Apple has pulled an app that documented U.S. military drone strikes, saying it violated the company’s app guidelines by containing “excessively crude or objectionable content,” Gawker reports. Metadata+ was developed by Intercept editor Josh Begley as a companion app to the Twitter account @Dronestream, which publicizes American drone attacks based on information from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Starting in 2012, Apple rejected the app five times under the name Dronestream for being “not useful or entertaining enough” before finally accepting the app once its name was changed to Metadata+ in 2014. Over the weekend, users were informed through a push notification that the app had been pulled. The move has drawn the ire of critics who point out that an app reporting the news is being banned as offensive, and this isn’t the first time the arbitrary nature of Apple’s app guidelines has come under fire as censorship.
Just last week the company sparked concerns when it rejected Ferguson Firsthand, an app that documented various accounts of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and presented them in a 3D environment. Apple hasn’t commented on the story.
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