I guess it depends on how you perceive "censorship". I wouldn't think of banning a misleading ad as censorship. My country, Greece, was under a military dictatorship for a few years in the 1960's and 70's, and censorship involved e.g. pre-approving all music, including not just song lyrics but also the music scores. Works by the two major Greek composers, Theodorakis and Hatzidakis [1] were banned outright and could not be played anywhere under pain of pain [2]. Obviously everything anyone wanted to publish in the press had to be pre-approved by state censors and any criticism of the regime, either written or simply spoken out loud, was punishable... you get the gist.

Not allowing advertisers to lie to advertise their product is I think not a kind of "censorship" one really needs to be worried about. They're free to advertise their product otherwise, they're just not free to lie to do it.

I feel silly making this elementary point, but freedoms can't ever be absolute in a society of more than one humans. Even in the US I bet you're free to drive, but you're not free to drive drunk. You're free to have sexual relations, but not with a minor. You're free to walk anywhere you like but not in other peoples' property and not on the streets with the cars (which btw is perfectly fine in Europe and it's rules about jaywalking that are "pants on head" for us).

These are rules. Societies have rules. They should have them. There's no problem with that.

And now my 16-year old self is very disappointed that I've grown up to be a conservative, establishmentarian fossil.

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[1] Coincidence. We're not all called something-akis.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_whipping

Clearcast is a private body owned by the broadcasters. The BCAP code is issued by the Advertising Standards Authority which, despite the name, is an industry self-regulation body.

It appears to be established in law that Clearcast is an assistance service, and approval doesn't seem to be sufficient or necessary by law to ensure advertising is legal. It establishes risk, rather than making a legal finding.

If Mullvad's ad was 'banned' by Clearcast, what happened is that their ad didn't meet the standards that the industry has set for itself and the broadcasters didn't want to touch it.

(edit - does this make it 'better'? I don't know. It seems to me a bit like the situation in the US with HOAs, which heavily restrict what you can and can't do with your property, but aren't exactly government either. But I favour accuracy over emotion when talking about this stuff, which is why I wanted to point out the actual structure of the system here.)