In addition to WhatsApp and Threads, which belong to Facebook’s parent company Meta, Telegram and Signal are also disappearing from the App Store in China after China’s Cyberspace Administration saw them as a “national security risk”.
According to an article on Ars Technica, Apple, like most tech companies in a similar situation, argues that it must obey the laws of the countries in which it operates, “even if it disagrees with them.” In Cupertino, it was confirmed that the authorities saw a national security risk in the four applications, but at the same time they underlined that the apps will remain available “on all other marketplaces where they are visible”. Threads is Meta’s answer to the void created after Twitter’s transformation, while the other three apps are well-known and popular messaging software.
The article cites several newspapers that have obtained information that political content and content related to President and Party Secretary General Xi Jinping caused confusion for the Chinese. These were “seditious” and “violated the country’s cyber security laws”. There is no mention of how, in the case of Signal, which only transmits messages encrypted, the contents of the correspondence were known, although this is of course also impossible on devices infected with viruses. In addition, it is important to add that although the above four applications were available in the country, they only operated to a limited extent due to the IT infrastructure for censorship and surveillance, referred to as the “great firewall”. In China, Android’s official marketplace, the Play Store, is not available at all, while Apple is constantly under attack for “making concessions” to the country. For example, the authorities have access to the key that encrypts users’ cloud storage, or that the emoji depicting the flag of Taiwan does not appear on iPhones in China, but we also previously wrote on Rocket about how Apple makes it difficult for Chinese protesters to spread anti-government material .
The four banned programs remained available in Macau and Hong Kong, the two special administrative regions of China, and the rest of the country’s residents are likely to notice only a fraction of the change, as local applications such as WeChat or Weibo are much more popular in WhatsApp or Threads.
(Cover photo: Xi Jinping (back) and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015 at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Photo: Ted S. Warren-Pool/Getty Images)
Tags: Users wrote Jinping immediately banned Facebook apps China
