Image: Citizen
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
Advertisement
Advertisement
On May 27 Motherboard asked Apple and Google whether they were going to review Citizen's status on their app stores in light of Frame's successful push to publish personal information of the individual mistakenly accused of starting the wildfire. Representatives from both companies acknowledged the request for comment and several follow-up emails, but stopped responding around a week ago. Apple did not respond to an additional request for comment sent on Tuesday.Importantly, the case of Citizen's CEO placing a bounty on someone's head was not a piece of user generated content. In the U.S. apps and social networks are generally not legally responsible for what their users may post, as long as they make good faith efforts to moderate their platforms. In this case, the manhunt and the potential policy violations were made by Citizen itself, not its individual users. At one point during the hunt, a Citizen employee pointed out that the company was violating its own terms of service that prohibit the "posting of specific information that could identify parties involved in an incident," according to the Slack chats. This staffer was ignored in that specific Slack room, and the broadcast continued to specifically name the wrongly accused person and share his photo for hours. In a subsequent all-hands meeting, Frame said he "overrode" the company's own policies that night.Do you work at Citizen, Apple, or Google? Do you have access to internal documents related to this incident? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
Advertisement