If you were concerned about the civilians trapped in a despotic regime, why would you give the regime leverage over the people you are trying to help? It would make sense in that light to do exactly what Apple is doing, and nudge people to other platforms.

Deliberately reducing the number of platforms that are accessible from the outside world is what gives the regime MORE leverage, not less. If you take Russians offline, you're just submerging them into state-run TV.

If you let them stay on VKontakte, you let them have more exposure to covert American media campaigns. In the cold war, a huge source of information for people east of the Berlin wall was Radio Free Europe, which was a covert media campaign.

Russians do not have access to just switch to other platforms on a whim the way you seem to think they do. Banning VKontakte from the app store is not going to encourage them to move to a platform like Facebook in a country where people disappear when they circumvent the country's blocks on foreign social media. It's much more analogous to destroying the radios of the Eastern Europeans during the cold war so they can't access any outside news at all.

What makes you so sure all of these actions don't have the opposite effect?

Let's say hypothetically Putin completely ceases in Ukraine and then loses the next Russian election. Now what? Do you think all of that economic damage inflicted upon the Russian people just vanishes?

Isn't it possible the Russian people elect someone even more radical than Putin and make the problem worse? History is full of examples of this.

None of this is really Apple’s responsibility, nor is it reasonable for them to be playing the 4d chess that you’re entertaining.

Apple isn’t a geopolitical humanitarian strategist organization. They’re a for-profit tech company. They sell widget to people with money unless they think it’s in the interest to not do so. Period

> None of this is really Apple’s responsibility, nor is it reasonable for them to be playing the 4d chess that you’re entertaining.

It's okay to put that burden on the Russian people, but not Apple? Why is Apple so special here?

If you're going to make the consequentialist argument that a consequence of the Russian's allowing an echo chamber is Apple can remove apps, then you also need to apply that to Apple. You can't selectively apply logic when it's convenient to your argument and disregard it when it's not.

Russia’s internal affairs are not Apple’s responsibility to fix. Nor is it within their power to do. I entertained someone else’s consequentialist argument above but I never made one myself.

> a consequence of the Russian's allowing an echo chamber is Apple can remove apps

Those are independent things, not a consequence of the other.

You would allow a company to do anything as long as its for-profit? Really?

No, I wouldn’t. We’re talking about removing an app from an App Store. Not “anything”.