[Yetanfou]

Twitter was and is used to coordinate illegal behaviour, the riots of last summer are a good example. When will Google and Apple ban Twitter?

They won't. The question is why Twitter is allowed on these platforms but not Parler or Gab or whatever other Twitter-competitor.

[tzs]

Twitter moderates user content. They have suspended or banned a large number of accounts for calling for violence, or even for wishing ill upon people (e.g., a lot of people got suspended for Tweeting when Trump got COVID that they hoped he would die from it).

Parler does not. There are numerous accounts on Parler calling for the killing of Pelosi, Biden, Pence, Chief Justice Roberts, assorted judges that ruled against Trump's lawsuits, state and local election officials, Republican governors and legislators who are not fighting hard enough for Trump, and numerous others. There were numerous accounts their calling for storming the Capital on January 6th and stopping the electoral vote counting using any force necessary to achieve this.

In short, Twitter is not banned because Twitter tries to comply with Apple's and Google's requirements to moderate user content and remove threats of violence, and Parler is getting banned because they do not.

[Yetanfou]

There is a plethora of similar content to be found on Twitter so that is not the reason.

The mentioned platforms also moderate user content, they just have different guidelines. Both claim to follow the law in that they take down content which violates it. Both claim that only illegal content is taken down. That is, as far as I can see, in line with the expectations for a platform to be considered a "common carrier" and as such be freed from liability for its users' content. Platforms which go beyond this by moderating on different grounds run the risk of being considered publishers and as such to be held responsible for their users' content. If Apple and Google put further demands on those platforms the question becomes who eventually is responsible for user content, this might end up being Apple and Google. That, in turn, should make developers think twice whether they benefit from being on those platforms. The alternative is to deploy to the web without any "native" apps (which often are not much more than rehashed web apps to begin with) which opens their product to a wider user base without needing to bend to the will of third parties.

This would be a good thing in my opinion. The time for "native" apps has come and gone, the time for the web has been there for a long time but this might just be the push needed to convince developers to make it their prime focus. This goes especially for communications-focused products since those derive their usefulness from being connected to the 'net anyway. There is still a place for native apps - offline mapping, offline media players, hardware-interfacing apps like Wifi-scanners, step counters etc - but those tend not to be the ones which end up in hot water anyway.

[tzs]

> Both claim that only illegal content is taken down.

Twitter's content policy explicitly bans several things that are not illegal [1] [2] [3].

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...

[2] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorification...

[3] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misin...