If the question is whether this is censorship or not, I can give you a resounding yes – disrupting the flow of discussion and making information harder to find is a form of censorship.
In the Internet age, it’s actually really hard to completely censor information, because there are so many ways to publish information. You probably found out about this yourself – I only heard about the marketing bounty controversy after you have censored the original thread because there started to be outcries on Twitter. So this is actually the predominate form of censorship (that many state actors also choose to use) – if some unwanted information becomes a hot topic, make it difficult to discuss it, until the engagement dies down and no one cares about it any more.
This is the very thing that happened here. We have the original thread we could have used for further discussion of this topic. It is a hot topic, yet the original discussion flow was disrupted. Making discussions difficult is a form of censorship.
If in your Parity’s position post you were trying to back down from the original censorship, I’m sorry – this is a job really poorly done. You may claim there’s no more censorship from this point on, but it won’t hide the fact that there was censorship.