Your Smartphone, Their Rules: App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship

If it's not done on the basis of jurisdiction, then laws about what constitutes illegal content in Germany or China or United States applies to everyone.

Taking the stance of "we're not going to follow any laws and publish everything" puts the companies in very difficult places in those countries as publishers of the content.

>While censorship is one thing, they forgot another overlooked ability of these app stores: pushing unwanted apps/services to our personal devices without our knowledge

When was the last time the play store or app store pushed apps "without our knowledge"? I've only heard of it done by shady third party bloatware that OEMs bundle with the OS. The actual issue is a system that can perform OTA updates, not app stores themselves.

Censorship by a website moderator means you need to move to another website to express your ideas. Censorship by the government means you need to move to another country.

Censorship on an app hosting page means you need to host your app somewhere else. Censorship on the only app hosting page allowed means you can't host your app at all.

I think it's inversely correlated with power, influence and reach. HN and Reddit don't have guns, can't throw you in prison, and there are lots of social medias to choose from, so a fair bit of censorship can be tolerated. Apple can't deport you, but you also don't have a lot of other choices, very low tolerance for censorship. The Government can really ruin your life if you get on the wrong side and your options for changing it or escaping it are pretty limited, we should demand the highest levels of transparency. Sure, some secrecy around military and intelligence for a little while, but we should eventually know what they decided and why.

It's ok when users have choice. Those who don't like HN moderation can hang out somewhere else (and many do).

Not using app stores isn't an option for most users, especially on iOS.

But is HN the only forum for tech discussions available to you?

The whole point is that both phone platforms are required to participate in modern life. Imagine if your water or electricity company decides not to supply your house. There is a reason such fundamental services are made into universal rights and do not follow the usual competition rules.

Apple/Google can’t be both the store, the device and the OS.

Moderation is okay when it properly adjusts signal-to-noise ratio of discussion.

Censorship is about suppressing opinions which fall out of Overton's window, which is not okay, as all it does is to enforce status quo.

There was a good blogpost by Ex-reddit engineers about it where the idea was to treat it as signal which you cannot understand, and your core purpose as moderation(from automated PoV) is to adjust the signal to noise ratio without being able to comprehend/read the underlying data.

A bit hypocritical of them, looking at how reddit's moderation works.

Frankly i'm also against private censorship in case of social media - as it is basically outsourced government censorship.

In the United States reporting on the presence of law enforcement on your street is protected by the first amendment. You can even film them and broadcast their activity in public places to the world.

You may not like it. Apple may not like it. But there's not much ambiguity here.

"Befehl ist befehl."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

They weren't "just doing their job", they were also doing something else. You'll find the something else as legitimate reasoning for ICEBlock.

At high risk, eh?

Ridiculous take on the situation. You’re either a bot or a maga pos. Not sure which yet.

What of the people that have done nothing wrong that were just living their lives now at high risk because of ICE’s ridiculous false agenda?