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Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

(blog.emojipedia.org)
1456 points pulisse | 2 comments | 07 Oct 19 16:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tibbon ◴[07 Oct 19 18:36 UTC] No.21184395[source]▶
What's it take for an engineer in the US to actually do something like this?

If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me.

Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use my entitlement/privilege as an engineer to say "fuck off" to anyone who wants me to do things I find immoral. Furthering the needs of a power hungry regime looking to assert dominance over others? Nope. I spend all my day working to further democracy and freedom, not to enable free thought and self-determination to be squashed.

Whoever coded this change and approved this PR, shame on you.

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sieabahlpark ◴[07 Oct 19 18:40 UTC] No.21184431[source]▶
You can easily build the feature that can be misused. Think of it as a general region filter or an emoji set to increase engagement.

You want to ensure your design team and product matches the demographic you're trying to target so you can choose which ones are approved for that area. Completely reasonable, not a malicious feature to build either.

Except when it prevents you from selling your device in China.

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datagram ◴[07 Oct 19 18:57 UTC] No.21184620[source]▶
From what we know about how the emoji blocking was implemented for mainland China, I doubt it's a benign feature just being misused: https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x34.html

Notably, the code specifically looks for the "CN" locale, and calls "removeEmoji".

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1. musicale ◴[07 Oct 19 20:18 UTC] No.21185505[source]▶
Wow, that is depressing. I would definitely be ashamed to implement a feature like that.
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2. kelnos ◴[07 Oct 19 20:37 UTC] No.21185693[source]▶
I could easily imagine (especially at a place like Apple where there's a ton of internal secrecy), the ticket for implementing removeEmoji() could have been pitched in a much broader fashion: perhaps there would be a "child mode" that would remove the middle finger emoji and others like that.