I'm quite curious about this article, less about the words, more about how it's being received.
It has 43 upvotes in 41 minutes. For a rather bland subject, that's not half bad (point wise), potentially motivated by the political conflict involved, but that happens.
However, in the time I've queued it in my "morning reading", I've refreshed it quite a few times and watched it flag, unflag, flag, unflag at least 5-6 rotations as I've tried to post this comment. I'm legitimately curious as to why there's so much distaste for this with so little discussion. There is certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article, and that could be called out as HN has an excellent (I mean this honestly, comments are very quick to say "this article has no substance, here is why" and I see that as a plus) history of, but the overall question of the potential for political censorship through the increasingly few gatekeepers of walled garden web content does raise some meta questions I've seen HN discuss on many other occasions with far less prompting.
I guess I'm asking two things. 1. Although there is not much empiricism in the article, is there not a meaningful discussion to be had about the above; and 2. I'm curious as to what would incite people to want to flag so hard rather than let a thread get some immediate momentum and then die off from lack of content as it is like to. (It's not even as with the snowden releases where the entire front page was snowden for a good few weeks :) )
> There is certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article
Little evidence? The claim is that this app was rejected and Trump satire apps are allowed - what evidence are you expecting other than the existence of the Punch Trump style apps on the App Store? Do you want a letter signed by Tim Cook saying that the App Store policies are intentionally biased?
You're providing evidence that the outcome exists in the real world. This is true. You are not providing evidence (neither did they) for the motive they described.
A letter would be nice (to the QA testers who vet these games) but because I (having been a QA at one point who could have had the ability to make similar decisions about what gets into games with almost no oversight, training, or checks+balances, albeit for a much more no-name group) really doubt that's the situation, I would also be more swayed by demonstrating a track record for single-party support historically, and potentially contrasting with other app stores over that time period, since I could absolutely see this occuring due to what I mention. (Improper checks and balances, lack of clear guidelines, less formal/consistent vetting process)
My "there is no evidence" should be taken as "the article seemed more conviction by 'THIS IS WRONG' than conviction by 'we find these systemic issues, here is the support for them'. In fact, it loops back to my original comment, in that both the articles and the flaggers were making a statement while providing very little other than the statement itself to support it.
There are satire apps on Itunes targeting Hillary Clinton.
It's very easy to make your case when you cherrypick one data point out of thousands.
Here's an app called Avoid Hillary[0] where you're Bill Clinton trying to dodge his wife. I honestly don't see how a boxing game with Donald Trump is any worse.
I do find it interesting that all of the instances of "Hillary", "Hillary Clinton", or "Mrs. Clinton" are hyperlinks to the WaPo Hillary Clinton topic page, while none of the Trump references are links…
This looks more like an oddity of their CMS, as contextual content tagging is usually automated.
That said considering just how loosely trump throws the word "lawsuit" around and actually acts upon it, it wouldn't surprise me if WaPo and some other media outlets disabled auto-tagging on his name.
It has both 'Hillary' and 'Trump' in the title. Between those who care too much about one or the other, and those sick to death of the mindless prattle, political stories are going to get flagged.
If it were just a matter of creating two political apps, one anti-red and one anti-blue, and observing that the anti-blue one is banned, I'd agree. The article cites 3 different games focussed on simulating violence against Trump, though, which to me is enough to suggest a trend.
It should be possible to come up with ~10 'clone' games (slap trump/hillary with a fish, hit trump/hillary in the face with a pie, etc) by swapping a few assets. Phonegap could be used to deploy the same simple javascript/html5 app on android and iOS. Submit each app to Google/Apple and see what the acceptance rates look like. I would think that would be enough to confirm or disprove the existence of any bias.
Yeah, it's not hard to believe that the decisions were made by two different low level employees, one who knows the rules and the other who doesn't. It's not as if these all get kicked up to Tim Cook's desk at the end of the day (though this one will be, thanks to press coverage)
I attribute it to Apple and other Sillicon Valley companies being in favor of H1B legislations, and Hillary Clinton is the candidate that supports it from the get go.
They are a private enterprise and can do what they want, but the optics aren't great. For the sake of PR they should try and maintain at least the appearance of being unbiased. Perhaps develop a single policy for politically oriented apps, and stick to it in all cases.
PS - Also noticed this was flagged & removed, then restored. Very glad to see it was restored as this is a very relevant thing to be talking about in the current political climate.
> They are a private enterprise and can do what they want
No. Private enterprises have to obey the rule of law. If they don't accept an app, for example, because its developer is Muslim it will be discrimination. They can, however, ban apps with a green background just because.
Another different thing is that as Apple and Google have such a big impact on what people can use or not some extra checks can be in place. They are not a monopoly but a oligopoly.
Not sure I'd put the two apps in the same category other than the fact that they're both political. I haven't played them, but one is appears to be raising awareness about very controversial (and possibly corrupt) behaviour, the other is inciting violence against a presidential candidate. If Apple wants to say "no politics allowed" that's fine by me, they can do what they want. But I think they should follow through with that, and not take sides. At the same time, they should be free to operate however they please within the confines of the law. So to me the only thing wrong with what they're doing is that it just looks bad.
Yeah, I'm of two minds on it. On the one hand, it reflects the current climate and allowing both would be the more "free speechy" way to go. But on the other, I think apps that target an individual person - any individual not just a political leader - I think are exactly as you said - really low value and promoting hate. Either way they go, they should clearly stick to one policy for both sides.
How does "Hide it Hillary" promote hate? It's satirizing something she actually did in real life. "Punch Trump", on the other hand, has violence in it, but even that is not sufficient to claim that it promotes violence.
As pointless as they may seem, the web has a long history of games allowing users to pretend to punch various celebrities, and the "punch famous person X" genre probably predates that. There have also been TV shows like Celebrity Deathmatch, and IIRC one popular show for teens/tweens had its main character use her computer to put the face of another character into a boxing simulation.
I think the cat is out of the bag on the punch X genre for now, but society's tastes can still change over time.
Why should they police what users can do with their devices at all? Providing strong guidance for the purpose of security seems reasonable considering that not everyone is computer-literate.
Anything else, that is policing content, seems self-serving (upholding brand image or whatever), dictatorial (imposing moral values, such as nudity == evil) and user-hostile.
> They are a private enterprise and can do what they want
I'm somewhat skeptical of this argument.
For the lower protocol layers we indeed do have common carrier status/net neutrality rules.
The upper layers ostensibly see competition. But it is competition with strong customer-lockin. Consider people for which a smartphone is a big investment. If they buy an iPhone then they're now part of apple's fiefdom and all their regulations and imposition of moral values.
The "private companies can do what they want" / caveat emptor argument has to stop working at some point in a company's size and pervasiveness. There are loads of examples of things that private companies are not allowed to do.
Some extreme examples for an existence proof: sell DIY pet euthanasia kits, sell candy with bits of embedded glass, bury leaky canisters of toxic waste in the local water table...
Some less extreme examples to help move closer to the line of allowed/disallowed behavior: refuse ER treatment based on ability to pay, refuse to provide phone service based on phone number dialed, refuse to seat a patron based on skin color, refuse to bake a wedding cake based on religion or sexual orientation.
So, having established the existence of restraints on corporate bevavior, and the diversity and reasonableness of many of those constraints, where would the line be drawn for companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google that have an oligopoly on most online communication and mobile software distribution?
For those flagging this, why not try an experiment? Put together two pallette-swapped games, perhaps 'Slap Hillary with a fish' and 'Slap Trump with a fish'. Submit these games to Apple and Google for app store approval.
If you're correct in your assumption that no bias exists, either both or none will be approved. If n=2 isn't enough, this should be easy to run with greater sample size.
The problem (if you could call it that) is that there are multiple people reviewing apps. While there are rules, each person has a different interpretation of them, which results in issues like this.
Go to the iTunes Store. Search for "Hillary".Enough anti-Clinton iPhone and iPad apps show up to indicate that this is an anomaly, not a systemic bias. The fact that a right-wing site got the WaPo to bite on it shows their gullibility rather than Apple's bias.
"In 2002, at an event held to celebrate the Times's 20th anniversary, Moon said: 'The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God' and 'The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.'" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times]
The Washington Times is indeed not at all a trustworthy news outlet. It is incredibly politically biased, to the point of overt absurdity. Due to the name, however, some continue to confuse it with the Washington Post and assume it has legitimate content.
Do they issue 'political guidelines' to their employees doing the screening or do things like these simply get escalated to the top where someone like the CEO makes the decision.
Interesting progression. For a while, it was flagged, and still racking up points at the #1 position, but now it's gone far away.
I wish we could actually discuss the issues raised by situations like this, without the pitchfork and flagging brigades coming out. You would think a site focused on technology could discuss IT security, hacking, and the potential influence of technology companies in shaping and directing political opinion. But unfortunately it tends to get shutdown before anything can get started.
You have to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page. Then (assuming the comment is [dead]) you'll see a 'vouch' link at the top. That's the same place where the 'flag' links for comments appear. If the comment isn't [dead], there's no 'vouch' link, because the reason to vouch for comments is to resurrect them from [dead].
> The system used to say [flagged] only when the story was both heavily flagged and dead (closed to new comments). Now it says [flagged] if the story is heavily flagged, dead or not. Flagged-but-not-dead was the case here. That's why you didn't see a 'vouch' link, btw; there's no need to vouch for posts that aren't dead, since the purpose of vouching is to unkill them.
It's funny to see how holier than thou people get about these topics. Punch Trump "promotes violence" against Trump?? It's a game where you box with Trump (and he boxes back). What is this, the 1950's???
I'm not sure how I feel about corporate censorship. On one hand we have property rights, which I believe in firmly and on the other hand we have freedom of speech/expression.
If we are going. To live in a world where public discourse takes place through private avenues we need to decide as a country which takes precedent, property rights or speech/expression.
Politically I don't care as I am not a US citizen. But just a quick search shows titles like "Never Hillary", "Avoid Hillary", "Hillary Clinton Cross the Road".
Regardless of whether you're expressing a pro or anti-government opinion, on Hacker News comments need to be civil and substantive—you have to actually say something meaningful with basis in reality. It's the genericness that's at issue here because it poisons the spirit of intellectual curiosity that is the basis for this site. We're all here to learn something, so we ask that comments say something.
Anyone that knows anything about the Apple App Store knows this piece is a little uninformed.
1. The two apps were probably reviewed by different people, and approvals from Apple have always been all over the place depending on the reviewer.
"The independent developers said getting approved with Google took less than one hour, while Apple’s denial came after an eight-hour wait."
2. 8 hour wait? Wow. I remember when the App Store had an 8 day review time. Let's keep in mind that Google rarely has a human review it's App submissions, Apple has a human review all of theirs, including updates.
In any case, the second half of this article is a Clinton hit piece, dropping all mention of apps and app stores and recounting again the Clinton emails story and focusing on negative reactions to it.
You're 100% correct, the article is uninformed about normal app review processes. However, the point about Apple rejecting a satirical anti-Hillary app while approving a number of apps depicting and encouraging physical violence towards Trump stands.
IMHO, the article is flawed, and clearly from a biased perspective, but there's enough of a valid point in there for it to stand.
Regardless of Apple's review process, the article makes a good point -- go search the app store for election related terms. There is almost no mention of Hillary, one way or another. In addition to lots of trump themed games, you'll find Fox news, Bernie and foreign elections. When Hillary is mentioned, she is in a screenshot for trump themed games.
Election news apps almost always show Trump in screenshots. It is hard to argue there is no supply of Hillary content if they are preferentially rejecting such apps.
Anyway, Apple's vetting process doesn't seem to be helping get minority (of developer resources) content into the store, and that seems relevant to HN.
I'm afraid that we're not able to discuss interesting technical issues without the overtone of this presidential election's good-vs.-evil campaign (and both sides see themselves as good and the other as evil). We couldn't even have a rational discussion about a secretary of state not being able to use a mobile device with official email. It quickly became a discussion about the evil, corrupt secretary of state killing innocent ambassadors by using a private email server. Every interesting technical issue - and, in fact, every interesting political issue, about how the most powerful government in the world can't provide useful email services to its secretary of state, and how we got there - was drowned out by the good-vs.-evil talk.
I'm afraid that comments about the candidates instead of the technical issues will dominate. I can't even come up with a more silly example than the present one: something happened to Trump but not Clinton, or Clinton but not Trump, and with no evidence that this is about the candidates, it must be that one of them is evil and silencing dissent or paying off Apple or something.
I'm afraid that the tenor of us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil arguments from the rest of the internet is infecting HN.
I'm afraid that well-reasoned criticism of the political candidates is getting ignored just because so much of it is ill-reasoned. If we expect every single article to have paragraphs of "BTW Hillary sux" or "BTW Donald sux", how do we expect to have actual, serious discussions of where the candidates are good or bad.
I'm afraid that articles like this are becoming normal.
One suspects that the underlying story here is: "Of the dozens of political apps submitted recently, some have been accepted and some have been rejected, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Here are two."
It has 43 upvotes in 41 minutes. For a rather bland subject, that's not half bad (point wise), potentially motivated by the political conflict involved, but that happens.
However, in the time I've queued it in my "morning reading", I've refreshed it quite a few times and watched it flag, unflag, flag, unflag at least 5-6 rotations as I've tried to post this comment. I'm legitimately curious as to why there's so much distaste for this with so little discussion. There is certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article, and that could be called out as HN has an excellent (I mean this honestly, comments are very quick to say "this article has no substance, here is why" and I see that as a plus) history of, but the overall question of the potential for political censorship through the increasingly few gatekeepers of walled garden web content does raise some meta questions I've seen HN discuss on many other occasions with far less prompting.
I guess I'm asking two things. 1. Although there is not much empiricism in the article, is there not a meaningful discussion to be had about the above; and 2. I'm curious as to what would incite people to want to flag so hard rather than let a thread get some immediate momentum and then die off from lack of content as it is like to. (It's not even as with the snowden releases where the entire front page was snowden for a good few weeks :) )