At the same time, what occurred mostly sounded reasonable to me, even if it was unpleasant. Strong opinions were expressed, concerns were made salient, people may have been defensive or acted with some self-interest, but no one was forced to do anything. Now the paper and your comments are out, and we can read and react to them. I have heard much worse in other academic and professional settings.
I don’t think “the work got published, so the censorship couldn’t have been that bad” really makes sense as a reaction to claims of censorship. You won’t see work that doesn’t get published, so this is basically a catch-22 (either it gets published, in which cases there isn’t censorship, or it doesn’t get published, in which case no one ever hears about it).
Also, most censorship is soft rather than hard, and comes via chilling effects.
(I’m not intending this response to make any further object-level claims about the current situation, just that the quoted argument is not a good argument.)
I don’t think “the work got published, so the censorship couldn’t have been that bad” really makes sense as a reaction to claims of censorship. You won’t see work that doesn’t get published, so this is basically a catch-22 (either it gets published, in which cases there isn’t censorship, or it doesn’t get published, in which case no one ever hears about it).
Also, most censorship is soft rather than hard, and comes via chilling effects.
(I’m not intending this response to make any further object-level claims about the current situation, just that the quoted argument is not a good argument.)