Most of the european news website are also censored, by law. Moderators are paid to remove comments, or whole threads. Some words are banned. The purge is even

Most of the european news website are also censored, by law. Moderators are paid to remove comments, or whole threads. Some words are banned. The purge is even worse that at CBC. As you said, the real problem is you can't really guess what people think, or how many share a viewpoint, unless you have a bot fetching the page and watching the disappearing posts. And that worries me too. At least on HN you can see hellbanned with showdead (hello josephcooney! you may find this discussion amusing, I find it at least better than european style censorship)