It’s silly to think the US government hasn’t been twisting their arm to do this for years.

My ears perk up whenever I hear a "Just think of the Children" argument because after Sandy Hook, I'm pretty certain the US could careless about children. There's a real reason behind this.

Whenever someone makes a "think of the children" argument it has absolutely nothing to do with whether they actually care about children. They just want to make it extremely difficult to counter-argue without being labelled as pedophile adjacent. It is a completely disingenuous argument 99% of the time it is used.

I feel like there’s a fallacy for this but I’m not sure. Either way doesn’t matter the logic here isn’t that the US could careless about children , it’s that the US cares more about Gun rights than it does children , but that doesn’t say anything about the minimum level of care they have , only the maximum.

My bet it was the US government. Predicted fallout doesn’t seem something Apple would do themselves with no monetary gain.

what's this take based on - have a link or anything?

I don't know about the suggestion that it's the government of China pushing for the feature itself, but the fact the feature now exists and WILL be used by authoritarian regimes to scan for political content is clearly understood by Apple employees. From the article:

> Apple employees have flooded an Apple internal Slack channel with more than 800 messages on the plan announced a week ago, workers who asked not to be identified told Reuters. Many expressed worries that the feature could be exploited by repressive governments looking to find other material for censorship or arrests, according to workers who saw the days-long thread.

your quote contradicts your statement. it seems like the employees are worried that it could be exploited, not that it necessarily will be.

In fairness, this is literally happening on Chinese messenger services today so I wouldn't call it either of those

Apple isn't being pressured from China, but criticizing the CCP as the brutal dictatorship it is is not racist (and that idea is done verbatim CCP propaganda).

Randomly suggesting that every authoritarian decision taken unilaterally by an american company was made to please the evil chinese government while offering no substantial proof is not "criticizing the CCP", it is just shoehorning US's far-right talking points into a thread that has nothing to do with it.

Why then release this feature in the US? Why not just release it in China and avoid all this negative press? Bad take is bad