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Apple won't sell app that reports on American radio-controlled drone strikes
Sep 28, 2015 9:49 pm
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The current United States political landscape is roly-poly, upside-down. One American presidential candidate this week, Carly Fiorina, bragged that she sold the National Security Agency the servers used to spy on Americans' metadata. American politicians are supposed to be optimistic, freedom-extollers, not dystopian McCarthyites. And Apple, seller of fart apps and a zillion other "offensive" products, and about as good a representative of American capitalism as there is, would seem to be an unlikely censor of news apps. But this week the Apple app store kept the fart apps but shut down the Metadata+ app that reports to users when America kills someone by radio-controlled drones. Apple has a history with this app, turning down artist and writer Josh Begley five times for the app version of his Twitter account @Dronestream, calling it “not useful or entertaining enough” and too narrow in focus. They accepted Metadata+ with its new name, until Sept. 27, when they said, "Apple has removed Metadata+ due to 'excessively crude or objectionable content.'" The app does not show corpses rotting in deserts with vultures circling overhead; it re-reports news already available in all sorts of apps in the Apple store. All it does it tell folks when America has killed someone with a radio-controlled drone. Apple apparently does not want anyone to contemplate the United States' current drone war in aggregate.
— Dronestream (@dronestream) September 27, 2015The current United States political landscape is roly-poly, upside-down. One American presidential candidate this week, Carly Fiorina, bragged that she sold the National Security Agency the servers used to spy on Americans' metadata. American politicians are supposed to be optimistic, freedom-extollers, not dystopian McCarthyites. And Apple, seller of fart apps and a zillion other "offensive" products, and about as good a representative of American capitalism as there is, would seem to be an unlikely censor of news apps. But this week the Apple app store kept the fart apps but shut down the Metadata+ app that reports to users when America kills someone by radio-controlled drones. Apple has a history with this app, turning down artist and writer Josh Begley five times for the app version of his Twitter account @Dronestream, calling it “not useful or entertaining enough” and too narrow in focus. They accepted Metadata+ with its new name, until Sept. 27, when they said, "Apple has removed Metadata+ due to 'excessively crude or objectionable content.'" The app does not show corpses rotting in deserts with vultures circling overhead; it re-reports news already available in all sorts of apps in the Apple store. All it does it tell folks when America has killed someone with a radio-controlled drone. Apple apparently does not want anyone to contemplate the United States' current drone war in aggregate.