IMHO, cooperating with an authoritarian regime in this way should be illegal, sort of like a sanctions violation. Cook and Pachai should go to jail for this. That consequence might clarify their thinking a little.
Withdraw the app and you go to jail. Don’t withdraw the app and your Russian employees go to jail
Then withdraw.
Hurts but if history should learn us a thing or two one of them should be not to give in to dictators.
The younger ones here are allowed to take a few minutes off to use their favorite search engine to look up the quote "peace in our time" by Chamberlain.
Edit:
It looks so simple the way I wrote it above. Please note that doing the right thing isn't easy. Telling lots of people their job is gone. Telling investors the money invested in one of the most promising markets is gone etc etc.
But I am afraid that sooner or later the alternative will be worse.
More like move them to a better place if they prefer this to simply terminating the contract. Benefits are numerous - retain already-hired quality personnel, have a good PR campaign about being moral and holy and doing the extra mile with bureaucracy (which would be true), grow some extra hairy balls overnight. Or something similar.
Russia unlike certain others probably won't torture their loved ones because of this.
Don’t forget to write up your list and start lobbying your congressional representative
Granted, the real world is more complicated but this is equivalent of using the strategy of disabling your steering wheel before playing a game of chicken.
Direct action is the primary working approach here.
For those reasons Google and Apple should be considered aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal as of now - but how well it looks?
Meh, no quite as bad as the US quietly making Russia its second largest supplier of oil, no?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/russia-ca...
If you want to starve Crazy Ivan of his forex…
Unfortunately, US companies have lost all trace of ethics. Most product companies now have planned obsolence, and use regulatory capture and abusive patents to grow revenues rather than putting customers first.
We are truly in the twilight of the free market.
Every time.
I also think that there ought to be a certain level of relativism when it comes to judging political systems.
Is it democratic that an unelected group of 9 people can unilaterally essentially decide the law of the land in the US?
Are republican (little r) systems inherently authoritarian in your view?
Do you actually fear that SCOTUS is going to start imposing some sort of autocratic control over American government? I'm not. You probably aren't either. There are institutional explanations for this.
That said, Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (a seminal republican text) was quite clear that republican mixed government does involve mixing a bit of democracy with a bit of authoritarianism/autocracy. I do think it is "authoritarian", but I don't think it is necessarily bad.
My question is merely: why can we extend this sort of support to mixed government in our country, but seemingly consider many of the other forms of mixed government in action as pure authoritarian tyranny?
For instance, we often criticize Iran as being authoritarian, but compared to many of our allies elsewhere, Iran is actually relatively democratic, even if they have authoritarian "checks" just like we do with the Supreme Court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Leader_of_Iran
Seems like a dictatorship to me.
There's black and white with grey in between. Whether you report the shades of grey as black or white depends on who you ask and what is offered for comparison.
Is india an authoritarian regime? You'll find plenty of evidence going both ways. What about Belarus? Hungary? Venezuela?
The grey is precisely why having yes/no binaries like this leads to more confusion.
A simple rule of thumb definition (that could probably use some refinement) is regimes that are either explicitly anti-democratic or a sham democracy. Russia certainly falls into the latter category, as this very story demonstrates.
In most cases, it's not that hard.
It's just another example among many. Russia is a sham democracy because the government takes action to prevent opposition politicians from gaining power.
> Does the fact that Twitter/Facebook/et al banned the NYPost in the run-up to the 2020 election as well as preventing people from sending links to NYPost articles in their DMs "demonstrate" anything about the US?
I sense you think it shows some kind of equivalency, which is not true. Actually, if those organizations had to run the NY Post story, the US would be closer to a sham than it is.
Hm, guess I'd like to live in a sham democracy then, as blocking me from sending certain political thoughts in my chat messages is unacceptable to me.
I'd rather have this power in the hands of publicly-sanctioned, rules-based agents than arbitrary private actors who can interfere with me at any time for whatever reason they want. Philip Pettit has written quite well on this issue.
No one's blocking you. Go put a sign up in your front yard, just don't complain your rights are being trampled when I don't let you put up a sign in my yard.
Other people have rights too, and that includes the right not to cooperate with you.
The image of society given by your picture does not resemble real life. Facebook and I are not equal actors akin to neighbors disputing over what gets put in their front yard.
It is this recognition that we are not equal neighbors that is the reason we have labor protections, minimum wage laws, campaign finance laws, etc.
You're never going to have a society that equal. Do you all the sudden have the right to put signs up at my house because it's bigger or on a busier street than yours? Should you be able to put chapters in the books I write because no one wants to read yours?
I think there are good arguments that Facebook is too big and should be broken up, but the NY Post Hunter Biden "story" isn't one of them. It was garbage, and filtering out garbage is an important function. I'm familiar enough with garbage to realize that.
No, I have the right to put signs up at your house because you put up a bulletin board and actively invited anyone in the neighborhood to put signs on it.
It's either open to the general public or it's not, and if you pick "not", the onus is on you to at least refrain from actively and ubiquitously contradicting that.
If every major cell phone provider chose to stop delivering any text with that article attached to it, would that be acceptable? What if they decided to unilaterally stop delivering any texts from the Trump campaign?
Clearly there is a line to be drawn, and falling back on "it's their private property and thus their right to filter it however they want" is not sufficient in the 21st century, in the age of platform companies and extreme corporate consolidation.
> It was garbage, and filtering out garbage is an important function
Garbage? It was new, previously unreported information. I voted for Joe Biden, and I still found it of interest - and it did appear to contradict some things Biden had said publicly.
So? They only have that kind of power over you because you chose to give it to them.
If I have cool friends, and you decided to organize your social life around visiting my house to see them, it's not my problem if you don't have a place to socialize if I sour on you and exclude you.
> Clearly there is a line to be drawn, and falling back on "it's their private property and thus their right to filter it however they want" is not sufficient in the 21st century, in the age of platform companies and extreme corporate consolidation.
My perspective is compelled speech or compelled cooperation with political speech is just as bad as censorship, so if that's your solution, you have to find a different one.
> Garbage? It was new, previously unreported information.
If the NY Post has a picture of Biden shitting on the toilet, that would also be "new, previously unreported information." It would also be garbage. Those categories aren't mutually exclusive.
> The Post, According to a survey conducted by Pace University in 2004, was rated the least credible major news outlet in New York.
In no way does that justify preventing me from sending true information relevant to a public figure in a chat.
If there is true, factual information they posted about, the same information can almost surely be sourced from another, more reputable news outlet that is known to fact-check and provide accurate information.
FWIW, I blocked/muted NYPost twitter account years ago because of their vitriolic, sensationalized and misleading click-bait articles. If you can't convey important news without manipulating me, you have no credibility and are no better than a grocery-store-checkout tabloid.
Should the standard be to only allow articles written by reputable outlets, which have been known to bury stories (such as those demonstrating war crimes by the US military)?
I just completely disagree with you I guess. I should be free to send whatever I want in private chat messages with my friends, even if it is politically unsavory.
And yeah, I believe text messages (SMS) are indeed filtered, sadly. I just saw an article about exactly this subject[0] where a company with a .xyz domain was finding that SMS containing their domain were not being delivered! Pretty disappointing.
This whole thread could be a good indicator of the future of online communication, and my personal advice is to start looking at "end-to-end encrypted (with no back doors)" as a requirement for any communication platform you use with friends & family. Too bad such a feature is extremely rare :(
[0] https://www.spotvirtual.com/blog/the-perils-of-an-xyz-domain... (and HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400 )
Take campaign finance, for instance. I'm of the opinion that we need much stronger campaign finance laws.
Your response, to me, reads similar to "well, I don't watch ads on TV and I certainly wouldn't vote for someone based on a 10 second ad, so I don't think campaign finance needs reform." The issue is that millions of people do watch those ads, just like millions of people do rely on tech platforms to contact their friends, socialize, engage in political discourse, etc.
IMO I feel that NY Post should basically be shut down and banned from publication due to their harmful, divisive rhetoric and blatant lies, but conversely I don't agree with filtering private communication. My personal opinion is that once a given platform allows freeform communication between two people, that communication should be completely private and unable to be filtered or censored. tbh I suppose our exchange has helped me clarify those views a bit ;)
Not about its government, given that they did not demand (or even informally pressure) that the tech companies involved make this move.
Mind you, every other station covered it heavily too. The sitting president was impeached over the hunter Biden story
I'm not a huge fan of Joe Biden (as you can probably infer from my comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550896), but the Hunter Biden stuff was a shameless distraction with no real substance.
So to answer your question: if the US MSM and social media was required to run smears of a sitting president against his opponent, the US would be far closer to being a sham democracy.
Uh, that's really not a strong affirmative justification for taking active measures to stop people from using your platform to share a story. And of course the real problem is not simply that the story was suppressed, but that we all know that media platforms do not in fact have a blanket policy against reporting on "shameless distractions with no real substance", and that this sort of post-hoc rationalizing of obvious partisan bias is intellectually insulting.
Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.
Give your customers the ability to install their own software or app stores on the hardware that they own and paid for, without requiring a monopolistic walled garden. Of course, companies like Apple would never do this because they are far too greedy.
They also could have just uploaded their database of candidates to Github.
Because elected representatives are not moral authorities
All that is hard, and that's why evil like Putin prevails...
If by "available", you mean political candidates, then yes. If you mean of the society in general, then no, quite the opposite, actually.
> So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals.
No, it means two of the worst people in the society (namely, the 'republican' candidate and the 'democratic' candidate) do not have good morals. This a slightly stronger measure than the society's minimum level of morals, but not by very much, and says nothing about average or about particular non-politician cases.
I'd say "demonstrates the", but... yes? Obviously?
Democracy worked well early on because institutions hadn't yet figured out how to exploit it, not because it had any inherent resistance to exploitation; now it's like Merkel-Damgaard hash functions[0]: it was always broken, but now we (and the attackers) know it's broken and are seeing the consequences.
0: eg, MD5, SHA-1
Or put from a flip side… Building apps in highly democratic Norway just for Norwegians to use because they’re the best democracy (for example) doesn’t make enough money to feed my family. So why do anything at all?
My point that the observe-eval-withdraw loop is difficult to terminate is not meant to argue we shouldn’t run the loop, but rather how difficult it is to code the withdraw conditions. As I tried to allude to in the second paragraph, you have to balance out the withdraw conditions with the pragmatic need to let the loop get some worthwhile work done.
I agree, there's some arbitrary hand-wringing to be done to work out where to draw the line, but doing nothing while you're paralysed trying to decide what pencil to use, seems just as bad as going along with the acts in the first place.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
Arguably having access to technology is important for the regular citizen, even under less democratic countries. There is the privacy angle, and also if you have an Android monopoly it becomes easier for the government to exploit/enforce what they want. You don't help people to understands the benefits of participating on a democracy, or even fighting to have a democracy by withdrawing and hiding what democracies around the world are able to produce and manufacture. Withdrawing the apps as required by government censorship is just one of the battles lost, but not the entire benefit Apple presence has.
In this case we're talking about propping up the existing Russian government who actively interfere in democracy around the world, assassinate political enemies and draw immense influence from the fear it spreads around it. Yeah, sure, why wouldn't we want to keep that going as long as we can?
Because it will end one day. Putin isn't Russia's greatest love machine. When that day comes, all the instability you'd blame on me and my ideals will rain down on us all anyway.
If you want to reduce my reasoned moral objections to "cancel culture", I'm sure you're somebody's hero, but yes, I think we should demand better from the companies we fund. Russia's instability is inevitable, either way.
Cancel culture means a lot of different things to different people. You might want to clarify your interpretation here.
> Russia will decrease many Russian's standard of living, but will have zero impact in stopping them from rigging elections.
Wow, this was a mental leap. So by giving into already established corruption of government officials in Russia, you're making it better for Russians standard of living by further having a corrupt government? I don't know how you reached this conclusion. There are thousands of businesses in Russia (and probably hundreds that are large and US centric), but only one government. One company pulling out is hardly going to make a dent in providing jobs in a country as large as Russia.
> If everyone cuts trade for moral reasons, then there's no incentive for us not to point nukes at each other again.
So, you're implying that if we didn't have global trade then nations would fight more? I don't think I've ever heard this interpretation before - care to elaborate?
I don't agree with OP but this is actually a pretty common talking point around the benefits of globalization. If you depend on some other country for some essential resource (e.g. natural gas) you're less likely to want to go to war with them because it would be quite inconvenient to suddenly have half your population freezing in the winter.
Here's some research from Cato that shows that trade interdependence generally promotes peace https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/does-tr...
Russia has a lot of power to flex against its own citizens.
The part you're reading around is the people here defending Apple and Google's behaviour, because they're just doing what's right for their employees.
Doing what's right for Apple and Google's employees is not setting up offices in front of Russia's loaded gun, which we've only known about for… hundreds of years. Apple and Google put their employees at risk. They don't get points for doing more bad things to further delay that risk (and feed the machine that made that enables the risk).
My naïveté is certainly worth considering, but we're all so wilfully blind to atrocities. It was one thing to let another country beat up its citizens and attempt to sanction them, but now we're each personally entangling our lives with companies that aid and abet. We have to demand better.
That much is simple.
Actually putting things right is more complex, but almost complete inaction isn't good enough.
If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties.
If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation.
[Edit to bring in a sister question] "Why don't Apple pull out of China then?" - because they put profit and cheap manufacturing ahead of their morals. And apparently we don't care enough that China effected a genocide while we watched.