You've made your substantive point by asking whether the claim of removal is accurate. Please don't spoil that by breaking the site guidelines yourself, as you did here and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742917 and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743106. That only makes things worse.
I agree with you that it isn't clear what's going on here. People are giving it an interpretation that feels obvious given the current context, and we don't yet know whether this interpretation is true.
Usually the obvious interpretation of an isolated internet factoid turns out not to be true.