I'm not talking only about stolen pictures. I'm talking more about censorship of ideas, or information Reddit finds inconvenient. For an example, just these days such a ban occured - read about it here[1]; TL;DR: a new subreddit gets created, its moderators are then shadowbanned. I don't care much about the contents of the subreddit (could be just a conspiracy theory), I care about Reddit's reaction, which is pure and direct censorship.
Well, the post is only five hours old. I'd say you should give it another 24 hours. If, at that point, there's still not a comment in that thread with a big red [A], then I agree, that's inexcusable, unless there's some kind of a gag order or other complicated legal thing going on. Heavily-upvoted petitions deserve at least a brief official response.
That said, there could be all kinds of reasonable explanations for what happened, including automated anti-abuse defenses that malfunctioned.
[1] https://archive.today/yBjys