In previous work, Citizen Lab researchers found that Apple moderates content over its engraving services in each of the six regions that they analyzed: the United States, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. Across these regions, they found that Apple’s content moderation practices pertaining to derogatory, racist, or sexual content are inconsistently applied and that Apple’s public-facing documents failed to explain how it derives its filtering rules. Most notably, they found that Apple applied censorship targeting mainland Chinese political sensitivity not only in mainland China but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Following their report, Apple responded that its censorship rules are largely manually curated and that “no third parties or government agencies have been involved
[in]
the process.” Moreover, Apple indicated that their rules depend on each region’s local laws and regulations.
In this report, six months later, they perform a similar experiment to see what changes Apple has made to their engraving filtering since their previous study. Notably, we find that Apple has eliminated their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan. However, Apple continues to proactively apply broad, keyword-based political censorship in Hong Kong, despite human rights groups’ recommendations for American Internet companies to resist censorship pressures and law enforcement requests to block content. As other major U.S-based tech companies such as Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter do not apply, proactively or otherwise, similar levels of political censorship in Hong Kong, they conclude their report by assessing possible motivations Apple may have for performing it, including appeasement of the Chinese government.
