GoKawiilis a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple’s App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in countries under censorship. Apple later revealed that it had removed the app due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and restored it once that content was removed.
But the decision once again stirred up questions and confusion about Apple’s moderation policies and how it treats different companies. And one company in particular sprang to many people’s minds: X, the Elon Musk-owned platform that stayed on the App Store even as sexualized Grok-generated images of children flooded the platform. What led to Telegram’s removal but X’s ability to stay online?
The answer may be more political than technical. “When you are enforcing your content moderation policy against an entire platform, you are subjecting yourself to the blowback that will happen,” Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown, tells The Verge.
Both Telegram and X have had their fair share of controversies. Telegram, which is headquartered in Dubai, garnered a reputation for having a laid-back approach to content moderation.
“Removing X would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple.”
That’s all to say that, while large and important, Telegram is also seen as a nuisance politically and a problematic platform in its own right. “X has a far stronger base of political support in the United States than Telegram does,” Chander said. That means “removing X would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple” to a degree it wouldn’t receive for taking down Telegram. It was not a first for Apple, either; the company previously removed Telegram due to a CSAM violation in 2018, for a similarly brief period of time.
One instance of illegal content can be enough to get an app removed from app stores, but Apple appears to have taken a very different approach when it came to X’s latest controversy. Late last year, X rolled out an update giving users the ability to edit images on the platform using X’s Grok AI chatbot. Soon after, AI-generated deepfakes that undressed adults and children began spreading across the platform.
Despite all of the pressure on Apple, the company kept X in its store. Instead, it began communicating with X behind the scenes to request changes.
... continue reading