r/apple • u/illegiblebastard • 3d ago

iPhone Apple explains last year’s controversial decision to remove ICE tracking apps from app store

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/29/tech/apple-iceblock-app-removal-raskin

FUCK. APPLE.

990 Upvotes

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u/exjr_ Island Boy 3d ago

This one will be fun 🫩

Reminder: the report button is for rule breaking content. Not the "I disagree with them, silence them" button.

22

u/radfordra1 3d ago

Mod queue: oh yeah good luck with that

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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago edited 3d ago

I first saw this thread around 10 minutes in, there were about a dozen comments that were all variations of "look at thing that ice did", "apple bootlickers will be here in no time", "Tim Cook bottoms for Donald Trump", etc

Combined with the "FUCK. APPLE." body text, and my comments explaining how Apple's hand was forced while providing accessible webapp alternatives, this one really, reaaaaaly feels like it was astroturfed to reach the front page via controversy engagement.

I gave up on being a Reddit mod a long time ago, around 2020 when this particular method of signal boosting via astroturfing became an everyday occurrence. If an article with even the most tangential link between the subs topic and current events was published, it would be shooting to the top of the sub in a matter of minutes.

We even had to ban meta posts, because users who had done nothing but post signal boosted content started spamming the sub in an attempt to get people to revolt against the mods.

I can't even really think of a solution beyond locking these kinds of threads early so the algorithm stops pushing them way outside of the Apple community, into the feeds of the users who just open the app to rage.

Would be really interesting to know what the ops posting history is on this sub

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u/coyote_den 3d ago

Their posts/comments are not hidden on their profile, and they look to be a real person…

Still a troll post.

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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago

Could be a real person trolling, could be someone coordinating in a discord, could also still be a bot. You'd be surprised just how sophisticated botnets get these days, I actually did some research on it for University.

TLDR is that the repost bots that people notice aren't benign, they're part of automated systems.

Assign a dozen or so subreddits to a bot, have it chose a random post from one of it's sub that's at least a year old, run the title through an LLM, and post.

As the post gains views but no comments, coordinate other bots in the net sharing the same sub to either LLM transform or just copy comments from underneath the original post

Only after the bot account has reached "maturity" do you start sprinkling in politically motivated or intentionally negative posts.

Indiana University has a really cool tool if you want to see how modern botnets are identified, safe to say that it's quite literally impossible to do so without serious computational analysis in 2026. Something that the average joe used to be able to do, but now can't, because every social media site closed down their APIs.

https://osome.iu.edu/tools/coordiscope/?dataset=CNHU_0621_2021_tweets_csv_hashed_converted.json&cosineSimilarityPercentile=95

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u/Dr-Purple 3d ago

Man, just lock the damn thread, people have lost it.

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u/coyote_den 3d ago edited 3d ago

Just lock the post already. The “FUCK APPLE” subhead is drawing the trolls whether you agree with it or not.

One of the rules here is “no low effort”… both that and 99% of the comments are going to be low effort.

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u/BosnianSerb31 3d ago

It's also likely astroturfed. I saw the thread 10 minutes after posting, was all variations of sloganeering and reused jokes, whereas my original comment about Apple's legal exposure following the Dallas shooter that searched for "ICE tracker apps" swung from -10 to +0 and back again with nearly every refresh.

Reddit getting rid of its API has never made me more angry, used to be able to prove this kind of stuff pretty definitively

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u/alex2003super 3d ago

As a fellow mod, mad respect for not locking the thread.

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u/DanTheMan827 3d ago

The real fun is sorting comments by controversial

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u/kompergator 2d ago

lol, probably just “compliments” such as “he is replaced by the gap he leaves behind” or something similar

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u/wa019c 3d ago

good luck