Tim Cook: Why I kicked Parler out of Apple’s App Store

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“We looked at the incitement to violence that was there,” Cook told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We do not consider freedom of expression and incitement to violence to have an intersection.”

The ability to prevent millions of people from easily accessing a social network is an important responsibility, which according to critics of all political convictions does not belong to a select few millionaires and multimillionaires who run the world’s largest companies. Some critics of Apple and its cohort’s decisions to ban Parler have argued that if it pushes the app out of the stream, participants will lead to dark Internet channels and potentially deeper into the rabbit hole of radicalization. .

But Cook argued that Apple’s job is to host all services, regardless of their content. He noted that Apple has terms of service for its hosts ’2 million apps and that apps that refuse to play by the rules can’t access Apple’s mass audience.

“Obviously we don’t control what’s on the Internet, but we’ve never seen that our platform should be a simple replication of what’s on the Internet,” Cook said.

Apple will welcome Parler as long as Parler finds a new cloud provider to host the social network, if the app effectively moderates users ’speech, Apple’s CEO said.

“We just suspended them,” Cook noted. “If they get their moderation together, they would come back.”

Apple CEO has criticized other technology companies for not having ideals, including sacrificing user privacy in pursuit of profits. But Apple, the most valuable company in the world, has to step on it lightly. Its substantial size and power means that any controversial measure could fall under the skin of regulators who have sued other Big Tech companies, including Google and Facebook, for violating antitrust law. Forcing other companies to bend at will will not facilitate Apple’s argument if it is under control for allegedly abusing the power of the monopoly.

Still, Cook argued Sunday that running a tech company is more than making money. He said Sunday that he believed Apple’s mission should be to solve some of the world’s most important problems. The company and its employees always try to do the right thing: a mission that motivates him to come to work every morning.

This helped influence his decision on Parler, particularly following the siege of the Capitol.

“It was one of the saddest moments of my life: seeing an attack on our Capitol and an attack on our democracy,” Cook said. “I felt like I was in some kind of alternative reality, to be honest with you. That couldn’t be happening.”

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