The ideas are certainly adjacent and I would be remiss for not saying that the act of censorship is part of what Bradbury was writing about… sort of. Censorship inherently is the act of reducing the onus of thought to the individual, which is, at its core, the discussion he’s making, but censorship is more the product of that notion rather than the notion itself. Luckily, Bradbury was quite explicit in revealing why he wrote the book, but often cited several (linked) reasons.

His first description was that, as you alluded to, he was worried that book burning was going to spread like fire, pun intended, on the heels of WWII.

>“When I heard about Hitler burning the books in the streets of Berlin, it bothered me terribly. I was 15 when that happened, I was thoroughly in love with libraries and he [Hitler] was burning me when he did that…. The reason why I wrote Fahrenheit is that I am a library person and I am in danger of someday writing something that people might not like and they might burn. So it was only natural that I sat down and wrote Fahrenheit 451.”

But later, he describes the motivation similarly, but expounds on the seed that would instigate those behaviors, or, rather allow them to proliferate:

>“I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago [1952]. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.”

Bradbury took care to characterize the lifestyles, archetypical beliefs, cultures, etc. which might produce a civilization that would be apathetic and more interested in panam et circenses, so to speak.

Indeed, they’re linked, which is why it’s often described as a book about censorship. But I’d submit that censorship is more of a character in the book more than the point of the book.