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Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

nytimes.com

21–30 of 200 posts

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#21
Remember all the people that made fun of "don't be evil" as a motto? This is what happens when you're motto is just, "how much is evil and its cheap evil sweatshop labor contributing to the bottom line today?"

(Also, touchbar = Darth Vader. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NCm_-GZ-Dc )

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#22
post #4

bowing to Chinese dictatorship, so sad. then again, Facebook/Snapchat also has no shame bowing as well. good thing Google has a backbone

> bowing to Chinese dictatorship, so sad

Not really. NYT has solidly established themselves as a fake news site. It's very reasonable to protect the public from such propaganda sites that post fake news, do you not agree?

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#23
post #2

Looks like the Chinese government would like to ensure that its citizens do not fall victim to 'fake news' and has thus taken on the responsibility of 'fact checking'.

China's been 'fact checking' far longer than the internet has existed.

The internet started in 1969 and the Chinese Communist Party forced the legitimate government to retreat to Taipei in 1949.

So China has been fact checking for twenty years longer than the internet has existed.

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#25
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"

source: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/commu...

"Blocking misinformation will help protect the [Facebook's] brand and credibility."

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/facebook-an...

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#26
post #4

bowing to Chinese dictatorship, so sad. then again, Facebook/Snapchat also has no shame bowing as well. good thing Google has a backbone

How did Facebook bow to China? AFAICT we are still blocked there. Disclaimer: I work for FB, this is my personal opinion

There were some recent rumours that FB is going to enable censoring tools to be able to return to China.

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#27
post #2

Looks like the Chinese government would like to ensure that its citizens do not fall victim to 'fake news' and has thus taken on the responsibility of 'fact checking'.

If you're trying to make fun of fact checking fake news, that is a totally facetious comparison. The whole point of fact checking is that the fact check / rebuttal is put side by side or preceding the original claim, with evidence and its own citations. You're not prevented from seeing the original claim, even if statistically fewer people see the original claim.

If the Communist party decided to replace all online censorship with modals saying how wrong the website was, and you could just click through the modal, I would consider that progress in China.

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#28
post #11
post #8

I wonder what is the largest legal entity a company like Apple or Google would be willing to flip the middle finger to and say "No, you are ridiculous, feel free to ban us." At some point the demands just become so onerous that you either have to have separate SKUs for that legal region (extra expensive) or you have to put the same backdoors or restrictions in all your products (which makes the product inferior for c…

Apple clearly isn't going to, although at least they have a very pro-encryption stance that we already know China isn't keen on. Google already bowed years ago. They tried to stay out of China on principle with search didn't they? But in the end the market was just too big and they entered it. It's easy to take a principled stance against North Korea (where users don't get a choice) or a smaller country that's pretty…

Google did back out of mainland China - they're only available in Hong Kong and lost 98% of their Chinese search market share because of it.

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#29
post #10

Can anyone from China list what U.S. news apps are available? I would love to know who sold out.

Honestly, English language material isn't a huge priority for censors in China most of the time. You'd have to be _extremely_ prominent and cover issues relevant to the CCP's interest before I'd assume "sold out" is more likely than "ignored by the censors".

[It seems reasonable to note, here, that the same logic applies to coverage of the American government -- despite the lack of censors. Perhaps they leverage access to privileged information -- why leak something important to someone who dredges up garbage about you the other six days a week.]

Re: Apple Removes New York Times Apps from iTunes Store in China

#30
I remember when Apple removed the App that reported on US drone strikes and civilian casualties.

I remember that Reddit bans foreign news outlets from its news subreddits.

I remember that Facebook censored people trying to post Snowden Documents in the US.

This is a global phenomenon. We should do everything in our power to reverse this trend in the United States so that we have the credibility to criticize China for doing the same.

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