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Apple Censors Consumer Report iPhone4 Discussions

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the behold-the-power-of-steve dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has done it again. All threads about Consumer Report's iPhone4 non-recommendation are removed or deleted. If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?"

24 of 588 comments (clear)

  1. Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?

    Keep it up until your 32,768th post when they'll regret using a signed short int for the NUM_POSTS_CENSORED value in your forum profile.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by Haffner · · Score: 5, Funny

      Am I the only one who immediately thought of the Season 5 finale of The Office when Dwight asks "How many people need to get hurt before we learn a lesson?" (or something) "One? Two? Three?" "Dwight..." "No, let me finish. Four? Five? Six?"

      --
      "Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
    2. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by biryokumaru · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If someone says something, and you remove it, that's censorship. I'm not saying Apple isn't within their rights to censor their own website, but there's no question that it is censorship.

      Think different indeed.

      --
      When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
    3. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Informative

      I mean, it sounds reasonable to prevent my angry customers from displaying all their filth on the front of my shop doesn't it?

      Try it some time. I picketed a computer store that took a $300 deposit on a $3,000 computer, with a promised delivery date, missed the date, then admitted they couldn't deliver it and wanted to make substitutions, and wouldn't refund the money. I handed out flyers to every customer who walked in the door. They called the cops. I told the cops I was exercising my constitutional right to free speech and wasn't impeding people from entering or exiting. They called their supervisor - who turned out to have had a similar bad experience with that store. Got the refund within the hour.

      Moral of the story - don't treat your customers like filth and they won't have cause to display YOUR filth in front of your store.

    4. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by urulokion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're right in that Apple is free to moderate their boards however they wish. But you are missing the point. Image is very important to Apple. They are trying to keep "the Image" intact. But ultimately Apple is tarnishing "the Image". They are trying to control information in a very Orwellian way (i.e. "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."). And what makes it very damning and hugely ironic, is that Apple is turning into the very thing they fought against in their very first Macintosh Commercial.

    5. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That depends on the circumstances. If you invite people to draw on your car, then restrict what they are allowed to draw, then yes, it is censorship. Apple runs a forum for its users, but removes critical threads from that forum -- how that is anything but censorship is a mystery to me.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    6. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, Apple users are way less mature.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    7. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by skelterjohn · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's because the government had it taken out.

    8. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree as long as that person has innocent intent. Consumer Reports clearly created this article to sell copies rather than push factual information. Also, the reality is that a good amount of this type of "information" that was on the newsgroups was being put there by marketing firms who are being paid to push a certain agenda. The article "Is the Iphone 4 Apple's Vista" comes to mind here...

      Lets cut to the chase... If Apple is so concerned about negative information on the iPhone 4, do you honestly think that there would be a 3 week lead time on shipping the of the phone? No, they would not. Also, the antenna issue is completely overblown, and I am sure Consumer Reports knows this internally...

      Wow that must be great Kool-Aid. Clearly, a review that essentially says "We love this phone, but we can't recommend it until Apple fixes it so it can actually make phone calls." can only be a slanted hack-job to drive up circulation. Other than that one important detail, they all but gush over the greatness of the iPhone4. At this point, can you even remember what it was like to have a relationship with reality?

      Cue the obligatory Penny Arcade "I'm the guy who gives hand jobs to Steve Jobs" strip. Seriously.

    9. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      In the Wiki article you cited:

      Corporate censorship is the process by which editors in corporate media outlets intervene to disrupt the publishing of information that portrays their business or business partners in a negative light.

    10. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by dirtyhippie · · Score: 5, Informative

      I RTFBingCache of the removed posts, and there was nothing useful there. Yes, it pointed to the consumer reports article, but after that there was nothing but trolling.

    11. Re:Zapp Brannigan's Reporting Strategy by kg8484 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple has no right to censor people for speaking their minds under these circumstances.

      Actually, it is well within it's rights to censor people posting on its bulletin board. Now, if Apple tries to get a restraining order against Consumer Reports or against people posting on Slashdot, then no, it is not within its rights. Again, I repeat, Apple is 100% within its rights to censor people posting on its forum. Doesn't mean it isn't unfair in some way, but still within it's rights.

  2. Freedom from pron, criticism, open debate by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeh, when Jobs said his control over every Apple-user's computing was about "freedom from porn", we could have guessed that "porn" was just being dragged up as a convenient excuse.

    --
    Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
  3. Apple fanbois will love it by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It will be an "advantage" over Android, that the forums are not cluttered with unnecessary information.

  4. Get over it and by a bumper you cry babies! by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Funny

    Really you just paid $299 for your phone. You pay goodness knows how much a month for your 2 GB capped data plan. Just suck it up and buy the $30 bumper! what is the big deal!
    (This message was sent from my Android phone on the Sprint network).

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  5. Apple is About Freedom! by CritterNYC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple is about freedom. Freedom from porn. Freedom from criticism. Freedom from competition. Freedom from objective discussions. Freedom from the truth.

    Apple little world is looking more like 1984 every day.

    --
    Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
  6. Hard to know if the posts violated the ToS by Omega · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's hard to know if this is censorship or if they just violated the terms of service and hatebois are flying off the handle. There are still lots of posts about the consumer reports unrecommendation on discussions.apple.com:

    http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?search=Go&q=consumer+reports

    Still, if it's true it wouldn't be the first time Apple flew off the handle with the censorship (remember the Ulysses app flap?).

  7. Re:To think that this is the company..... by khendron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They never said that 2010 wouldn't be like 1984.

    --
    Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
  8. Re:To think that this is the company..... by HerculesMO · · Score: 5, Funny

    Touche.

    --
    The price is always right if someone else is paying.
  9. New Logo Please by Tihstae · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We need a new logo on /. for Apple. No more with the company logo. We need Steve Borg or something similar.

    1. Re:New Logo Please by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Found it

      --
      Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
  10. Re:It is their site. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They are right up there with Microsoft on the evil scale.

    Compared to Apple, I'd let Microsoft watch my children.

  11. Take a look in the Apple support forums, please by RLBrown · · Score: 5, Informative

    Naturally, as soon as I read the Slashdot summary, I read the original at TUAW. The TUAW posting was as represented by the Slashdot summary: Apple is said to have killed all mention of the CR article in its forums. Being an Apple support forum member, I logged in. Yes, the particular posts were indeed labelled "you do not have permission...". EVIL, I thought. But then I poked around -- there are massive threads discussing the antenna in the Apple Support Forum, many dumping vile on the antenna engineering. So what was so offensive to Apple in the handful of posts that they did censor? TUAW helpfully pointed out that Bing had cached the offensive posts. Well, let's have a look there. The deleted posts were less about the antenna issue, and more about the quality and accuracy of CR testing. Expressed in highly emotional fan-boy terms. It would seem that Apple has not touched the real ongoing discussions of the antenna issue, but just taken down the threads that strayed into CR bashing. BTW, as a CR subscriber, I read the original article there, too. Yes, after giving good marks to most iPhone 4 features, it considers the antenna issue to be a fatal flaw. But it does not discuss the claims that the signal must be marginal in the first place, for the hand grip to make a difference. Nor discusses the possible smokescreen of bar generation algorithms.

    --
    -- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
  12. Re:Look it up by blind+biker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The multiple posts about an external magazine review have been removed because discussing magazine articles is offtopic for a tech support board, just as discussing the latest Huffington Post article on Angelina Jolie is offtopic.

    So, a magazine article about the iPhone is off-topic in a tech support board dedicated to the iPhone?

    Are you saying this with a straight face?

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.