No, it's bad faith to pretend that some random Fediverse server that allows unfettered hate speech has the same societal impact as the mountains of misinformation and bigotry that flourish on Twitter and Facebook, despite their half-hearted efforts to look like they're fighting it.
Have any of the Fediverse apps that were banned from the app store done anything to prevent the issues that you say Facebook and Twitter have? I'll take the simple banning of a harmful server on their app as a way to change my mind on this issue.
I'm not defending these hypothetical Fediverse apps that don't moderate. I'm saying that compared to Fediverse apps exposing a few thousand people to hate speech, Facebook and Twitter actively promoting bigotry, propaganda and conspiracy theories to tens or hundreds of millions of people is far more harmful — even if they make a nominal effort to prevent it from happening.
And, more to the point, I'm alleging that the reason Google is taking down the Fediverse apps and not Facebook or Twitter has nothing to do with their moderation policies, and everything to do with money.
They have done exactly that multiple times. For example, the app Tusky has a hardcoded list of hate-speech instances for which the login is blocked, to just give you one example.
Other than that, the instances themselves simply choose not to federate with questionable instances. This happens in an almost organic way where if an instance refuses to block federation with another questionable instance, other instances will then also refuse to federate with that instance.
The result is a network where hate-speech and undesirable content has been almost organically filtered out.
But keep in mind that the (client) apps themselves are more like web browsers. Anyone can host their own website and access its content through one of these apps. This also means that instances which are blocked by an app can very easily circumvent that as well.
(Sorry for my bad english and repeatedly using the word "instances")
I asked about the apps that were banned from the play store. Tusky is still available on play store. Maybe their hardcoded list of hate-speech instances were enough for Google to keep them on the play store?
Just look at the scale at which Facebook enables the distribution of right-wing propaganda: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/technology/what-if-facebo...