I still get sketched out that companies feel so free to "unpublish" content that they later decided was embarrassing. Traces of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"...

To be fair, if something has been deemed offensive by the everyone on the interwebs, do you leave the offensive thing there to thumb your nose at them or just remove it to at least stop the bleeding?

Fair question, but in this case it wasn't so much "offensive" as "embarrassing to the author." i.e. they're hyping up this guy who later turned out to be not as smart as he thought.