Apple censorship the application of the New York Times in China – The Figaro

The application has disappeared from the App Store chinese since 23 December. It would have violated the local laws and regulations, without further explanation will not be made to the american daily newspaper.

Finished, the consultation of the New York Times for an iPhone in China. Since 23 December, applications in English and chinese, the us daily have disappeared from the App Store in the country, at the request of the local authorities. “We have been informed that the application was in violation of the local regulations. Therefore, it had to be removed from our platform,” explained a spokesperson for Apple. IPhone owners who have already downloaded the app should be able to continue to use it, but they won’t be able to update it. The mark “did not want to say what laws should transgress the application of the New York Times, which has contacted Apple about this, and if there had been a decision of the court”, writes the american newspaper.

The site of the New York Times is inaccessible in China since 2012. The daily had attracted the wrath of Beijing after the publication of a series of articles on the wealth amassed by the family of prime minister Wen Jiabao. But the chinese authorities had not yet managed to prohibit its application. Other sites of foreign media are persona non grata in the country: Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal or World are blocked, except to work around the censorship by using a VPN (software believe that the user is located in a country other than his own).

According to the New York Times, Beijing has been able to rely on a new law, which entered into force in June 2016. This indicates that the mobile apps “may not endanger national security, disturb the social order” and “publish forbidden information”. The u.s. daily says that one of its reporters was in the process of investigating the financial links between the chinese authorities and Foxconn, the largest factory in China is capable of manufacturing up to 500,000 iPhones per day. “On the 23rd of December, our journalist spoke to the press attachés of Apple. He had also been in contact with Foxconn and representatives of the chinese government. Later in the day, Apple has learned in the Times that its applications would be censored in China,” says the newspaper.

Apple was until recently one of the rare players from the Silicon Valley to be more or less accepted by Beijing. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat have been banned, officially in order to preserve the local actors of the tech, such as Alibaba or Tencent. China represents the second largest market for Apple after the United States, but the brand has been increasingly of the fierce competition of the chinese manufacturers of smartphones. In a year, iPhone sales have plummeted by 30%. The smartphone in the us is currently fifth in the market, caught by the devices of Huawei, Vivo, Oppo or Xiaomi. Apple has also seen censor in the spring of two of its apps, iTunes Movies and iBooks, which allow you to buy movies and e-books.