Elon Musk’s noble crusade to restore free speech to the global public square has so far been everything patriots dared hope for: a declaration of war against our corrupt regime and the censorship required to sustain it. So far Elon has met and exceeded our expectations, having restored President Trump, announced a “general amnesty for banned accounts,” and done away with the site’s old Orwellian Covid “misinformation” policy.
We predicted in a now-classic piece (which Elon read) that the Regime would respond ruthlessly to such a provocation. Real free speech is simply too dangerous to be allowed, and any effort to restore it, we said, would be met with an all-out media, bureaucratic, legal, and economic assault.
And now, it looks like the regime is trying to leverage one of its greatest weapons to nip Elon’s Twitter in the bud: the world’s largest company, Apple.
Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
For the time being, at least, this effort may have failed. On Wednesday afternoon, Musk tweeted about a meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook, and indicated there was no danger of Twitter being purged for the time being. That’s great news. But Musk, and all supporters of free speech, should remain deeply wary of Apple, both due to its immense power and because of many years of evidence of a political agenda burrowed deep into the company.
It is one thing for Apple to curtail advertising with Twitter. Several companies have done that, under the pretext of “brand safety” — a mafia shakedown technique which will be the subject of a future Revolver report. It would be quite another matter for Apple to cripple Twitter’s distribution by banning them from Apple’s App Store.
For all but a tiny minority of tech-savvy consumers, the App Store is the only way to add new software to an iPhone. And iPhones make up more than 50 percent of all smartphone sales in the U.S., meaning that with the push of a button, Apple could block half the country from downloading and using Twitter’s app. Since over 85 percent of all Twitter use is on mobile devices, an app store ban for Twitter would essentially be a killshot for the entire platform — just like it was for Parler, which has never recovered from the merely temporary store ban it received after January 6.
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