Apple makes Navalny app available once again in App Store in Russia

Apple has resumed allowing users in Russia to download an app run by supporters of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after criticism that it was kowtowing to the Russian government’s censorship demand.

Joseph Menn and Greg Miller for The Washington Post:

Law enforcement agents had repeatedly threatened the top Apple and Google officials in Russia with arrest in September unless they removed Navalny’s “Smart Voting” app, which included more than a thousand endorsements of candidates for seats in Russia’s legislature.

Those demands came as voting was about to begin, and both companies complied. Google later reinstated the app for Android phones soon after the election, while Apple did not…

Apps are an especially critical form of communication in Russia now because the country’s censorship apparatus has not been able to block or modify content flowing from installed apps to users’ phones.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple is far too accommodating to censorship.

As SteveJack wrote for MacDailyNews last September:

The weaponization of private corporations by authoritarian/totalitarian governments or governments with authoritarian/totalitarian leanings works like this:

1. Centralized government has too much power.

2. Centralized government uses that power (regulation, taxation, etc.) to threaten private businesses to bend to their will (regardless of any constitutional restraints on the government itself; it uses private businesses to enforce unconstitutional actions that the government cannot legally impose).

3. Private businesses do what the government wants or they’ll find doing business very difficult, if not impossible.

4. Big tech, which also has too much concentrated power, bans people, apps, and censors media outlets for questioning the government or reporting facts that could potentially damage government office holders/seekers.

That Apple has become the face on the screen – along with Google, Twitter, Facebook – in their own “1984” revolutionary ad, is sadly ironic.

An Apple that lived up to its own iconic “1984” branding effort would throw hammers, not repeatedly cower in a corner, bowing to every government’s authoritarian whim, whispering, “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

Apple’s leadership is morally bankrupt.

Apple’s leadership is very good at using its vast resources to order and elegantly assemble parts cheaply in order to sell them at huge margins, generating enormous profits, but, in any time of even the remotest stress, it spinelessly lacks a moral compass even as it repeatedly proclaims its own particular brand of morality in an unending orgy of pitiful, often-nauseating virtue signaling.

I long to see an Apple again with a leader who will say “No,” not just when it’s convenient, and speak truth to power not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard.

As Potter Stewart said so well: “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.”

Mass surveillance, too, reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.

And that goes for any society, not just Russia.

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. — Tommy Smothers

SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer, and contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.

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