"I dislike bratty teenagers as it is and don't care: in what field exactly is a preteen an expert, and why should they be allowed to troll me as Zach Silverstein did? There are millions of websites for brats; let him and his cohort play, fling doodoo and cast snark at the other 9,999,999+"
Sounds like a clear violation of the "be nice" rule to me. I don't know enough about Quora to know what kind of tone is normal there, but I would be perfectly happy with a community that banned anyone who spoke like that.
North Korea is totalitarian. Nazi Germany was totalitarian. The Soviet Union was totalitarian. Criticising the government could get you executed, or imprisoned in a far away forced labour camp for a long time.
Quora is a website. They can, er, ban you from using their website. That might be a stupid, not very nice action for them to carry out, but it's not totalitarian.
First they ban accounts and sometimes delete them to make the person disappear without a trace, and secondly they prohibit you from asking why certain people got banned. This censorship prevents people from acknowledging that certain people existed.
Criticising Quora on Quora will get you banned without prior warning, and in some instances have your account deleted without a trace.
And when you're banned or disappeared, nobody is allowed ask why that happened, as those questions get censored.
When the admins who run the "content providers" are engaging in libel themselves, about the people that use(d) their service, it's a whole different ball game.
In no way was it implied that an ISP or other information transfer network (ie. the post), had to moderate its data transfers.
This is about the specific service that uses the network, not the network.
Sounds like a clear violation of the "be nice" rule to me. I don't know enough about Quora to know what kind of tone is normal there, but I would be perfectly happy with a community that banned anyone who spoke like that.