Apple Just Permanently Banned Infowars' App from the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Apple Just Permanently Banned Infowars' App from the App Store

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34 pointsMBCook16 comments

Good. Nobody owes Alex Jones his own free publishing platform. Nothing is stopping him from using money to hire "professionals" to set up a colo/hosting environment and do everything on httpd he fully controls. There already is an Infowars website, and as far as I know, its upstream ISP are still happy to take his money. It will have a lot less visitors, though.

This is a joke. They will go after his payment processors, then his DDOS protection, then his domain name, then his infrastructure, and everything else they have been using. Before you know it, you will be telling us to build our own fiber optic networks.

Who are "they"? The "chicom globalists"?

Probably the same people who fluoridate our water to make the frogs gay. /s

I'm not a fan of Alex Jones, I barely know who he is, but all this banning seems a bit risky to me. Hosting companies have generally had "Safe Harbor" protection against liability for content that third parties post on their platforms. However if they actively start policing and censoring content, they're more involved, and might now be more liable in other claims of offensive or defamatory content.

They don’t allow porn in the App Store among other things. He says “everyone is trying to stop him from telling the truth”. Maybe banning him for his actions helped prove his point, but I doubt it gave him more legitimacy than the fact the Trump called-in to his show. I personally think there’s a fine balance between normalizing these people by providing a platform and encouraging free-speech.

They didn’t ban him for promoting a questionable grasp on reality, they seem to have banned him for sharing content of him harassing people or sharing hate speech. Maybe all of these platforms should have a filter that users can disable if they want to see it?

This isn't about legal liability (which is what safe harbor refers to) it's about Apple's ToS.

TFA says app store guidelines say apps that are "defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way" are rejected.

"Holding contributors to a standard" is not legally risky just like HN removing comments that are against the rules is not legally risky.

Apple seems to have made it clear they don't want to be a dumpster.

I imagine that Apple is ultimately doing this for the same reason all businesses do it. There's no reason for a business to unnecessarily restrict its customer base. Apple would like to sell its iPhone to people whether or not they support abortion.

Unfortunately I feel that big corp understands the value of secularism better than the rest of America, perhaps because they are constrained by the imperative to be more effective than their competitors, including with their workforce and customers.

If the "safe harbor" you're referring to is CDA230, you have it quite backwards. They're shielded under that statute even if they ban people and delete things selectively, regardless of the reason.

Under the legal environment at the time CDA230 was enacted, they already had a shield. What they didn't have was the ability to moderate their own platforms and still keep that shield, they had to pick one or the other because if they screwed up and missed something then suddenly they were liable again.

So CDA230 actually encouraged them to moderate their platforms, arbitrarily if they want to. The "moderation" they were expected to do was mostly to remove "indecent" content, but they aren't required to do that or forbidden from removing anything else.

So at least in that respect, Twitter and Apple are doing exactly what they were expected to do.

Makes sense, but I wonder why now. Twitter’s ban?

It was VERY odd that they removed his podcasts but left the apps up. The App Store has much stricter rules than the podcast directory.

I feel like we could just be overthinking it. They probably waited to capture enough evidence to come back with if this blows back on them.

My understanding was the same content that got him removed from the podcast directory what’s available in the app, so I wouldn’t think it would be a hard case to make.

Maybe nobody reported the app until now.

Different teams, different requirements perhaps.

You can't call this website "hacker" news anymore. Hacker culture is supposed to be about openness and anti-censorship no matter who the individual. In celebrating or justifying the censorship of infowars this community has shown it's true colors.

I'm quite frankly ashamed to see what HN has become.

And for those saying it's not censorship it's a private platform. At what stage does it become censorship? * When they ban his web hosting account * When his DNS registrar bans him? * When his payment processor drops him? * When his broadband providers bans him?

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