They do have a history of removing threads and posts that get too popular though. I remember several incidents where highly upvoted comments and posts about Lemmy got removed for seemingly no reason.

It's probably impossible for them to entirely prevent discussion about Lemmy so they instead astroturf and try to manipulate the discussion to portray the platform in a bad light. It seems to be an extremely effective tactic, unfortunately for us.

Reddit's obfuscation of upvotes and downvotes is problematic, and makes it trivial for them to manipulate any discussion if they feel like it. Not to mention their ability to just nuke anything they don't like with no repercussions.