I think it is about scale. If you stand up a public forum and you have 100 users, do your moderation choices actually sway a large percentage of public opinion? Consider instead a social media platform with a billion users and its moderation choices. It is time for us to use some common sense and not just dissolve everything down to that simplistic binary terms. Having a forum doesn't make you a publisher. Moderation isn't always bad. There are many other nuances like reach, scale, trust, etc. For instance, there is a huge difference between me posting disinformation of my private blog, and me publishing disinformation is a newspaper read by hundreds of thousands daily. My responsibility and influence over the public increases with the reach I have. We need to think the same way about social media.