Let's say the company was acting like the thought police. Do you think they would go and publicly announce that "we are the thought police"? PR statements have

Let's say the company was acting like the thought police. Do you think they would go and publicly announce that "we are the thought police"? PR statements have as much value to me as a pigeon's fart. As a regular user I don't have any visibility into the leadership, but it's been obvious for years that at least at the level of users and moderators, there has been a hard shift away from free speech like there was in the earlier days. I only joined reddit in 2011/2012, but even then there was still a strong feeling of free speech, which includes the freedom to heinous and despicable (but legal) speech. Maybe the leadership tried protecting free speech in 2018, but users and moderators had long since drifted away from promoting free speech by that point.