For about an hour this week, Telegram disappeared from Apple's App Store — a jarring absence for a messaging platform serving over 1 billion people worldwide, many living under government censorship. Apple later disclosed that it had pulled the app because of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and brought it back once that content was deleted. The incident has reignited debate over how Apple enforces its moderation policies and why it treats different companies in sharply different ways, according to a report published this week by The Verge.
The contrast with X is striking. Late last year, X introduced a feature letting users edit images through its Grok AI chatbot, and AI-generated deepfakes that undressed adults and children quickly spread across the platform. The UK's former prime minister condemned X and pushed forward a deepfake law, while the European Union launched an investigation into the platform. Advocacy groups demanded that Apple and Google remove X from their app stores, but that never happened. Instead, Apple communicated with X behind the scenes to request changes, according to a letter Apple wrote to US senators seen by NBC News. Apple later determined that X had "substantially resolved its violations," while telling Grok's team they needed to make additional changes "or the app could be removed from the App Store." During this entire period, Apple removed neither X nor Grok, even though the AI chatbot within both apps generated undressed images of minors. Meanwhile, Durov claims that Apple removed Telegram before ever contacting the company.
The distinction may come down to politics more than technical violations. "Removing X would have likely caused a firestorm of political response against Apple," Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown and affiliate of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, told The Verge. Chander explained that "X has a far stronger base of political support in the United States than Telegram does," meaning that taking down X would expose Apple to backlash it wouldn't face for removing Telegram. Apple is aware of what can happen: in 2022, shortly after he bought Twitter, Musk began publicly complaining that Apple was trying to restrict the app. The dispute ended with Tim Cook giving Musk a tour of Apple's campus and resolving the apparent "misunderstanding."
Apple's recent actions suggest the rules have some flexibility — at least when the world's first trillionaire is involved. The company closely guards the process behind its moderation decisions, making it difficult to determine exactly how it works with developers behind closed doors. One instance of illegal content can be enough to get an app removed from app stores, and Apple had previously removed Telegram due to a CSAM violation in 2018 for a similarly brief period of time. But the playbook appears different when political consequences loom larger. The lack of transparency leaves app developers guessing which violations will trigger immediate removal and which will earn a private conversation and time to fix the problem. For platforms navigating Apple's gatekeeping power, the calculus may depend less on the severity of the violation and more on who owns the company and what kind of blowback Apple expects to face.