
'Hide It Hillary' mobile game banned by Apple, title like 'Punch Trump' approved - sergiotapia
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/2/hillary-clinton-hide-it-mobile-app-game-banned-by-/
======
existencebox
I'm quite curious about this article, less about the words, more about how
it's being received.

It has 43 upvotes in 41 minutes. For a rather bland subject, that's not half
bad (point wise), potentially motivated by the political conflict involved,
but that happens.

However, in the time I've queued it in my "morning reading", I've refreshed it
quite a few times and watched it flag, unflag, flag, unflag at least 5-6
rotations as I've tried to post this comment. I'm legitimately curious as to
why there's so much distaste for this with so little discussion. There is
certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article, and that could be
called out as HN has an excellent (I mean this honestly, comments are very
quick to say "this article has no substance, here is why" and I see that as a
plus) history of, but the overall question of the potential for political
censorship through the increasingly few gatekeepers of walled garden web
content does raise some meta questions I've seen HN discuss on many other
occasions with far less prompting.

I guess I'm asking two things. 1. Although there is not much empiricism in the
article, is there not a meaningful discussion to be had about the above; and
2. I'm curious as to what would incite people to want to flag so hard rather
than let a thread get some immediate momentum and then die off from lack of
content as it is like to. (It's not even as with the snowden releases where
the entire front page was snowden for a good few weeks :) )

~~~
djrogers
> There is certainly very little evidence to the claim of the article

Little evidence? The claim is that this app was rejected and Trump satire apps
are allowed - what evidence are you expecting other than the existence of the
Punch Trump style apps on the App Store? Do you want a letter signed by Tim
Cook saying that the App Store policies are intentionally biased?

~~~
existencebox
You're providing evidence that the outcome exists in the real world. This is
true. You are not providing evidence (neither did they) for the motive they
described.

A letter would be nice (to the QA testers who vet these games) but because I
(having been a QA at one point who could have had the ability to make similar
decisions about what gets into games with almost no oversight, training, or
checks+balances, albeit for a much more no-name group) really doubt that's the
situation, I would also be more swayed by demonstrating a track record for
single-party support historically, and potentially contrasting with other app
stores over that time period, since I could absolutely see this occuring due
to what I mention. (Improper checks and balances, lack of clear guidelines,
less formal/consistent vetting process)

My "there is no evidence" should be taken as "the article seemed more
conviction by 'THIS IS WRONG' than conviction by 'we find these systemic
issues, here is the support for them'. In fact, it loops back to my original
comment, in that both the articles and the flaggers were making a statement
while providing very little other than the statement itself to support it.

------
eli
Never attribute to malice that which can equally be explained by carelessness.

My experience with completely nonpolitical apps strongly suggests the app
approval process is very arbitrary and inconsistent across the board.

~~~
pkinsky
If it were just a matter of creating two political apps, one anti-red and one
anti-blue, and observing that the anti-blue one is banned, I'd agree. The
article cites 3 different games focussed on simulating violence against Trump,
though, which to me is enough to suggest a trend.

~~~
sitic
Apple could have been rejecting one hundred apps which mock Trump without us
knowing. You're a suggesting a trend based on a single data point.

~~~
pkinsky
That's absolutely right. I suggest a simple experiment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12420407)

It should be possible to come up with ~10 'clone' games (slap trump/hillary
with a fish, hit trump/hillary in the face with a pie, etc) by swapping a few
assets. Phonegap could be used to deploy the same simple javascript/html5 app
on android and iOS. Submit each app to Google/Apple and see what the
acceptance rates look like. I would think that would be enough to confirm or
disprove the existence of any bias.

------
grej
They are a private enterprise and can do what they want, but the optics aren't
great. For the sake of PR they should try and maintain at least the appearance
of being unbiased. Perhaps develop a single policy for politically oriented
apps, and stick to it in all cases.

PS - Also noticed this was flagged & removed, then restored. Very glad to see
it was restored as this is a very relevant thing to be talking about in the
current political climate.

~~~
dawnerd
Honestly don't think they should allow apps like hide Hillary or punch trump.
They're low value and only promote hate towards the person.

~~~
wyager
How does "Hide it Hillary" promote hate? It's satirizing something she
actually did in real life. "Punch Trump", on the other hand, _has_ violence in
it, but even that is not sufficient to claim that it _promotes_ violence.

~~~
nitrogen
As pointless as they may seem, the web has a long history of games allowing
users to pretend to punch various celebrities, and the "punch famous person X"
genre probably predates that. There have also been TV shows like Celebrity
Deathmatch, and IIRC one popular show for teens/tweens had its main character
use her computer to put the face of another character into a boxing
simulation.

I think the cat is out of the bag on the punch X genre for now, but society's
tastes can still change over time.

~~~
nitrogen
Very curious why some disagree with a factual description of the history of a
particular genre of game..

------
pkinsky
For those flagging this, why not try an experiment? Put together two pallette-
swapped games, perhaps 'Slap Hillary with a fish' and 'Slap Trump with a
fish'. Submit these games to Apple and Google for app store approval.

If you're correct in your assumption that no bias exists, either both or none
will be approved. If n=2 isn't enough, this should be easy to run with greater
sample size.

------
ihuman
The problem (if you could call it that) is that there are multiple people
reviewing apps. While there are rules, each person has a different
interpretation of them, which results in issues like this.

------
MaysonL
Go to the iTunes Store. Search for "Hillary".Enough anti-Clinton iPhone and
iPad apps show up to indicate that this is an anomaly, not a systemic bias.
The fact that a right-wing site got the WaPo to bite on it shows their
gullibility rather than Apple's bias.

------
TheLarch
"In 2002, at an event held to celebrate the Times's 20th anniversary, Moon
said: 'The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know
about God' and 'The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading
the truth about God to the world.'"
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times)]

~~~
waterphone
The Washington Times is indeed not at all a trustworthy news outlet. It is
incredibly politically biased, to the point of overt absurdity. Due to the
name, however, some continue to confuse it with the Washington Post and assume
it has legitimate content.

------
jondoe
Because every blue chip company has already pre purchase some new hillary
act/law

------
dominotw
Do they issue 'political guidelines' to their employees doing the screening or
do things like these simply get escalated to the top where someone like the
CEO makes the decision.

------
lumberjack
I remember Stallman and many others, I believe even on HN, so not long ago,
talking out against walled gardens.

Now it's the norm.

------
codegeek
strange. This post was flagged and even showed up dead just a few mins ago.
Did the mods restore this ?

~~~
douche
Probably the "vouch" feature working. Countdown on it being flagged down
again: 1, 2, 3...

~~~
koolba
Where does the vouch link show up? I don't recall ever seeing one.

~~~
dang
You have to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page. Then (assuming
the comment is [dead]) you'll see a 'vouch' link at the top. That's the same
place where the 'flag' links for comments appear. If the comment isn't [dead],
there's no 'vouch' link, because the reason to vouch for comments is to
resurrect them from [dead].

------
almostApatriot1
It's funny to see how holier than thou people get about these topics. Punch
Trump "promotes violence" against Trump?? It's a game where you box with Trump
(and he boxes back). What is this, the 1950's???

------
chrisan
If you follow enough links you'll get to the source of the story
[https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/50pfl4/appl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/50pfl4/apple_censored_our_game_because_we_poked_fun_at/)

Which does sound like it actually happened. However at current time it shows
up in the app store.

------
armenarmen
I'm not sure how I feel about corporate censorship. On one hand we have
property rights, which I believe in firmly and on the other hand we have
freedom of speech/expression.

If we are going. To live in a world where public discourse takes place through
private avenues we need to decide as a country which takes precedent, property
rights or speech/expression.

------
franksunjin
I believe Software Engineers should be conservatives. Because when anything is
doing wrong, the first we can think of is rollback.

------
cscurmudgeon
Politically I don't care as I am not a US citizen. But just a quick search
shows titles like "Never Hillary", "Avoid Hillary", "Hillary Clinton Cross the
Road".

------
themartorana
Anyone that knows anything about the Apple App Store knows this piece is a
little uninformed.

1\. The two apps were probably reviewed by different people, and approvals
from Apple have always been all over the place depending on the reviewer.

 _" The independent developers said getting approved with Google took less
than one hour, while Apple’s denial came after an eight-hour wait."_

2\. 8 hour wait? Wow. I remember when the App Store had an 8 _day_ review
time. Let's keep in mind that Google rarely has a human review it's App
submissions, Apple has a human review _all_ of theirs, including updates.

In any case, the second half of this article is a Clinton hit piece, dropping
all mention of apps and app stores and recounting again the Clinton emails
story and focusing on negative reactions to it.

This was flagged and dead and should be again.

~~~
Jimmy
>This was flagged and dead and should be again.

Strange. It almost sounds like you're afraid of this article for some reason?

And I'm saying that as someone who abhors Trump and is trying to get everyone
I know to vote for Hillary. I just hate double standards is all.

~~~
geofft
Not 'themartona, but, I'm afraid of this article.

I'm afraid that we're not able to discuss interesting _technical_ issues
without the overtone of this presidential election's good-vs.-evil campaign
(and both sides see themselves as good and the other as evil). We couldn't
even have a rational discussion about a secretary of state not being able to
use a mobile device with official email. It quickly became a discussion about
the _evil, corrupt_ secretary of state _killing innocent ambassadors_ by using
a private email server. Every interesting technical issue - and, in fact,
every interesting political issue, about how the most powerful government in
the world can't provide useful email services to its secretary of state, and
how we got there - was drowned out by the good-vs.-evil talk.

I'm afraid that comments about the candidates instead of the technical issues
will dominate. I can't even come up with a more silly example than the present
one: something happened to Trump but not Clinton, or Clinton but not Trump,
and with no evidence that this is about the candidates, it must be that one of
them is evil and silencing dissent or paying off Apple or something.

I'm afraid that the tenor of us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil arguments from the
rest of the internet is infecting HN.

I'm afraid that _well-reasoned_ criticism of the political candidates is
getting ignored just because so much of it is ill-reasoned. If we expect every
single article to have paragraphs of "BTW Hillary sux" or "BTW Donald sux",
how do we expect to have actual, serious discussions of where the candidates
are good or bad.

I'm afraid that articles like this are becoming normal.

Yes, I'm afraid of this article.

