A coalition of women’s groups, tech watchdogs, and progressive activists is calling on Apple and Google to remove the social media site X and its related chatbot, Grok, from their app stores, reports Reuters.
And it’s a shame and embarrassment that the two companies haven’t already done this. Has Apple finally reached the point where profit matters more than principles.
In open letters published on Wednesday, the coalition accused the Elon Musk-owned apps of generating illegal content that violates both companies’ terms of service.
The push, whose backers include the feminist group UltraViolet, the National Organization for Women, the liberal group MoveOn, and the parent advocacy group ParentsTogether Action, is aimed at piling pressure on Musk after Grok began generating sexually charged, degrading, or violent images of women and children.
“We are really imploring Apple and Google to take this extremely seriously,” Jenna Sherman, UltraViolet’s campaign director, told Reuters ahead of the letter’s release. “They are enabling a system in which thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people, particularly women and children, are being sexually abused through the help of their own app stores.””
Already, in a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Edward Markey have askedApple and Google remove X Corp’s X and Grok apps from their app stores.
From the letter: We write to ask that you enforce your app stores’ terms of service against X Corp’s (hereafter, “X”) X and Grok apps for their mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children. X’s generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms. Apple and Google must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed.
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