that this post had hidden elements, then WHY would it be bad if that user decided to click that icon to see what they were?
You would still get to show what YOU WANTED. The difference is you are no longer expecting people to jump through hoops to look at what was hidden. The default is hidden, yet you've made the ability to see what was hidden something ANYONE can do, and not simply certain people technically inclined.
If a user can access our website, they can access other websites. This is not an unreasonable assumption.
Filing a FOIA request and navigating to a different page are not comparable.
We intend to provide a specific type of experience for our users, and that involves encoding some of our opinions into the product. Of course, the whole thing is open source and we hope people take the code and run it on many other domains with their opinions supported.
Ultimately due to the nature of the blockchain it becomes impossible for us to censor anything, and we are going to take full advantage of that to provide strong moderation tools on steemit.com for a censorship-free, yet enjoyable reading experience.
I think I can speak for most of the team when I say that we welcome lots and lots of negative press accusing us of "censorship". It's laugh-test inaccurate, and is free promotion. 😝