> The point is the app is not being used for ambushing and attacking police at all, because there have been no such ambushes in Hong Kong.
> In no case have protesters caught the police unawares in an ambush, let alone off-duty police.
Right, this is what my questions were conditioned on. It's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on in situations like this when the government is so famously fond of misinformation and control of the press, but there's at least claims out there
[1] that this has happened, along with plenty more examples of more general violence from sources that are not credibly controlled by China.
I don't pretend to know that this claim is true, but it's surprising to me that you are so confident that no such incidents have happened, even in the face of (even possibly false) news reports that it has happened.
More importantly, you're free to make whatever wild guesses that the official story is a lie in a way that Apple perhaps isn't: if the reports of ambushes are even somewhat credible, it's not clear to me how they could push back against a gov't claiming that an app is facilitating attacks on police.
Note that I'm not saying that their hands are definitely tied here, my model of this isn't high-confidence and I'd personally be opposed to the takedown of a communications app in most situations (including this one). I'm just trying to reconcile the reactions here to the norms we currently have around corporations' power relative to gov't.
> or to any example of it being misused in the way the statement alleges.
This is fair; I am filling in the blanks with assumptions a little here: namely, that Apple's statement reflects the pretext of the govt's demand for removal. I also figure that isolated incidents of violence are far from difficult to come by in riots as intense as the ones in question (the Wikipedia page for the protests has a handful of examples). But it seems to me that this context in, say, the US, would be such that Apple would be criticized for refusal to remove the app, with plenty of takes about how irresponsible the decision is (it certainly stands on firmer ground than the new consensus that eg platforms are responsible for cracking down on "hate speech"). The difference here seems to be the legitimacy people grant to the gov't being resisted, and it's again not clear to me that that's a call that a company like Apple could or should be making (beyond broad decisions like whether or not to operate in the country).
Thanks for the thoughtful response by the way: my comment doesn't have a strong position but is exploring some nuance I have questions about, and I know HN isn't really the forum for posting anything but the kinds of neatly-wrapped takes that can be swallowed (or rejected) whole by simpletons. It's always nice to get some engagement with the content of the comment instead of the usual mindless pattern-matching + upvote/downvote that most here are limited to.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/30...