If Apple CEO Tim Cook told his Apple News minions to take their left thumb off the scale, they’re not listening: Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have more reason than ever to raise hell.
A month after we flagged the blatant political skew of the Apple news feed, the tech giant’s aggregator for general readers offered fewer than 2% of its top stories from outlets seen as right-leaning.
Fine, that’s up from literally 0% the month before, but eight out of 560 stories is a joke.
These numbers come courtesy of the eagle-eyed Media Research Center, which has been exposing lefty news bias for literal decades.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson warned Cook last month that this bias may violate consumer-protection laws; it seems the Cupertino crew doesn’t care.
Content suppression like this is bad for consumers because it hinders them accessing stories they might want.
It’s bad for the news biz — massive platforms shouldn’t pick winners based on ideology.
And it’s horrible for the country, cementing partisan divides and keeping people stuck in an echo chamber.
Consider how The Post got locked out of social media for daring to publish true, verified (and utterly vindicated) stories off of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Meanwhile, “mainstream” outfits like The New York Times did their best to hide the damage of Team Biden’s open borders while “responsible” lefty outfits such as the Guardian openly ran interference for Hamas post-Oct.-7.
It’s not just Apple.
The same issues pervade other tech giants, like Google and Meta, (though Meta’s seen recent improvement).
Indeed, bias-spotter Allsides (a genuinely nonpartisan outfit) found in 2023 that across the media-aggregation landscape, sites with Post-like politics get majorly short shrift.
The White House has already barked; if Apple doesn’t shape up it needs to bite, hard.
Why should the FTC exist at all if it can’t protect against shady and deceptive business practices like this?
We get that Cook and his No. 2, Eddie Cue, don’t want any of this; the trouble is lower down.
But no matter what else the top dogs have on their plates, they need to get their minions in line before it becomes a nightmare for the whole country; getting this right is a service they need to perform for society.
Their colleagues across the tech world have similar duties: Big Tech must get its thumb off the scale, or face the consequences.
