We live in a world where gangs of armed, poorly-trained state-sponsored masked thugs are apparently roaming the streets of our former ally, the United States are apparently killing, assaulting and abducting entirely innocent people, many of which are perfectly regular US citizens, with total impunity.
Once upon a time one might have thought the large, often progressive-in-origin “don’t be evil” American big tech firms would have had something less than positive to say about the situation, or at the very least not felt compelled to actively support and enable these damaging, dangerous, immoral actions.
The present day being what the present day is, of course the opposite is true.
Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump’s Mass Deportation Effort - and it is of course the bad side, the oppressive side, the violent side. They’ve deleted and banned various apps that some of the poor, beleaguered US citizenry were using to keep track of where ICE officials were and what they were doing - ICEBlock, Red Dot, those sort of apps.
The ban was seemingly under the absolutely ludicrous premise that ICE officials are “a vulnerable group in need of protection”.
For most Android users this, in practical terms, means they cannot use these services any more.
At the same time, Google are happy to host a Customers and Border Patrol app that is used by the authorities to facially-recognise a truly vulnerable group in need of protection (especially under the current regime) - immigrants - and call ICE on them.
After a user scans someone’s face with Mobile Identify, the app tells users to contact ICE and provides a reference number, or to not detain the person depending on the result, a source with knowledge of the app previously told 404 Media. 404 Media also examined the app’s code and found multiple references to face scanning.
Obviously, and correctly:
“Providing tech services to supercharge ICE operations while blocking tools that support accountability of ICE officers is entirely backwards,” Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Free Expression Project,
After all using these sort of tools was exactly what the governor of the state where some of the most atrocious ICE indecencies are taking place, Minnesota, asked his residents to do.
Gov. Tim Walz encouraged Minnesota residents to carry their phones at all times to record federal immigration actions, promising during a statewide address on Wednesday night that “accountability is coming” for abuses by federal officers.
“Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” Walz said.
OK, time to buy an iPhone? Well, no, even if one did have the ludicrous amount of money spare to do so, it doesn’t matter. Apple already blocked all the same sort of apps.
In a statement US Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had “demanded” the removal of ICEBlock saying it was “designed to put ICE agents at risk”.
Sure enough, whilst they were not legally compelled to comply as far as I can see, Apple nonetheless rolled over, forgot about that concepts of free speech et al supposedly so precious to Americans, and did what exactly what their oppressive government asked them to do. Presumably, to curry favour with Trump, to make rich people richer, to prioritise personal and shareholder wealth over the common goo.
“When companies agree to the administration’s demands in order to achieve some other goal, whether it be avoiding tariffs or getting merger approval, they send a message to others that it’s ok to do the same,“Ruane said. “What’s worse, they erode the promise of the First Amendment for all of us at the same time.”
Both companies, and their peers, have of course funnelled vast sums of money in Trump’s direction. In one of the more crass attempts at bribery to win favour, the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, personally gave Trump a big lump of “America First” gold at one of this meeting.
Contrary to their app store guidelines - one of the few selling points of the very existence of their app stores - they both failed to remove an app, X, that very recently had been used to generate non-consensual sexual images of women and children at a peak rate of 1 a minute. Outside of the self-evident horror of creating a child porn generator, perhaps the sickest example of this that I heard about was is some depraved folk using it to generate fake sexualised images of Renee Nicole Good - one of the innocent American citizens that the aforementioned ICE needlessly murdered.
Apps have been banned in the past for enabling the display of sexual imagery. Why did this app escape the many calls for its banning? Because it was owned by the richest man in the world, and one of the worst of the tech bros, who has close connections to the US government - Elon Musk. They were presumably too scared to take it down. Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
…booting X from these app stores for its flagrant violation of policy means upsetting Musk and the entire right-wing media ecosystem he controls through X — and with it, directly upsetting the clout-chasing content vampires who currently run the United States
…
This is the trap these men have gotten themselves into: They sold their principles for power, and now they don’t even control their own companies. Welcome to gangster tech regulation!
The hypocrisy. In a past court case:
Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”
You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces
Then there’s Tiktok, the ownership of the US version of which has recently been mandatorily handed over to a “group of investors loyal to President Trump”. Several users are claiming that since the switchover they have been unable to make and/or widely distribute posts mentioning Epstein, criticising Trump or talking about the disgusting travesty that are recent ICE operations.
Even celebs have noticed.
Celebrities who have spoken out on TikTok against the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by Border Patrol claim that their posts are being silenced.
On Instagram, Billie Eilish posted a TikTok made by her brother, Finneas O’Connell, which criticizes those defending the killing, along with a follow-up image revealing that her brother’s video had a mere 114 likes, writing: “tiktok is silencing people btw…”
Tiktok US seems to be claiming that the cause of such phenomena are just unfortunate technical issues, nothing intentional. And I suppose it might be, however unlikely that sounds. But because of how these platforms are designed, we cannot know:
It would be incredibly difficult to prove TikTok is censoring content about ICE because the platform’s content recommendation process is so opaque, said Jeffrey Blevins, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who studies media law and ethics, among other subjects. Plus, if TikTok were intentionally censoring content about ICE, it would be within its legal right.
It’s never ending. OpenAI’s president is a Trump mega-donor. A horde of big tech bosses gave Trump huge sums of money so they could sit in the audience at his inauguration, presumably in an attempt to “cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation and buy favor”. Since then, big tech continues to bend the knee. in so many ways. And, I mean, it’s worked out well for them in many ways.
Standing alongside him that day were the leaders of the tech industry’s most powerful companies, who had donated to him in an unprecedented bending of the knee. In the ensuing year, the companies have reaped enormous rewards from their alliance with Trump, which my colleague Nick Robins-Early and I wrote about last month after Trump signed an executive order prohibiting states from passing laws regulating AI. Trump has sponsored the tech industry with billions in government funding and with diplomatic visits that featured CEOs as his fellow negotiators in massive, lucrative deals.
As year two of Trump’s second term begins, Silicon Valley’s titans appear poised to enrich themselves even more with the president’s enthusiastic aid.
The whole sector seems rotten to the core. I know not how, but somehow it is morally imperative to find a way to replace it, or, as a very minimum, stop personally supporting it.