[liberationtech] AppleCensorship.com survey

[Charlie Smith]

Hello!

Apple actively censors their own App Stores all around the world, yet
reveals few details on which apps they censor and why they even censor in
the first place. Instead of waiting for Apple to come clean about its
censorship practices, in January of this year, GreatFire.org launched
applecensorship.com, which allows anybody to check for instances of Apple
censorship in every Apple App Store around the world.

We now could use your feedback to help us make improvements to the website.
We would be very grateful if you could take a few minutes out of your day
to complete our survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CTZ9XGT

Since January, in the China App Store alone, visitors to applecensorship.com
have identified over 1100 apps <https://applecensorship.com/na/> which are
unavailable in China. 82 of those apps are news apps. Apple is actively
making it as difficult as possible for Chinese citizens to use Apple
devices to find information about, for example, the events of 1989 or the
much more recent demonstrations in Hong Kong.

Because of the information provided by applecensorship.com, Bitter Winter,
an online magazine dedicated to religious issues and human rights in China,
discovered
<https://bitterwinter.org/apple-cooperates-with-the-ccp-to-censor-bitter-winter/>
that their app was being censored by Apple. TibCERT <https://tibcert.org/>
(Tibetan Emergency Readiness Team) conducted an analysis of Tibetan apps
being censored in the Chinese App Store. They discovered that of the 119
Tibetan-themed, iOS apps they found in the China App Store, 29 have
been censored
by Apple
<https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2019/jun/apple-censoring-tibetan-information-china>
.

The newest Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index
<https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2019/report/executive-summary/>
highlights how Apple
<https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2019/companies/apple/index/> has
abused their power over online speech, and notes instances of this in
China. According to the report, Apple has not disclosed data around the
content that it removes from its App Store when faced with requests from
the government authorities.

Until Apple comes clean about its censorship practices, we will actively
continue to improve and to promote applecensorship.com and we thank you in
advance for helping us <https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CTZ9XGT>.

Best,
Charlie & the GreatFire.org team
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