Yes that is what I mean. It's an intimidation couched in gentle language ("don't say things like that or else") and the threat is banning. Examples are in my past comment threads and some to my email years ago. I've gotten it for comments that weren't even controversial, it seemed the mods just disagreed with the opinion and decided to come down hard just because. I've seen it on others' comments too and had to defend them.

Of course there are some crazy extremist comments, but I'm talking about both comments about programming, and content has been echoed by the UN general assembly or human rights organizations. Those comments are now apparently out of line. This forum has crossed into the realm of censorship normally reserved for generic corporations who remove anything that might affect ad sales.

In my experience, if someone is going to be contrarian or pivot the topic to something else or move a conversation from primarily non-political into political, they have the burden of explaining the connection to the main topic and to be exceedingly diplomatic. One-liners that go against the grain or that will generate a lot of adversarial back-and-forth get warned.