I can’t help but think about the long game here. Are there complex PR strategies that could potentially be employed here by Apple and Facebook together?
I wonder if this ‘fight’ represents some sort of controlled opposition by a few Silicon Valley tech giants to win favorable regulation for the tech industry as a whole: by showing a fake rivalry Apple and Facebook (and others) can carefully control the overall narrative, and although this story focuses on a negative issue (which, let's be real, is not much worse than the average person having already soured on Facebook anyway), it could lead to incomplete, premature, pro-corporate laws, rapidly lobbied for, and passed, by mostly tech illiterate lawmakers (just look at all the senate hearings the past few years [1]).
To the average citizen, these new laws will seem like a transparent and proper attempt to address the major problems in the tech/adtech space, but in reality they are psuedo-solutions, as they do not tackle the underlying root causes. In the end it allows the tech corps to slightly adjust their products (small concessions in the short term), after which they will slowly repurpose the old mechanisms into new shells, and continue with business as usual.
I think a Prop22-inspired PR playbook/campaign is also in full motion here.
This seems like corporate-capitalist gaslighting of the working class in one of it’s most advanced forms.