Day: 8 January 2021

Apple Tells Parler to Moderate Better or Lose Its App by Tomorrow ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Ryan Mac and John Paczkowski, Buzzfeed News:

In an email sent this morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Apple wrote to Parler’s executives that there had been complaints that the service had been used to plan and coordinate the storming of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wednesday. The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer.

“We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property,” Apple wrote to Parler. “The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”

Apple gave Parler a day from when it sent its letter to submit a new version of the app alongside a moderation policy. Google did not wait; it pulled the app from the Play Store this afternoon.

From Apple’s letter, as quoted in the article:

Your CEO was quoted recently saying “But I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.” We want to be clear that Parler is in fact responsible for all the user generated content present on your service and for ensuring that this content meets App Store requirements for the safety and protection of our users. We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content.

For what it is worth, it will still be possible to post to Parler from its website even if these apps are removed. It is not as though Parler does not exist on the iPhone after tomorrow when, inevitably, the ostensibly unmoderated platform fails to produce a tighter moderation strategy.

This clearly relates to questions about whether it is fair that users’ native software choices on the iPhone are limited by Apple’s control over the platform and its only software distribution mechanism. It seems reasonable to me that Apple would choose not to provide a platform for apps that have little to no moderation in place. Both Apple and Google disallowed clients for Gab — Twitter but for explicit Nazis — in their respective stores. Apple rejected the app at submission time, while Google permitted it and then pulled it:

Google explained the removal in an e-mail to Ars. “In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people,” the statement read. “This is a long-standing rule and clearly stated in our developer policies. Developers always have the opportunity to appeal a suspension and may have their apps reinstated if they’ve addressed the policy violations and are compliant with our Developer Program Policies.”

Gab now runs on Mastodon, which is a decentralized standard that allows different communities to moderate posts as they choose. There are many Mastodon clients in the App Store, likely because there is not really a singular Mastodon product as much as there are many posts collected through a standard format.

The Mac App Store Turns Ten ⇥ macrumors.com

From the Apple Newsroom on January 6, 2011 [sic]:

Apple® today announced that the Mac® App Store℠ is now open for business with more than 1,000 free and paid apps. The Mac App Store brings the revolutionary App Store experience to the Mac, so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes® account, download and install them in just one step. The Mac App Store is available for Snow Leopard® users through Software Update as part of Mac OS® X v10.6.6.

You know the first interesting thing about this? Apple issued a press release when the iOS App Store turned ten; Apple also posted one the day the Mac App Store turned ten, but it wasn’t about the Mac App Store:

As the world navigated an ever-changing new normal of virtual learning, grocery deliveries, and drive-by birthday celebrations, customers relied on Apple services in new ways, turning to expertly curated apps, news, music, podcasts, TV shows, movies, and more to stay entertained, informed, connected, and fit.

There’s a bit in the release touting the “commerce the App Store facilitates”, and Apple used it to announce $1.8 billion spent on the App Store between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, but that’s it. Also, I want to thank the person who decided that Apple’s press releases do not need to contain intellectual property marks.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the Mac App Store did not get its own anniversary announcement. It could be the case that Apple considers the launch of the iPhone App Store the original, and everything else is simply part of that family. Apple also doesn’t indulge in anniversaries very often — the App Store press release was an exception rather than the rule.

But it also speaks to the Mac App Store’s lack of comparable influence. Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Since its inception, the Mac App Store has attracted its fair share of criticism from developers. Apple has addressed some of these complaints over the years by allowing developers to offer free trials via in-app purchase, create app bundles, distribute apps on multiple Apple platforms as a universal purchase, view analytics for Mac apps, respond to customer reviews, and more, but some developers remain unsatisfied with the Mac App Store due to Apple’s review process, the lack of upgrade pricing, the lack of sandboxing exceptions for trusted developers, the absence of TestFlight beta testing for Mac apps, and other reasons.

Michael Tsai:

Thinking back to the early days of the Mac App Store, I remember how its introduction killed a nascent third-party effort to build a similar store. And I recall how, just months after the store opened, Apple changed the rules to require that apps be sandboxed. […]

The Mac App Store has led a bizarre life in its first ten years — remember when system software updates, including operating system updates, came through the Mac App Store? A 2018 redesign made it look more modern, but it continues to feel like it was ported from another platform. Like the iOS App Store, it faces moderation problems, and its vast quantity of apps are mostly terrible.

There are some bright spots. I have found that good little utility apps — ABX testers, light audio processing, and the sort — are easy to find in the Mac App Store. Much easier, I think, than finding them on the web. It is also a place where you can find familiar software from big developers alongside plenty of indies, software remains up-to-date with almost no user interaction, and there are no serial numbers to lose.

Unfortunately, there remain fundamental disagreements between Apple’s policies and developers’ wishes that often manifest in comical ways. Recently, for my day job, I needed to use one of Microsoft’s Office apps that I did not have installed. I was able to download it from the Mac App Store but, upon signing in to my workplace Office 365 account, I was told that the type of license on my account was incompatible with that version of the app. I replaced it with a copy from Microsoft’s website with the same version number and was able to log in. I assume this is because there is a conflict between how enterprise licenses are sold and Apple’s in-app purchase rules. It was caused in part by Microsoft’s desire to sell its products under as many subtly-different similarly-named SKUs as possible, and resulted in an error message that was prohibited by App Store rules from being helpful. Regardless of the reasons, all I experienced as a user was confusion and frustration. Oftentimes, it is simply less nice to use the Mac App Store than getting software from the web.

Happy tenth birthday to the Mac App Store; it cannot be the best that Apple can do.

Deplatforming Might Work ⇥ vice.com

Jason Koebler, writing for Vice in 2018:

There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning [Reddit’s] most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.

Early results from Data and Society sent to an academic listserv in 2017 noted that it’s “unclear what the unintended effects of no platforming will be in the near and distant future. Right now, this can be construed as an incredibly positive step that platforms are making in responding to public complaints that their services are being used to spread hate speech and further radicalize individuals. However, there could be other unintended consequences. There has already been pushback on the right about the capacity and ethics of technology companies making these decisions. We’ve also seen an exodus towards sites like Gab.ai and away from the more mainstream social media networks.”

I linked to this two years ago when Facebook cracked down on extremist public figures using its platforms, but I figured I would re-up it today.

This is a significant test of deplatforming. It seems to work for media personalities and toxic average users, but will it work for someone who — let’s face it — is still the president of the United States? Will it have significant blowback? I have concerns that it will embolden die-hard followers to commit further acts of violence, but I also think that is a problem for law enforcement and American society as a whole.

I do not think national healing is hastened by broadcast media of any type continuing to permit reckless lies about election fraud from influential figures.

Twitter Bans Former Casino Owner With Cameo Appearance in ‘Home Alone 2’ ⇥ blog.twitter.com

Twitter, perhaps knowing the stakes of suspending the personal account of the president, posted a comprehensive explanation of its reasoning. I have trimmed it to two salient paragraphs:

Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks. After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.

[…]

Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.

I do not understand why Twitter calls this a “permanent suspension” instead of a ban, but that’s what it is.

Even the most powerful people must face consequences. There must be a generally agreed upon line that cannot be crossed. I guess the line for Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook is when their platforms are used to tacitly encourage people to overthrow a fair election in a stable democracy.

Big platforms experimented with taking the laissez-faire moderation style of 4chan mainstream and it backfired. It is long past time that they took a more active role in user moderation.

See Also: Ben Thompson’s piece from yesterday; Mike Masnick today. I often disagree with both on platform moderation issues — see preceding paragraph — but I think they have articulated well why they support a more hands-off approach to moderation more generally, and why they came to believe this ban is due.