Elon Musk Wants Answers About Apple’s Support Of Censorship
Giving Twitter the boot over ambiguous standards would closely resemble the company s decision to strip Parler, a pre-Musk free speech alternative to Twitter, from the Apple app store last year. Days after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Apple colluded with other tech conglomerates to take Parler offline. Apple and Google barred Parler from being downloaded on their devices while Amazon stripped the platform from its web hosting services.
As nationwide protests broke out in China over the weekend threatening to undermine the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under President Xi Jinping, Quartz revealed that Apple plugged a crack in the regime s Great Firewall that dissidents exploited to communicate. Apple s latest iOS update released in November placed new restrictions on AirDrop, a file-sharing feature on iPhones that allows users to share files directly from one phone to another (and consequently under the nose of government monitors). The update erased unlimited use for Chinese users only.