[allenbrunson]

oh, man. i was all ready to vote this up until i read the article's real headline: "iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple."

i appreciate the article's submitter removing the editorial slant in the original headline, but that doesn't improve the content, i'm afraid.

[jgilliam]

I'm not following you. What is wrong with the content of the article?

[allenbrunson]

the app was not 'censored' by apple. they are free to approve or reject any app they want, for any reason. the article posits that the author's views are being supressed, and that's just ridiculously wrong. it's like news.yc commenters having their comments [dead]ed for flaming, then claiming that they are being 'censored'.

the author is free to take that position, i guess, just as i am free to stop reading any article that talks like that.

[tjogin]

If it was rejected due to its "politically charged" content, what would be the difference between that and censorship?

[stingraycharles]

Because Apple makes it very clear in their TOS that they don't want that. And obviously, the iSinglePayer app is politically charged. The developer of the app decided to develop it anyway, and now he's claiming he's being censored.

It's kind of silly, actually. People seem to think they have some fundamental right to be approved into the AppStore, which is simply not the case.

[tjogin]

How does making something clear in a TOS not make this censorship?

Censorship, as defined by Wikipedia: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor."

How is this not censorship on Apple's behalf? I'm not saying they're not in their right to censor the content on their AppStore, I'm just saying it is censorship.

[stingraycharles]

Okay, according to that definition, you may be right. Ultimately, I think it's up to a judge to decide; censorship is not as black and white.

Take Google for example. They automatically filter various type of sites from their index (phishing, link farms, etc). According to the definition on Wikipedia, that is censorship too: it's communicative material, which is considered harmful by Google.

[anigbrowl]

The problem is that there are approved iPhone apps which are overtly politically charged, like this one: http://www.conservativetalkingpoints.com/

So there's obviously a double standard, though I'd guess it's at the level of individual reviewers rather than Apple policy.

[jgilliam]

An application promoting single payer health care is not even remotely comparable to a flame comment.

[allenbrunson]

but news.yc also doesn't allow political articles, for the most part, because they tend to attract unproductive arguments. i'm going to guess that's the real reason that guy's app was rejected, rather than 'censorship'.