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

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

“We believe that freedom of expression and incitement to violence are not at crossroads.”

The ability to prevent billions of people from easily accessing a social network is a weighty responsibility – a responsibility that critics of all political beliefs have argued is not in the hands of a select few millionaires and billionaires who run the world’s largest corporations . Some critics of Apple and its cohort’s decisions to ban Parler have argued that pushing the app out of the mainstream will drive participants into dark channels of the Internet – and possibly deeper down the rabbit hole of radicalization.

But Cook disputed that Apple’s job is to host any service, regardless of its content. He noted that Apple has terms of service for the 2 million apps it hosts, and apps that refuse to play by the rules cannot access Apple’s massive audience.

“We obviously have no control over what’s on the internet, but we’ve never seen our platform supposed to be a simple replication of what’s on the internet,” Cook said.

Apple will welcome Parler – provided 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,” commented Cook. “If they got their moderation together, they would be there again.”

Apple’s CEO has criticized other technology companies for lacking ideals, including sacrificing user privacy by pursuing profit. But Apple, the world’s most valuable company, should act lightly. Due to its considerable size and power, any controversial move could get under the skin of regulators who have sued other Big Tech companies, including Google and Facebook, for violating antitrust laws. Forcing other companies to bend to their will won’t make Apple’s argument any easier when it is investigated for alleged misuse of monopoly power.

Still, Cook said on Sunday that running a technology company is more than making a lot of money. He said on Sunday that he believes Apple’s mission should be to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. The company and its employees always try to do the right thing – a mission that motivates him to come to work every morning.

That helped influence his decision about Parler – especially in the aftermath of 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,” said Cook. “I felt like I was in some kind of alternate reality, to be honest. This couldn’t happen.”

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