Apple cowardly still has not pulled X and Grok from the App Store ↦

The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto in an absolute scorcher in which she minces no words:

Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.

It is absolutely unconscionable that, as of this writing, X is not only still on the App Store but is ranked #1 in “News”1 and that Grok is the #3 free app. Moreover, there has been—as far as I have seen—no public statement from Apple or Cook about this situation in the days, at least, over which it has unfolded. Probably because it is indefensible. Even, if at this point, they removed X/Grok from the store—which, don’t get me wrong, they absolutely should—the question would be “what took so long”? Was there something you had to think over? It suggests the company is hoping that all of this will simply blow over. Which is certainly…a choice.

As Lopatto rightly points out, this exposes Apple’s entire argument that the App Store is there to protect its users for the sham that it has always been.

Nick Heer, writing in his own link to Lopatto’s story, points out “This is why it is a bad idea to rely on private corporations to do the job of regulators and law enforcement.” Yeah. It also points out one of the failures of capitalism at the scale at which these companies operate: there are no market forces that can make an impact here. No number of customers will desert Apple over this that will make so much as a ding on the company’s bottom line. And even if they did, there is only one real alternative, Google, which is doing the exact same thing. The only thing that can force these corporations to act is government regulation—and whoops, this administration has not only pulled the rug out from under its regulatory agencies, it also literally employed the chief perpetrator.

It’s one thing not to expect political activism from large corporations, but to compromise your stated values all in the name of business as usual simply exposes that your values never meant anything in the first place. Lopatto called it right: cowards.

🙄 ↩

Go to the linked site.

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