IMO the reason Gab was created was because users kept getting banned / flagged on Twitter. So yes, the same standard applies.
The big companies are really limiting speech. You can't have separate black/white bathrooms, in many places your business can't allow indoor smoking, you can't limit employment based on certain things if you want equal opportunity employer benefits, yet we have no protection for speech.
Daily Stormer (which is honestly so crazy I couldn't tell if it was a parody) can't be hosted by any major or minor providers. No one will give them space to speak. When that many companies gets to control all the platforms, when Google can fire a guy for a well thought out opinion, they effectively censor dissenting idea.
I'm not saying I like gab. It's seriously full of voat type users, but they should have a place where they can speak.
Then let's not even bring Progressive WebApps into the mix...
I agree completely. The alternative is that the bad ideas get hidden away, and not seeing the light of day, they begin to fester sort of like social rot. Or worst, people turn to violence. Free speech is not only about being heard, but about weeding out bad ideas.
A great book on the subject is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch. He can explain the importance of free speech much gooderer than I ever could. :)
If you examine the Nazi ideology, it really is at a psychotic level of cynicism. They don't care if you are a true believer, or if you're doing it for the lulz, or if you're a psychopath whose incentives happen to align. So long as you go along, it's fine.
If you go far enough left on the political spectrum, you arrive at the same place. (The rapists and murderers were made into bosses in the Gulag.) However, for some reason, speech that is almost as vile from the left is given a softer treatment.
This horseshoe theory is widely disputed.
It's true that it's a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and Antifa. But crapping on individual human rights in one's political interest is wrong either way, and both groups do that. It doesn't matter if steam is at 220 degrees or 440 degrees. It's going to scald you either way. It doesn't matter how bad, so much as that both are bad!
So I won't be able to find hate speech, racist speech, and speech inciting violence on Facebook and Twitter?
You'll be able to report it, and have a reasonable chance of action being taken on it.
Anecdotally, when I tried Gab, the ratio of violent racist content to normal content was way way higher than on other platforms (even if the absolute amount is much higher on twitter due to popularity, the ratio is lower).