At the South by Southwest conference, CNNMoney’s Dylan Byers spoke with Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue about what is and is not allowed on the company’s app stores.
We think when you have a large platform, there’s a lot of responsibility…. We came up with guidelines that had to be followed in order to participate in there. The other part is that nobody is completely free. There’s no such thing as free. There’s no pornography on any of [Apple’s] sites. So, people do draw lines, and you can decide where you want to draw the line. We do think free speech is important, but we don’t think white supremacy or hate speech is free speech that’s important to be out there… We denied bomb-making apps, apps that were submitted into our store that would teach you how to make a bomb, we just don’t think that’s something we want on our platform, and so we draw those lines.
We draw a set of guidelines that are published, so everyone in the world can read them. If it doesn’t follow the guidelines, we obviously don’t allow it in the store. And, we do think it’s important… we have certainly the NRA TV app, we also have pro-gun control apps in our store. It’s important for America and the world to have debate on certain issues, from that standpoint, but if it falls off – I’ll give you an example – from day one, we decided that we did not want our App Store to be a place that you buy and sell guns and so we don’t allow apps that allow you to buy or sell guns. And, again, free speech is something we stand behind and it is important, but that doesn’t mean it’s everything. — Eddy Cue
Direct link to video here.
MacDailyNews Note: The NRA TV app is available on Apple’s App Store for Apple TV devices here and requires tvOS 9.2 or later.
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