Social media app Parler,??? ?? ?? ??? banned from pretty much everywhere due to right wing propaganda, racism and calls for violence on its platform, has once again been shunned by Apple.
Parler had initially been banned from Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store in January, following the deadly riots at the U.S. Capitol, and the service went offline after it was banned by Amazon and rejected by other hosting providers. In February, Parler went back online, together with new community guidelines.
According to Bloomberg, Apple denied Parler re-entry to the App Store after reviewing the new guidelines.
“After having reviewed the new information, we do not believe these changes are sufficient to comply with App Store Review guidelines. There is no place for hateful, racist, discriminatory content on the App Store,” Apple wrote to Parler’s chief policy officer on Feb. 25, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.
Apple also reportedly provided some screenshots to support the above, including those of user profile pictures with swastikas, as well as posts and user names that are racist, homophobic and misogynistic.
In its letter, Apple argued that developers are required to provide "robust moderation capabilities" to prevent and get rid of this type of stuff. Instead, Apple said, "simple searches" were enough to find this content on Parler.
SEE ALSO: Parler is back after going dark for a monthIn January, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Parler would be allowed back into the App Store "if they get their moderation together."
As it stands now, this could be the end of the line for Parler on iOS. According to Bloomberg's sources, the company fired its three remaining iOS developers on Wednesday, together with four other workers. The company CEO and co-founder John Matze was fired in February.
We've reached out to Parler regarding Bloomberg's report and will update this article when we hear back.
UPDATE: March 11, 2021, 3:39 p.m. CET "Over the past two months, we’ve worked towards the goal of returning to Apple’s App Store, in reliance on Tim Cook’s statements that Apple's problem was not with our mission, but only with the perceived lack of enforcement of our guidelines. Parler has always opposed and worked to remove violent and inciting rhetoric from our platform, because it inhibits productive, civil discourse. Accordingly, and even though we knew that problems with violent and inciting content were not unique to Parler in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6—a fact that independent reviews of court records have now shown—we worked tirelessly to adopt enhanced protocols for identifying and removing this type of content.
We have since engaged Apple to show them how we’ve incorporated a combination of algorithmic filters and human review to detect and remove content that threatens or incites violence. We’ve also explained our new feature which empowers individual users with the option to filter out personal attacks based on immutable and irrelevant characteristics such as race, sex, sexual orientation, or religion. It’s just the latest way in which Parler enables users to curate their own feeds as they choose. Parler expects and hopes to keep working with Apple to return to the App Store,” Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff told Mashable in an e-mail.
Topics Social Media