It could be an Insta mod messed up, a blame the AI situation, the company self-censoring, or maybe a threatening DM from the government. All of which have precedent.
Hard to have an informed opinion without more details.
Incidents like this are common enough, that this is what the system does. If it’s AI, or rogue mods, or zuck himself, it doesn’t matter because this is what the system is doing - and if this wasn’t an acceptable outcome to meta the system would be changed.
Whats makes you think it is being changed?
I don't know anything about the internal workings of meta to confidently state that situations like this do or don't cause internal change.
What I can say is scores of people on Meta's various platforms are saying very negative things about the US administration and are not being banned.
Just because you don't always get banned for political speech, doesn't mean random political speech bans don't have a chilling effect.
You appear to have an overwhelming desire to see this obvious outlier as indicative of a larger pattern that clearly does not exist. A conclusion this article clearly alludes to and wants you to come to but doesn't do on it's on because it's so provably incorrect.
Just because this administration has done something in the past doesn't mean that every time that thing happens, this administration is responsible for it.
I'm a fan of a slightly different version of this that I heard years ago:
"Just because something isn't working as advertised, doesn't mean it's not working as intended."