I dunno, semantically yes. But the rampant act of higher powers pummeling your account into nothingness is essentially censorship. It's just not in terms of the literal, legal definition.
Just think of kerriknox who was and may still be forced to abandon their account and make a new one, under a secret name, covering softer, less controversial subjects. Sure, he could continue doing his flat earth stuff but to what effect? No income, no views. That's censorship to me.
If Assange posted things and noticed his money is being taken away and his posts are being reliably greyed out, I doubt he will distinguish from legal censorship
Seriously, The steem blockchain does not sensor!
The steemit.com frontend, which reads the data from the blockchain, may hide and make the data less attractive but it NEVER ignores the posts. You will Always find posts even when peoples reputation is low or posts have been flagged to oblivion. But that is a choice by the steemit.com frontend.
If this choice is not good, you and anyone else is free to submit a patch to the condenser (steemit.com frontend) that will solve this issue and at the same time handle spam issues.
Good luck and looking forward to your future contribution
I'm aware of how a blockchain works but that's not my point. My point is beside that, the goal of avoiding censorship is that people can hear your voice and your message. Any method to reduce or remove that can be seen as an attack of censorship.
Yes you can say 'well its always going to be available', the fact remains that the audience will be deliberately restricted which is counter to the platform assange presumably desires. He wants his and everybodies messages to have the equal capability to get out to the masses, hindered only by its own content and effortss, not actively shut down by those in power.
And saying 'well if you can do better, do it' is a bad argument, not everybody happens to have the expertise to fix a shower but they can still understand when a plumber it making things worse. The fact is most of us are slaves to those who have the experience and those who have the money and if we want to be heard, we better stick to the 'rules' determined by those few individuals.
I am so pleased to learn that You Tube and Google are not censoring as seriously as I thought. I always thought that if they change their algorythms so that the information is not easily visible, in social media terms, that is a form of censorship - just as flagging is over here.
I still believe the only answer is to block flagging from being more than once and even that one flag must be examined by a committee for establishing the reason for flagging, and if the flagger was wrong to do so, the flag be removed and the flagger be flagged twice.
People will think twice before doing it.
If/when Gab.ai comes onto the blockchain, their site would be more suitable, for without rep and money already in the account, Assange is not going to be read by many (I know, I'm splitting hairs, as the word will quickly spread and he'll be flooded with comments), but this is a once-oof possibility. For instance, I tried to imagine Alex Jones coming here, but somehow I could not picture it. Same with many others, who actually need a platform which cannot be censored by Merkel.