Free societies have long grappled with balancing artists' right to self-expression with the need to prevent libel, slander, fraud, and treason. At long last, Apple has found the secret for deciding when censorship is acceptable.
"We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you
want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a
book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get complicated, but we have
decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store."
Everyone from Voltaire to Larry Flynt argued that freedom of speech hinged on the rights of the speaker and the message's content. Now we know they were all looking in the wrong place, for Apple has shown us that the medium through which a thought is expressed suffices to justify banning it.
A practical example of Apple's censorship policy is the humor game Sweatshop, which was banished from their app store. Though the game was developed and marketed as a humorous expose of child labor and sub-poverty level wages in overseas clothing factories, one of Apple's reasons for dropping it was the depiction of factory managers blocking fire escapes.
Forgive me for not using this space to explain the workings of satire. I doubt it would do any good.
A second look reveals that the app store's policy is silent on the issue of criticizing a major corporation. The question of whether such criticism may be expressed on a blog seems to occupy a gray area. What do you think?
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
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3 comments:
Yup, this is basically a repeat of what happened with the "Phone Story" game.
Apple has long had an iron fist on their products, so there is no surprise in their doing this.
Their arguments are thin though, just because apps are a new form for speech to take doesn't make it more or less valid than any other form of speech. When the government recognized our intrinsic right to freedom of speech they weren't only protecting it on methods that existed at the time. When the radio was invented, it wasn't okay to censor because it didn't exist at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Apple has the right to disallow products from being offered through their store, the same as any store being allowed to not purchase and sell products they don't wish to offer. So a Christian book store isn't required to sell pornographic material for instance.
Apple should allow any app, but they aren't required to do so.
Nick: The "Phone Story" game sounds like fun. What was their problem with it?
Ben: exactly right. Apple could have fallen back on, "We have the right to decide which products to offer in our store," instead of making a hamfisted attempt to restrict freedom of speech based on the medium.
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