I got dowvoted for pointing this out elsewhere on Lemmy, but I’ll offer some extra info on this - the platforms say they don’t censor swear words, kill, murder, etc. That may or may not be true. But what is true is that they want advertisers, the advertisers dictate what kind of posts they want to be associated with, and what kind they don’t. So if advertisers say they don’t want to be associated with sex, drugs, death, guns, etc. a post will not get many ads. The algorithm pushes moneymaking posts to the top, so the most “ad-worthy” are the ones shoved in your face and the ones with few or no ads get buried.

So the platforms have deniability that they don’t directly censor normal content, but the algorithm is essentially set up to bury “undesirable” words.

So people censor so they don’t get buried.