> apparently the mods have started deleting any negative opinions of him off the Homestuck reddit

This is incorrect. There are a handful of removed comments on the main post about Gio's article, but most of those were not for or against Gio and were removed for unrelated reasons, and the remaining two were pure mudslinging (the comments being top-level and consisting of "Me when I am a transmisogynist" and "Then try again, dimwits.", the latter in response to the post title). Makin did ban one outspokenly anti-Gio account on suspicion of being a sockpuppet, but several others have made similar criticism without any such action. For completeness, in looking through the moderation log, I found two anti-Gio comments from a larger argument tree that seem to have been caught in the abuse and harassment filter for some reason, which I restored.

It's possible that I've missed one or two mod actions in the last four days, among the spate of vacuous reaction posts to the animated series, but if there's a broad censorship campaign afoot Makin would have to be somehow hiding it from his own staff.