Yahoo Finance Apple CEO Tim Cook Tells ‘Fox News Sunday’: No Intersection Between Free Speech And Provoking Violence
Defending his company’s takedown of the controversial Parler app from his online store, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Fox newsman Chris Wallace today that he doesn’t believe freedom of speech and allegedly provoking violence intersect.
Apple, Google, and Amazon Services all took the Parler app offline after the protests at the US Capitol on Jan. 6. Five people died in the confrontations.
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“We looked at the incitement to violence that was on there (Parler). And we don’t consider that free speech and incitement to violence has an intersection,” Cook told host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
Cook said all of the App Store’s services are expected to abide by the terms of service.
“We obviously don’t control what’s on the Internet. But we’ve never viewed that our platform should be a simple replication of the internet. We have rules and regulations, and we just ask that people abide by those.”
Asked whether he was creating incentive to go deeper underground, Cook said that he would allow the service back with greater moderation.
“We’ve only suspended them for us. And so, if they get their moderation together, they would be back on there,” he said.
John Martze, the CEO of Parler, also spoke to Fox today, and claimed he was given 24 hours notice about his service’s takedown, and suggested collusion.
“It’s very, very interesting that they all, on the exact same day without previously indicating, they never indicated to us that there was any serious or material problem with our app,” CEO Matze said to Fox newsman Mark Levin “But on the same day, you know, all on the same day, they send us these very threatening notices.”
“And Amazon, as usual, [was] basically saying, ‘Oh, I never saw any material problems. There’s no issues.’ You know, they played it off very nonchalantly. And so we had still even, you know, on the 8th and the 9th, you know, we had no real indication that this was, you know, deadly serious.”
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