If not, then why is the removal of an app from the app store censorship? The world wide web still exists. Parler is still on the internet.
Seems like there should be some acknowledgement that there's a difference between refusing to actively participate in distributing content and censorship.
Which is to say, it's true, & that's a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the censorship itself isn't bad.
The most effective, most powerful communication medium that exists right now is native apps for social networks on smartphones. If 100% of that medium is controlled and censored by two companies, that means those two companies exert a massive influence on what kinds of communication society as a whole will have.
If you believe in the general principle of free speech (not just strict legal interpretations of say the 1A), that's not a good thing.
That's practically illegal now, too. What a time to be alive...
The better analogy is that the newspaper has banned certain people who have written articles inciting violence.
Or maybe an even better analogy: the movie theater has taken the microphone away from the person telling those in the crowded movie theater to start punching each other.
My analogy is far more accurate than your tortured newspaper analogy. Parlour still gets to publish unrestricted as a web site and as web apps, it just doesn’t get free distribution, marketing and hosting from Google or Apple.
Except you can sideload on Android.
And as much as I dislike the Catholic Church, not allowing it to list books it finds heretical is outright restrictions of its freedom of speech. It’s only a problem when the church has the power to have governments also ban those lists, but that’s quite a different thing.
This is assuming services like Cloudflare and hosting services won't cut Parler - they've done this before
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
And actually, the more I think about it, this is a more apt analogue to what's happening with Paler then first engages the mind...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest#:~....
And this is yet another escalation on the road that started with “we’re just going to censor tweets that literally say the sky is green.” Google has banned an entire social network.
It’s exactly what social conservatives did back when they controlled the levers of government and industry in the mid-20th century. They prevented liberals from spreading their ideas, because that could cause social unrest, violence, etc. (And there was violence, such as anarchist leftist bombings.)
That’s freedom in both directions.
At its worst Hollywood created a black list for alleged communist sympathizers. That was a very specific kind of rating system for the same benefits. Most Americans were justly terrified of the Soviet Union and its genocidal leadership at the time, and distributing a film written by or starring someone who publicly endorsed communism would have killed box office and likely had the studio boycotted by large anti-communist groups.
That said, the black list unfairly included lots of people who were at most interested in social justice.
Today the same thing has happened to Mel Gibson and us happening to Johnny Depp. Don’t expect your employers to invest their millions into help you promote repugnant behavior or beliefs to their customers.
If WalMart sold ice cream to white people, but not to black people, that would be pretty awful both morally and it would be illegal.
The thing with speech is it is inherently attached to a person. There is no speech in a vacuum. Google has basically said that certain people shouldn't be able to speak. As politics is a personal belief like religion, it is sad it is not a protected civil right. But that's what this is--saying certain people can express their beliefs, but others can't.
censorship of viewpoints you disagree with means you don’t understand the point of freedom of speech.
Say you had two stores: Walmarket and Toget. That's it. That's all you got. Toget stops telling a brand of ice cream and you literally cannot sell it anywhere else other than Toget and Walmarket because someone would have to drive 2 hours out of their way each time to buy your Ice Cream.
You have Android, iOS and PinePhones.
Where I live there is indeed no importer of certain brands of products that I could easily get in the US. Not even an equivalent alternative.
But life goes on and aside from me complaining about it on the internet every now and then I don’t let it bother me.
Social media and communication are a different beast.
I mean, Parler is a CRUD app. You are posting a comment on another CRUD app that doesn't even have an official mobile app client!
Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Facebook and Twitter are older than push notifications. SMS and email are pretty obvious replacements with little functional difference.
> Let's not kid ourselves. People rarely use the browser for something they really like on mobile if there is a native app. The experience is very different.
Sure, but you are pretty clearly moving the goalposts. Is it any more difficult to enter "news.ycombinator.com" into a mobile web browser than it is to download a mobile client?
There is also ongoing work to add Push API [0] support on the web as well. No Safari support though.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
Can't service workers/PWAs handle this? While the UI may be subpar, they still have total access to it.