Many companies face that choice. What I will never understand is why anyone would use a service like that to organise protests against a government that can enforce its censorship rules.

Scale effects. Everyone I know has Whatsapp, some have Telegram and I can count the number of Signal users I know on one hand. It's easier to get a mass protest done via chainmal in WA/Telegram than via Signal.

Also, organising a protest isn't about keeping individual messages secret. You can never keep something secret that you want thousands or hundereds of thousands of people to know about. It's all about getting the message across fast without the government blocking it.

Email is the only reasonably decentralised and diverse messaging infrastructure we have. It's impossible to block without shutting down the entire Internet in a country.

The core problem is that the Internet is both centralized and decentralized at the same time - while the Internet is able to route traffic away from broken cables etc. easily, it is vulnerable to hostile actors who are able to control an entire country's uplinks.

Something like Tor should have been built into the Internet from the beginning... but it wasn't, as the Internet was built on the implicit trust that no one would do harm.