Apple Chief Executive, Tim Cook, disapproves of Facebook’s policy as-well-as other social media platforms. Cook believes that social media companies do not care about how their services constitute division within the society; they would rather risk sanity to attain consistent engagement on their platforms.
During the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference, while addressing the audience, Cook noted that amongst other social media companies, Facebook instigates societal division neglecting the negative impact they transpire while they attain productivity.
“At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement,” Tim said. “The longer, the better — and all to collect as much data as possible,”
“It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn’t come with a cost — of polarisation, of lost trust and, yes, of violence,” he added.
Tim Cook’s idealogy is centred on the Capitol Hill riot that the previous U.S. President, Donald Trump’s supporters, disrupted social and governmental activities. On the 6th of January, when the riot escalated, lives were lost, including civilians and law enforcement personnel. Social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Shopify, Pinterest etc. seized the opportunity to restrict the former U.S. President account.
Societal polarisation Facebook instigates — a rare regularity in the U.S. — in contrast to the social network’s involvement in other underdeveloped countries such as Myanmar, they can access unlimited access to socialise on Facebook.
Facebook became the regular “internet hub”, and the state’s ruling government took advantage to promote false information legitimising the genocide against the segregates Muslim state of Rohingya.
The similar event against the minority Muslim population in Sri Lanka where anti-muslim contents went viral that escalated into violence.
India also witnessed a similar phenomenon where the Hindu-nationalist factions stealthily assembled via Facebook’s messaging platform, WhatsApp. The matter against the minority Muslim population also escalated into a paramilitary force taking laws into their hands with claims to be vigilantes.
Facebook shared apologies to the victim states, such as Sri Lanka, Rohingya, and the Indians, urging peace to reign continuously. The Chief Executive of the social media platform, Mark Zuckerberg, then adjusted its policy — they limited the number of forwarded messages shared either on Facebook or WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg also comments of Cook’s misconceptions about his business not neglecting the fact that the iPhone maker is his major competition in the industry. He said Cook’s interference was “anti-competitive.”
Zuckerberg said “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do. They say they are doing this to help people, but the moves track their competitive interests.”
In contrast with Apple’s services and Facebook’s, Apple has absolute control over its product, whereby the relevance of its iMessage serves as a perfect substitute for WhatsApp. However, Zuckerberg noted they lacked security on their platforms.
“Now, Apple recently released so-called nutrition labels which focused largely on metadata that apps collect rather than the privacy and security of people’s actual messages,” Zuckerberg said. “But iMessage stores non-end-to-end encrypted backups of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud.”
