From Joseph Menn and Greg Miller's "Apple restores opposition app to its App Store in Russia" posted Wednesday by the Washington Post:
Apple has resumed allowing Russians to download an app run by supporters of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after criticism that it was acceding to unreasonable government demands for censorship.
As reported by The Washington Post last month, law enforcement agents had repeatedly threatened the top Apple and Google officials in Russia with arrest in September unless they removed Navalny’s “Smart Voting” app, which included more than a thousand endorsements of candidates for seats in Russia’s legislature...
The reversal comes amid escalating tensions between Russia and outside companies, many of which have withdrawn from the market or curtailed activities there since Russia invaded Ukraine. But civil liberties groups and American officials are pushing the other way, arguing that Apple and other tech companies provide ordinary Russians with the means to find independent news sources and to connect to activists and nonprofit organizations opposed to the war in Ukraine.
My take: Too late to make a difference for this war, but OK.
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Is it, though? If nothing else, it’s symbolic of Apple taking a side. Also, the only way to topple a regime built on lies is to get the truth out.
I don’t think folks in Russia are aware that their willful ignorance is generating atrocities that in some cases rival those of Hitler’s Germany. To the degree that Apple can wake them up to that reality, Apple is doing both the Russian and Ukrainian people a tremendous service.
Strange, though, how resistant people are to admitting they’ve been taken in, even to the point of tacitly supporting atrocities. But then, look at the plight of slaves in the US just a few hundred years ago, and the endemic racism we struggle with to this day that resulted from it.
Sadly, Putin seems to know how to fight against this war.
What Putin knows is that he’s in a war with the truth.