Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of Ice Abuses

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

raw_anon_1111

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Apple banned an app that archived videos of ICE abuses, sparking controversy and debate about censorship and the role of tech companies in moderating content.

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01Story posted
Oct 9, 2025 at 2:05 PM EDT
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3 months ago
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Discussion (46 comments)

Showing 41 comments of 46

garyfirestorm

3 months ago

2 replies

i guess this one trick can help us ban facebook and instagram :)

01HNNWZ0MV43FF

3 months ago

Facebook won't let me make an account, so those videos are already gone from FB from my perspective

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

I love when coders run into fascists because we tend to think that deep knowledge of the rules and mechanisms will help us here the way it does everywhere else, but we're in a sphere where every rule is mutable by anyone who is capable of organizing enough violence.

valleyer

3 months ago

4 replies

Tim Cook is a Trump supporter.

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

6 replies

I don't think Tim Apple is anything but a Tim Apple supporter at the end of the day, it's just that this administration has shown that will abuse the civil litigation system to tie up your time and money endlessly without ever actually reaching a verdict until you finally just give up and pay Trump to go away...ahem, make a donation to the presidential library fund

lovich

3 months ago

1 reply

A reluctant supporter is still a supporter at the end of the day

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

1 reply

but an enthusiastic supporter can be counted on to be a supporter tomorrow. he'll cow to whomever it is in his best interest to cow to, just like how Zucc banned Trump then paid him or how WaPo went from liberal leaning to only publishing pro-free market editorials as a matter of policy

GuinansEyebrows

3 months ago

1 reply

sure, but there is damage being done today by people who support trump today, enthusiastically or not.

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

no one is arguing that. this isn't about whether tim apple is a good guy, it's about how we get him to stop hurting us and recognizing his motivations as opposed to, say, peter thiel who is all-in trump-plenary-dominionist-authoritarian under all circumstances and can't be bargained with.

valleyer

3 months ago

1 reply

Except he did that, and Trump continues to ask for more. And Cook keeps volunteering it.

Why so many people fail to infer the obvious answer here -- that Cook is a Trump-supporting Republican -- boggles my mind.

And not that it really matters, but I say this as a longtime Apple user and employee.

Marsymars

3 months ago

Even if Tim Cook didn't vote for Trump, his actions are currently supporting Trump.

raw_anon_1111Author

3 months ago

1 reply

I think Apple has enough money to fight civil actions if Cook had a spine.

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

think like him: they can fight but is fighting the most profitable thing to do? Depends on how many bites at the apple (pun intended) that Trump intends to take. If you can count on someone to extort you once then paying them is a good option, if you think they're gonna come back for more then not paying them is a good option, and if you're not sure then letting someone else try both options and seeing how it works out for them is a great option and if you have to make a decision now you can pay once and then watch.

aggregator-ios

3 months ago

5 replies

Apple's board would quickly replace any CEO that put the fiscal future of the company into question. Apple is still a tech darling in terms of stock performance and Cook has a fiduciary duty to make sure Apple doesn't flounder. Cook did what he had to do and he's forever going to be remembered as the bad guy for doing it. Whether he actually is or isn't a Trump supporter, we won't know. We have to wait for a tell all book from Cook. My guess is that he will remember this time as the darkest in history and regret it. That is fortunately or unfortunately the immense responsibility that falls on a leader.

BrenBarn

3 months ago

1 reply

Then they're also cowards, evil, or both.

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

always both. only ever both.

tastyface

3 months ago

Horseshit. Apple could have added a backdoor for the FBI back in 2016 with the exact same reasoning, but didn't, and told disagreeing shareholders to basically fuck off.

ratelimitsteve

3 months ago

>Whether he actually is or isn't a Trump supporter, we won't know.

We don't know what goes on in his little secret heart between him and Jesus but in the consensus reality that we all share he's a Trump supporter because when Trump wants to do something Tim Apple helps. That's what it means to support something. I think somehow we got that definition confused with whether Trump supporters feel good about the fact that they're Trump supporters as though saying "Yeah I did that but I didn't like doing it because it's not who I feel like I am" matters at all to the victims.

rkomorn

3 months ago

> My guess is that he will remember this time as the darkest in history and regret it. That is fortunately or unfortunately the immense responsibility that falls on a leader.

"It was the darkest time in history but I did the right thing by maximizing shareholder value."

pjmlp

3 months ago

He could have chosen to leave, there is always an option.

Cornbilly

3 months ago

I don't think it's even litigation they're worried about. It's the tariff power that the cowardly GOP-controlled Congress has given up to Trump to use as a cudgel.

watwut

3 months ago

One has to love it when the most powerful and riches members of society are suddenly casted as if they were the weakest of the poor.

Tim Cook and the rest of the billionaire class do exactly what they want to do politically.

yieldcrv

3 months ago

1 reply

They want something from the government that is at the government's discretion, such as semiconductor access, data facilities, subsidies, clearances, inclusion in circular partnerships

that's why they are not challenging this

Braxton1980

3 months ago

That makes him a Trump supporter

beefnugs

3 months ago

"Just following orders" "Just participating in corruption" "Just watching out for the children"

polski-g

3 months ago

Tim Cook doesn't want the legal liability when this app is named in a civil suit regarding an assassination. It simply isn't worth it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/dallas-ice-s...

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/defendants-in-prairieland-...

nebula8804

3 months ago

1 reply

I think with the case of Iceblock the developer talked about how the app is super simple by design so that it can be used by 80 year old grandmas. I believe thats part of the reason it wasn't a PWA or something of that nature (among other reasons)

In the case of this application, the circle of users may shift more towards technically savvy.

If we assume this to be true, I could see how it may make sense to provide the application as a sideloadable APK or as open source so that it can be compiled and installed using TestFlight. Its unfortunate that we've reached the point that users can't even run software on their own computing devices.

I wonder if things continue to get bad will we start to see a greater number of people refraining from installing updates to their devices just because prior versions allow more things like jailbreaks. Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so it may happen.

OGEnthusiast

3 months ago

2 replies

> Apple is burning their reputation with these moves so it may happen.

I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough noticeable effect by itself).

lenkite

3 months ago

Its not ICEBlock specifically, but that a precedent has been now been fully set against the First Amendment, where the government can lean on monopolies and the monopoly will comply to destroy rights.

nebula8804

3 months ago

>I highly doubt there will be any noticeable backlash against Apple for removing ICEBlock, sans negative online commentary (which to be fair isn't exactly zero, but doesn't have enough noticeable effect by itself).

No not just IceBlock but overall increasing the blocking of users from running the software that they want to run.

In the past we've just had niche applications blocked (emulators, some porn applications and apps maybe hackers would use).

Everything else was fair game to be in the app store. Now that semi-mainstream applications are getting banned, it encourages more people to find ways to get the software they want to run.

Dig1t

3 months ago

2 replies

If you want to archive videos isn’t YouTube (or Vimeo or Rumble) the best place to do that? What’s the point of a dedicated app?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF

3 months ago

Allowing preferences or downloaded videos to be stored in local storage.

Downloading from YouTube is hard, Google keeps trying to kill yt-dlp. You can download manually from your own site using a web browser, but the app wrapper would make it easier to search by metadata ("Find ICE videos from my town") and to make sure you don't accidentally download the same thing twice.

Plus YouTube might take those down for ToS violations sooner or later.

Anyway it doesn't matter - We should have the right to have apps like this and make them available to the general public. If you can't get it from the App Store, and you can't install an apk on Android, and you can't install an alternate store trivially, then it's as good as dead.

hackable_sand

3 months ago

Resilience. Archive the videos on all the platforms. Seed the torrents.

guywithahat

3 months ago

1 reply

I'm not sure this article would say it but I wonder if it was, at least in part, banned because it's "stealing" content from other apps? It seems like their could be a privacy or usage policy violation in there.

That said, any app who's end goal is to doxx federal agents for doing their job is probably not going to last long on the app store.

foxyv

3 months ago

> That said, any app who's end goal is to doxx federal agents for doing their job is probably not going to last long on the app store.

So what you are saying is that federal police should be anonymous? Like some sort of, secret type of police?

lunias

3 months ago

1 reply

Why are we not avoiding apps and app stores altogether? I understand the desire to tap the captive audience, but we're teaching people that the only software worth running is found in the app store and runs on your phone. Make a web version, make a desktop version, make it work in whichever way affords you and your users the most control over the software. Stop asking Apple for permission and stop getting upset when they deny you.

taraindara

3 months ago

1 reply

People must choose to avoid it. I’m currently on this path. I prefer to use web versions of apps I need access too. If there is no web version, it’s most likely a service I don’t need anyway. My phone is slowly turning back into just a phone with a web browser.

pabs3

3 months ago

There are more ethical sources of apps, like F-Droid, but it sounds Google's changes to Android will shut that down for most people, but there will be other Android variants like GrapheneOS where F-Droid will still be usable.

ChrisArchitect

3 months ago

Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45520407

vlod

3 months ago

full: https://archive.is/20251008205650/https://www.404media.co/ap...

metalman

3 months ago

apple sorbet

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