Hello! Apple actively censors their own App Stores all around the world, yet reveals few details on which apps they censor and why they even censor in the first place. Instead of waiting for Apple to come clean about its censorship practices, in January of this year, GreatFire.org launched applecensorship.com, which allows anybody to check for instances of Apple censorship in every Apple App Store around the world.
We now could use your feedback to help us make improvements to the website. We would be very grateful if you could take a few minutes out of your day to complete our survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CTZ9XGT Since January, in the China App Store alone, visitors to applecensorship.com have identified over 1100 apps <https://applecensorship.com/na/> which are unavailable in China. 82 of those apps are news apps. Apple is actively making it as difficult as possible for Chinese citizens to use Apple devices to find information about, for example, the events of 1989 or the much more recent demonstrations in Hong Kong. Because of the information provided by applecensorship.com, Bitter Winter, an online magazine dedicated to religious issues and human rights in China, discovered <https://bitterwinter.org/apple-cooperates-with-the-ccp-to-censor-bitter-winter/> that their app was being censored by Apple. TibCERT <https://tibcert.org/> (Tibetan Emergency Readiness Team) conducted an analysis of Tibetan apps being censored in the Chinese App Store. They discovered that of the 119 Tibetan-themed, iOS apps they found in the China App Store, 29 have been censored by Apple <https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2019/jun/apple-censoring-tibetan-information-china> . The newest Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index <https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2019/report/executive-summary/> highlights how Apple <https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2019/companies/apple/index/> has abused their power over online speech, and notes instances of this in China. According to the report, Apple has not disclosed data around the content that it removes from its App Store when faced with requests from the government authorities. Until Apple comes clean about its censorship practices, we will actively continue to improve and to promote applecensorship.com and we thank you in advance for helping us <https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CTZ9XGT>. Best, Charlie & the GreatFire.org team
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