Censorship and isolation as China bans thousands of mobile apps
globalvoices.org
Research on Apple censorship finds out, as of March 2023, 11,026 out of a total of 40,049 apps were unavailable in China Apple Stores. The ratio of unavailability was 27.53 percent.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/200056

  • When the US House of Representatives passed the legislation that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok, a popular video app, to an American company or face being banned in the US, citing national security concerns, the Chinese government criticized the move as “an act of bullying.” Yet, ironically, TikTok is also unavailable in China, and it is not an isolated case. For example, Alibaba’s popular messaging platform, Ding Talk, is also unavailable in China, and its local version is called Ding Ding.
  • A recent research report on Apple censorship in China, “Isolation by Design,” conducted by the App Censorship project under GreatFire, a censorship monitor group based in China, indicates that more than 60 percent of the world’s top 100 apps in China Apple App stores are either unavailable or inaccessible in China. These apps include Google Maps, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Messenger and Twitter.
  • While China has warned the West against economic decoupling, the country’s censorship system is designed for the purpose of isolation, as highlighted by the GreatFire research team.

Aside from the game sector, the App Censorship research team has identified eight sensitive categories from the list of apps banned by Apple in China:

1. Virtual private network – VPN: 240 unavailable apps including Lantern VPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN, Nord VPN.

2. Privacy & Digital Security: 29 unavailable apps including Signal, ProtonMail, DuckDuckGo.

3. LGBTQ+ & Dating: 67 unavailable apps, including Hinge, Adam4Adam, weBelong, and Grindr.

4. News, Media & Information: 170 unavailable apps, including NYTimes, BBC News, and Reuters.

5. Social Media & Communication: 96 unavailable apps, including Skype, LinkedIn, Viber, Damus, and Line.

6. Tibet & Buddhism: 41 unavailable apps, including Himalaya Lib, MonlamGrandTibetanDictionary.

7. Uyghur: 72 unavailable apps, including RFA Uyghur, Hayatnuri, Awazliq Kitap, and UYGHUR MAN.

8. Religion: 144 unavailable apps, including the Bible App by Olive Tree, Quran Majeed, TORAH, JW Library.

  • Possibly linuxEnglish
    1•5 days ago

    In a lot of ways China fears its own people getting access to information. It isn’t a dictatorship to my knowledge but neither was big brother in 1984.

    I do think governments are overstepping there authority with large companies. The US and China are not the only ones.

  • @[email protected]English
    -1•5 days ago

    We rarely see an article that bad

    It even states that Alibaba’s and TikTok’s apps have a local version. They have decided to technically decouple the two, so this is not censoring.

    And of course they would ban spyware like Google’s apps, this is just common sense

    By the way, what a great source, Apple’s own investigation team on censorship in it’s economic adversary