Edit, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
And well, they should probably remove the apps of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc as it's plenty of hate speech there too.
That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting.
I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with awful stuff. It's not that hard to imagine a naive reviewer who doesn't understand the architecture to be confused if they get a report showing screenshots of the app with the content available in it.
This is my concern. These apps are not content hosts, they are akin to Web browsers or RSS readers, but they are small, one-person endeavours that don't have the clout to get Google to notice the difference between the content providers (the individual Mastodon servers) and the ActivityPub client app that these apps represent.
I know one of the devs is thinking to not push the issue as he's worried about his other apps on the same developer account.
The discussion has veered off into censorship issues, but this is a simple 230-ish problem, these apps are not the Mastodon servers that (presumably) some people have had issues with. They are agnostic client readers of the ActivityPub statuses.
There is no way, nor any legal requirement, for a browser like these apps to be held responsible for the million possible bits of content it could consume.
The app is not the service.