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'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

washingtontimes.com

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Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#21

Post by iLoch »

dawnerd wrote: post #11
grej wrote: post #9

They are a private enterprise and can do what they want, but the optics aren't great. For the sake of PR they should try and maintain at least the appearance of being unbiased. Perhaps develop a single policy for politically oriented apps, and stick to it in all cases. PS - Also noticed this was flagged & removed, then restored. Very glad to see it was restored as this is a very relevant thing to be talking about in…

Honestly don't think they should allow apps like hide Hillary or punch trump. They're low value and only promote hate towards the person.

Not sure I'd put the two apps in the same category other than the fact that they're both political. I haven't played them, but one is appears to be raising awareness about very controversial (and possibly corrupt) behaviour, the other is inciting violence against a presidential candidate. If Apple wants to say "no politics allowed" that's fine by me, they can do what they want. But I think they should follow through with that, and not take sides. At the same time, they should be free to operate however they please within the confines of the law. So to me the only thing wrong with what they're doing is that it just looks bad.

Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#22

Post by wyager »

dawnerd wrote: post #11
grej wrote: post #9

They are a private enterprise and can do what they want, but the optics aren't great. For the sake of PR they should try and maintain at least the appearance of being unbiased. Perhaps develop a single policy for politically oriented apps, and stick to it in all cases. PS - Also noticed this was flagged & removed, then restored. Very glad to see it was restored as this is a very relevant thing to be talking about in…

Honestly don't think they should allow apps like hide Hillary or punch trump. They're low value and only promote hate towards the person.

How does "Hide it Hillary" promote hate? It's satirizing something she actually did in real life. "Punch Trump", on the other hand, has violence in it, but even that is not sufficient to claim that it promotes violence.

Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#23

Post by pkinsky »

eli wrote: post #18

Never attribute to malice that which can equally be explained by carelessness. My experience with completely nonpolitical apps strongly suggests the app approval process is very arbitrary and inconsistent across the board.

If it were just a matter of creating two political apps, one anti-red and one anti-blue, and observing that the anti-blue one is banned, I'd agree. The article cites 3 different games focussed on simulating violence against Trump, though, which to me is enough to suggest a trend.

Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#24

Post by danso »

eli wrote: post #18

Never attribute to malice that which can equally be explained by carelessness. My experience with completely nonpolitical apps strongly suggests the app approval process is very arbitrary and inconsistent across the board.

Yeah, it's not hard to believe that the decisions were made by two different low level employees, one who knows the rules and the other who doesn't. It's not as if these all get kicked up to Tim Cook's desk at the end of the day (though this one will be, thanks to press coverage)

Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#26

Post by DasIch »

grej wrote: post #9

They are a private enterprise and can do what they want, but the optics aren't great. For the sake of PR they should try and maintain at least the appearance of being unbiased. Perhaps develop a single policy for politically oriented apps, and stick to it in all cases. PS - Also noticed this was flagged & removed, then restored. Very glad to see it was restored as this is a very relevant thing to be talking about in…

Why should they appear to be unbiased?

Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#27

Post by existencebox »

djrogers wrote: post #16
existencebox wrote: post #8

I'm quite curious about this article, less about the words, more about how it's being received. It has 43 upvotes in 41 minutes. For a rather bland subject, that's not half bad (point wise), potentially motivated by the political conflict involved, but that happens. However, in the time I've queued it in my "morning reading", I've refreshed it quite a few times and watched it flag, unflag, flag, unflag at least 5-6 r…

> There is certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article Little evidence? The claim is that this app was rejected and Trump satire apps are allowed - what evidence are you expecting other than the existence of the Punch Trump style apps on the App Store? Do you want a letter signed by Tim Cook saying that the App Store policies are intentionally biased?

You're providing evidence that the outcome exists in the real world. This is true. You are not providing evidence (neither did they) for the motive they described.

A letter would be nice (to the QA testers who vet these games) but because I (having been a QA at one point who could have had the ability to make similar decisions about what gets into games with almost no oversight, training, or checks+balances, albeit for a much more no-name group) really doubt that's the situation, I would also be more swayed by demonstrating a track record for single-party support historically, and potentially contrasting with other app stores over that time period, since I could absolutely see this occuring due to what I mention. (Improper checks and balances, lack of clear guidelines, less formal/consistent vetting process)

My "there is no evidence" should be taken as "the article seemed more conviction by 'THIS IS WRONG' than conviction by 'we find these systemic issues, here is the support for them'. In fact, it loops back to my original comment, in that both the articles and the flaggers were making a statement while providing very little other than the statement itself to support it.

Re: 'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved

#30

Post by pkinsky »

For those flagging this, why not try an experiment? Put together two pallette-swapped games, perhaps 'Slap Hillary with a fish' and 'Slap Trump with a fish'. Submit these games to Apple and Google for app store approval.

If you're correct in your assumption that no bias exists, either both or none will be approved. If n=2 isn't enough, this should be easy to run with greater sample size.

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