Sorry, iPhone owners: Apple CEO Tim Cook’s human rights rhetoric doesn’t match up with his record.
Don’t get me wrong, if America is to remain the world’s economic powerhouse, we’ll need more companies like Apple that produce high-value goods and create high-value jobs. Still, we should always call out hypocrisy where we see it. And when it comes to human rights, there’s great hypocrisy in the separation of Cook’s rhetoric and Apple reality.
On one side is the rhetoric. Regularly declaring his fealty to human rights and freedom, Cook has received awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation and the Human Rights Campaign. Receiving another award at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., last year, Cook pledged that he would “continue to stand up for human rights, including the right to privacy.” The CEO knows how to talk the talk.
Walking the walk, however, is a different matter. Because just a couple of months following that Newseum event, Cook accepted Chinese government censorship constraints in Apple products. Those constraints limit the freedom of Chinese users of Apple phones to find and freely exchange knowledge as they see fit. Apple’s choice to accept those constraints illustrated its deference to an authoritarian government. But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. After all, in the aftermath of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack, Apple notably refused to help the FBI access the terrorist’s phone. If intrinsic human rights are the defining factor, however, why does Apple have one rule for China and one for the U.S.?
Cook’s divergent approach to dealing with China and the FBI is noteworthy in that it suggests Cook might not be as objectively concerned about human rights as he pretends. Indeed, Apple’s restriction of Alex Jones last week suggests that it views the rants of one man as more important than the freedom of hundreds of millions.
So why does Apple retain such positive press coverage? Cook is a clever man: he knows how to keep the power players right on side! Just last weekend, for example, Cook earned Trump’s Twitter accolade: “Looking forward to dinner tonight with Tim Cook of Apple. He is investing big dollars in U.S.A.”
That tweet speaks to one final area of Apple hypocrisy. While the company is investing in the U.S. economy, its workplace conditions abroad aren’t exactly superb. Those working in the southeast Asian factories that produce Apple products are lucky to have their jobs, but they could be treated far better. And while Apple is paying closer attention to working conditions, its own auditing service this year found escalating problems.
Put simply, while Tim Cook might be a great CEO, he isn’t the human rights guru some assume.
