Apple Removes All Confederate Flags from App Store

Recently, the United States has been shaken by yet another violent shooting, this time by a dangerously racist young man, who gunned down nine African Americans at a famous black church in South Carolina. His manifesto, which clearly laid out his racist agenda and his ‘ties’ to the Confederate States, has lead to a backlash around the nation—and now, the once-common Confederate Flag and Confederate symbols that adorn South Carolina are under fire for being unintentional promoters of racial hatred in America.

Because, like it or hate it, the South fought to keep slaves. They were the bad guys.

Well, there’s always going to be some gut reactions after a shooting, but, as always, none of it is the good kind. Instead of doing the sensible and proven effective method of, say, regulating gun control or tackling the source of our long-standing racism, Apple has decided instead to remove every Confederate Flag from their app store. In some cases, I’m sure that was very useful—but when it’s a app that teaches Civil War history, or, indeed, a game that focuses on the Civil War… it kind of misses the point.

In Apple’s new guidelines, they state that the Confederate Flag cannot be used in the pictures for Apps if they are used in negative or mean-spirited ways—and while that probably exists somewhere, in the strategy iOS games Civil War: 1862, Civil War: 1863, Civil War: 1864, and Civil War: Gettysburg, they were simply present because, well, it made sense.

According to director Andrew Mulholland, the take-down was sudden, without warning, and of course cited ‘negativity’ in the take-down.

Apple has a long history of going crazy when it comes to censorship, oftentimes not showing any discrimination between what’s actually offensive and what merely uses an offensive object in an inoffensive context. Nothing much we can do about it, since it’s a company doing the censoring and they don’t have a constitution we can use to make them stop, but… annoying regardless.