I’ve spoken extensively about this with people from China.
If something is totally forbidden, that holds.
However, the government doesn’t want people to feel oppressed beyond the explicitly forbidden.
What happens instead is, if it’s unfavorable but not forbidden, it will be mysteriously downvoted and removed, but if it keeps bubbling up, the government says “okay clearly this is important to people” and leaves it up.
This happened with some news cases of forced marriage in some rural mountain regions, and the revelation that a popular WeChat person (like YouTuber) was involved with one of the families.