I just spoke to the other moderators and we have just restored both of the posts mentioned. Apologies for the inconvenience. I don’t think either were done with any intent to ‘hide the horrible truth’ or anything.
While looking for these, I had a review of all the deleted topics, and 99.9% of the them are really just spam that somehow made it through. There is a very small number that are legitimate content, and then in most of those cases it was because of some topic restructuring where a conversation had diverged or converged.
I am quite confident that there isn’t some ‘bigger issue’ here, and don’t see any reason to take it any further.