Apple Inc. has a good side and a bad side.
A strong work ethic, oodles of innovativeness, much neat technology.
But a taste for censorship and a willingness to abet the censorious efforts of China’s totalitarians.
One manifestation of Apple’s contempt for unfettered discourse? Its apparent threat to kick the Twitter app off the iOS platform now that Twitter is run by someone friendlier to freedom of speech than the previous management.
Obnoxious though this would be, it’s not half as horrible as knowingly facilitating Chinazi repression. Yet Apple has recently crippled the iPhone AirDrop feature that protestors in China have used to share files like videos of the surging protests against the government’s insane zero-COVID mega-lockdown policies.
Because of a new iOS update, iPhone users in China — and only in China — can now only send files to persons not on their contact list for just ten minutes, hampering the ability of protesters and others to evade Chinese government censorship.
The company’s officers read the news. If Apple really didn’t intend to do this, all it has to do is roll out another update pronto to restore full AirDrop functionality.
Reclaim the Net notes, however, that Apple has often helped the Chinese Communist Party conduct its censorship: for one thing, by removing thousands of apps from its Chinese store at their behest. The deleted apps include VPN apps that helped users evade China’s wide-ranging and determined censorship of the Internet.
Think Different, Apple, not in lockstep with tyrants.
