Does "dead" status on HackerNews means suppression of the freedom of speech?

For example - spam really doesn't belong, and should be flagged. When that happens, the item is killed and is marked as [dead].

Do you have any specific item in mind?

Routine maintaining of order & interest on a private site is NOT censorship; you are welcome to publish your content & links elsewhere, and HN admins (and users flagging objectionable content) will not come after you to erase such publication or punish you for publishing it anyway.

Stasi would kill you for persisting in publishing prohibited content. PG et al won't.

    [Update] Additionally, why is sharing other
    people things considered ok but sharing your
    own things consider bad and banned?

As I've said elsewhere, give us some examples, and we can give you some feedback.

1) Hacker News has a variety of methods for marking submissions or comments as dead. Not all of these require moderator intervention. Many submissions are marked dead by spam filters. Or they're killed by user flags. Some comments are caught in spam filters, or the user has been caught in a hellban. Or sometimes users flag the comment (I think this is marked differently as "flagged" rather than "dead").

2) Users with a small amount of karma can "Vouch" for dead items. This will bring them back to live status, and might trigger the mods to look to see if the account was mistakenly killed.

3) Even if the account was correctly hellbanned users could vote to un-kill individual comments. Although abuse of the vouch feature leads to loss of the button.

4) Can you point to anything that you think was incorrectly killed? Plenty of stuff which is critical of HN or YCombinator or YCombinator companies is posted and not killed. Mods have said, many times, that they do not intervene in killing those threads.

5) YCombinator companies are held to the same community standards as everyone else. A YCombinator company that used sock-puppets to vote up their submissions would get banned.

6) Sharing your own things is fine. There's even a section of the site dedicated to sharing your stuff: Show HN. And the rules ask people to engage in constructive criticism, and avoid undue negativity. It's a problem if the only thing you submit is from your own site. But it's a problem if a user only submits from one site even if it's not their stuff. Some people take every opportunity to mention their stuff in comments. "Oh hey, just wanted to say my site EXAMPLE.COM does this, try it out, let me know what you think". Sometimes that's okay if it's directly relevant to the parent comment. And HN is seems to be reasonably tolerant of it. But you have to be honest ("This is my site" is okay, "hey, have you seen this site?" is less okay) and you have to not over do it.

But, like I say, I'm just a user so maybe I've got this all wrong.

Secondly, many things on HN are automated, the volume of work would be too large otherwise. Consider, you submit item after item, getting no comments and no upvotes. I'm not surprised an automated system would mark it as probable spam, especially since you've never commented on anything else. You have been behaving just as a spammer would.

Which takes me back to the first point: have you asked the mods? Complaining here just makes you look bad.

Your definition of censorship ignores that you have no basic right to publish using facilities you don't own.

Also, considering we can opt in to seeing the dead items, they aren't even censored by your loose definition of the term, they are just inconvenient to access.

I've been hellbanned apparently, which ever so slightly annoys me considering it was for stuff that "cooler" posters don't have an eye batted at, but I don't pretend HN owes me anything.