Internet censorship?

Jim in Seattle wrote this to me today.
"This article appeared in the local paper today. Our local problem in Seattle is that the "adult gigs" category in Craigslist, a good source of models, has been systematically flagged and deleted every day since January. Theories abound, but consensus is that CL administrators started flushing the ads last winter, but since then there have been religious nuts and feminists flagging ads for female nude models, perhaps to protect the virtue of young naive damsels. Nobody knows, but the censors are winning in this small battleground with Craigslist's tacit approval because they have done nothing to stop it."

Wired article:
"The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms."

I haven't met any of this personally, but it fits with the way the world works. The way from barbarism to civilization is partly that of spiritual maturing, but it's also partly simply suppressing the barbaric urges, white-washing them, with the natural consequences mentally and societal. At today's state of mankind, you either have an oppressive mafia or you have an oppressive government or big companies, but there's nowhere you don't have oppression.

Of course, when somebody says:
"I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid," Dors said. "It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete."

... One might say "get a serious web host instead of Flickr". It's not censorship if it's not pervasive. Like my experience ten years ago. A web host is perfectly in its right to determine what they want on their servers. The thing that irked me was the underhanded and disruptive way the whole thing was handled. If they had just given me a polite notice instead of simply turning off my site before a three-day weekend, I could have found a new host no problem.