Apple told TV Plus showrunners to avoid plots that might upset Chinese officials

In early 2018, Apple SVP of internet software and services Eddy Cue and SVP of internet software and services Morgan Wandell instructed TV creators it had commissioned to produce content for Apple TV Plus to avoid plots and scenarios that held China and the Chinese state up in a critical light.

Buzzfeed quotes an anonymous showrunner who says this is common practice in all of Hollywood's streaming giants, who fear that upsetting the Chinese state could result in a blockade of all their offerings (China permanently blocked Apple's Ibooks and Itunes Movies in 2016 over similar concerns).

These were hardly the first of their kind. In the second half of 2018, Apple challenged or rejected just two of 56 app takedown requests from China, removing 517 apps at the governments behest, according to the companys transparency report. Apple said the vast majority of these apps were for porn and gambling, but it has also removed an unspecified number of virtual private networking and news apps. Apple provided customer data to the Chinese government 96% of the time when it asked about a device, and 98% of the time when it asked about an account. In the US, those numbers were around 80% and the US government did not make any app removal requests.

In September, Apple seemed to brush off the seriousness of an exploit attack directed at the Uighur ethnic minority. The sophisticated attack was narrowly focused, not a broad-based exploit of iPhones en masse, Apple said in a blog post acknowledging the attack.