But from a tech/convenience perspective, the web is pretty...janky. Native apps are where it's at. And those have centralized gatekeepers with absolutely no freedom of expression.
It's not just conservative-ish stuff like Gab that gets hit. Another example is Apple refusing to accept an app that sent notifications when the US assassinated people via drone strikes. I think this does real damage to the polity; this is an important political message that cannot be delivered by the most salient medium because of corporate censorship.
And in the artistic or gaming realm, there's all sorts of "adult themed" stuff that'll get you rejected from the store. It's like a return to the 50s before the various Ferlinghetti obscenity trials.
Do you think the app-equivalent of Lolita or Howl or the Tropic of Cancer of even American Psycho would ever make it onto the app store today? Highly unlikely.
(Maybe you don't think apps are as important as books, but I think they will be.)
(And again, more generally, the interesting thing is we seem to have rapidly culturally shifted, where many people value the desire to be protected from disruptive speech more than the freedom to speak without disruption.)
Sure, the web is pretty janky now, but it's the future (if we have one for apps). Native apps are doomed. Progressive web apps are catching up fast, and the good ones are already providing a more seamless experience, particularly on mobile, than native apps can. Ask yourself, how many users now, on average, install new apps on their device from an app store?
And your example of Apple, while true, only puts a fine point on this. What developer wants to write 3 different apps instead of just one that works across all platforms? And Steve Jobs knew this and pushed devs to build iPhone apps using standard web technologies.
I do think app platforms are natural monopolies, so I wonder if the best thing to do is regulate them somehow to ensure openness. E.g., require any app to be installable that does not actually do illegal things.
It's seems kind of heavy-handed, but the current situation of Apple heavily restricting the kinds of apps we can have seems very non-ideal to me, too...
(The web is a great escape hatch for all of this, as pointed out by some other commentators, but I think native is where the action is, and it'd be nice to have web-levels of freedom there, too.)
I think the key change here is how completely radicalized even the mainstream has become. This popular defense of actual neo-Nazis would be unthinkable even just 20 years ago. But now we see the power of common interests (ending all immigration) and the terminal logic of "the enemy of my enemy."
https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...
I'm not sure I see a huge difference, in practice.
"But if you don't like Twitter's policies, you can just make your own app." Sure, like Gab, which was subsequently banned from both the Google and Apple app stores for not itself censoring. Not a lot of breathing room when the modern communication mediums are dominated by a duopoly.
But that's all tangential to my point, which was referring to the cultural appreciation of free speech.
It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when site's like Twitter claimed to be strong supporters of speech as both a principle and a practical reality to strive for.
Nowadays, the more common attitude is, "if we allow people to speak freely, they will spread conspiracy theories, fake news, and hateful thoughts harmful to society, so these ideas must be suppressed."
In just a few years, the zeitgeist has gone from valuing free speech as one of our most cherished ideals to valuing social cohesion as the most important good.
Pretty crazy.