I have repeatedly found that not to be the case. And of course, I have no way to prove moderator abuse/ overzealousness because of how opaque the moderation is on this site. To some extent you'll just have to trust me, unfortunately.
If a post is marked [dead], only users with 'showdead' turned on in their profile will see it, but that's trivial to turn on, so anyone who wants to read such comments easily can. And of course users are free to vouch for [dead] comments, which in most cases promotes them back to normal status.
Since you've made many accounts on HN, presumably you know all this.
I had my account hell banned by posting "too many articles about Snowden/NSA".
PG even modified the HN code to automatically friction-drag (partially flag) articles of such content. He simply blocked content which didn't agree with his viewpoint.
I lost nearly all respect for HN over this.
I am a solid citizen here (my comments are solid and regularly upvoted), yet my account is hell-banned primarily for my views.
I personally believe this is proof that "peak-HN" and "peak-YC" has already occurred.