Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

I think most people understand there are many places to buy stuff.

Shopping malls are 'one kind of place' and they have special rules.

I haven't set foot in a Mall in a few years literally, they can't be that important.

If there is no crime in publishing the content then overturning special protections in section 230 will have no effect.

>If you own a building, and someone writes a bomb threat on a bathroom stall, are you guilty of a bomb threat?

If you have a magazine, and publish letters to the editor that contain bomb threats, yes. A building isn't a publishing business, and these companies are in the business of publishing, but it turned into publishing on computers and suddenly they get a special exemption.

They choose what goes on their platform, who can go on it, what is said. They've demonstrated amply their ability to control speech and enforce policy. Let them have their platforms, let them have the liability like everyone else.

It's all just equal treatment under the law.

> This is just plain false. The dictionary definition [1] disagress with you, Wikipedia explicitly mentions private private organisations [2]. Religion institutions have censored a lot of things in the past [3]. If what you said were true, government censorship would not be a phrase people used as it would be a pleonasm.

Nice strawman, but that wasn't my argument. My statement was quite clearly not about the definition but the historical position of the censor. Let's first take the etymology of the word and examine it in context shall we? The Roman Censor was a magisterial position that in addition to running the census in regular intervals also responsible for morality laws also known as regimen morum. It was under the regimen morum that Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth and his censorship which led to his sentence of drinking hemlock and ultimately, death. We can look at early China and see similar themes arise in that the position of the censor was typically a governmental magistrate with high authority in place to regulate moralistic behavior.

When the enlightenment philosophers started espousing free speech movement they were fighting against monarchical tyrants who were trying to quell the dissent from a relatively new invention, the press. Sadly during this time the Catholic Church was also engaging in the Spanish Inquisition, the slaughter of Jews and Non-Conformist counter establishment churches. Freedom of Conscious, the ability to choose ones own morals, religion, method of governance, the denouncement of the absolute authority of monarchs were all part of the boiling pot that made free speech thinkers and ultimately those who wrote the US constitution encode the rights of all people to speak freely without consequence from governmental authority.

However, that is not to say that what you say is without consequences, a spoken threat can still be grounds for civil or criminal prosecution, likewise so can libel or slander be grounds of a lawsuit. Furthermore, while the enlightenment philosophers who espoused free speech are often credited for those freedoms we currently enjoy, not many of them endorsed the concept of universal toleration. You see, there is a difference between freedom of conscious, speech, expression, and religion vs universal toleration. Universal toleration is the idea hate speech, the suppression of minority opinion, community persecution of morality, pornography of all forms regardless of the level of exploitation involved including but not limited to child porn, and snuff films, must be tolerated without let or limit.

There exists a boundary, a line of demarcation, which can be used to separate what is tolerable with what is not and that line is consent. Can the parties involved in an activity consent to that activity? Two gay people aren't hurting each other, but threatening to beat them up certainly is. What is the age of consent vs the age of maximal maturity? Are sex workers a blight on society or are the conducting business on their own terms. Do people doing drugs deserve prison? These are intellectual and philosophical quandaries, some of them I fall into one side or the other on. Personally I would like to see voting, drinking, drug use, age of consent, what age you can enlist at, etc all be raised beyond even 21. But the one thing I think we can all agree on is that if you do something, with the intent and purpose to harm another then that is intolerable.

So where does that make me fall on the corporate censorship debate? Well there are different kinds of corporate censorship, the kind that I abhor and the kind that I endorse. I abhor the idea of a corporation censoring press about them when it shows them in a negative light despite uncomfortable truths. But if I am running a platform and people are spreading content that is contrary to my intent, that I could consider harmful to my business, specifically hate speech that is intended to suppress a group or ideal then that to me is not even censorship, it is moderation of content and editorial discretion, and I fully endorse that.