Tim Cook: Why I took Parler from Apple’s App Store

Tim Cook: Why I took Parler from Apple’s App Store

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“We saw the incitement to violence that was there,” Cook told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”.

“We do not believe that freedom of expression and incitement to violence have an intersection.”

The ability to prevent billions of people from easily accessing a social network is a heavy responsibility – that critics of all political beliefs have argued that it does not belong to the hands of some selected millionaires and billionaires who run the world’s largest companies. Some critics of Apple’s decision and its cohort to ban Parler have argued that taking the app off the market will take participants to obscure Internet channels – and potentially deeper into the rabbit hole of radicalization.

But Cook contested that it is Apple’s role to host all services, regardless of their content. He noted that Apple has terms of service for its hosts’ 2 million apps, and apps that refuse to follow the rules are not allowed to access Apple’s general public.

“Obviously we don’t control what’s on the internet, but we’ve never seen that our platform should be a simple replication of what’s on the internet,” said Cook.

Apple will welcome Parler – as long as Parler finds a new cloud provider to host the social network – if the app effectively moderates users’ speech, said the CEO of Apple.

“We just suspended them,” noted Cook. “If they managed to moderate it, they would be back there.”

The Apple CEO criticized other technology companies for their lack of ideals – including sacrificing users’ privacy in pursuit of profit. But Apple, the most valuable company in the world, needs to exercise caution. Its substantial size and power means that any controversial move could slip into the shoes of regulators who sued other Big Tech companies, including Google and Facebook, for violating antitrust law. Forcing other companies to bow to their will will not make Apple’s case any easier if it finds itself under scrutiny for allegedly abusing monopoly power.

Still, Cook argued on Sunday that running a technology company is more than making a lot of money. He said on Sunday that he believes Apple’s mission must be to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. The company and its employees are always trying to do the right thing – a mission that motivates them to come to work every morning.

This helped to influence his decision about Parler – particularly after the siege of the Capitol.

“It was one of the saddest moments of my life – seeing an attack on our Capitol and an attack on our democracy,” said Cook. “I felt like I was in some kind of alternate reality, to be honest with you. This couldn’t be happening.”

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