No, it's still censorship even if the government doesn't do it. It's just not a violation of the 1st amendment in that case.

You can define "censorship" any way you want, but if you use it for cases where liberty is increased then you're pretty much making it useless for discussion. We normally use it as the flipside of freedom of speech. It just doesn't make sense to define it in such a way that increased censorship can also mean increased freedom of speech.

You want to think in terms of liberty.

There's always a line to be drawn... when are you preventing a message from being heard vs. when are you forcing someone to propagate a message they don't want to express? The line is the balance of liberty -- whose freedoms are being impinged the most?

In the case of Trump and Facebook, we can put it more directly. The harm to Trump and the people who want to hear/promote his messages vs. the harm to Facebook and the people who receive his messages. Facebook is very far from the only place most people can hear from Trump, so there's little harm to Trump and supporters of his if Facebook declines to carry his messages. That means it's mostly up to Facebook to decide whether being a conduit for his kind of messages is good for it or not. He certainly seemed to violate all kinds of their terms and conditions, so for one thing it would be hard to moderate Facebook at all if they allowed him to stay. Not to mention, it's really not good for democratic society in general to propagate false election conspiracies. (I doubt Facebook or any corporation cares about something like that, but they may still consider it if enough of their users care.)

Regarding the first amendment... censorship and freedom of speech is certainly a broader topic than the first amendment. It's relevant here though, because we're talking about whether Facebook should somehow be required in some way to propagate messages from the government, even if it doesn't want to.

Dude are you an LLM? It's an article about zuck saying the government pressured Facebook into censoring posts and how he wishes he had pushed back against them instead of complying.

Dude, I am not. :)

I know what the article is about, but I was replying to a specific comment, which took a different turn.

I'm not going to restate the context in every comment I make. If you care to, you can go back and read it for yourself.