Apple’s Eddy Cue spoke Monday at SXSW.
James Martin/CNETIn the wake of the debate over whether platforms like Twitter and Facebook are doing an adequate job handling fake news, Apple’s banking on curation as a way through the tumult.
“It’s always hard to sit from the outside and talk about others,” Apple’s Eddy Cue said Monday at the South by Southwest Conference, “when you have a large platform, there’s a lot of responsibility.”
Cue is senior vice president of Internet software and services for Apple. He oversees both iTunes and Apple Pay, and services including Apple News. His talk came the same morning that Apple announced that it was buying a digital magazine distributor. Texture, which gives you unlimited access to different magazines for a single fee, has been billed as something like a Netflix for magazines.
He didn’t say exactly how Texture would be rolled into Apple News.
“We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users,” Cue said in a statement announcing the deal.
During his discussion at SXSW, Cue said things like white supremacy and hate speech don’t have a place on Apple News— the platform wants to lean on the side of what Cue called trusted news sources.
And yet, CNN’s Dylan Byers, who interviewed Cue, asked why the NRA has a presence in the App Store and on Apple TV. Cue said every platform draws its own lines. The NRA might have an app, but Apple also prohibits apps that facilitates the sale of guns, for example.
“Everybody has a responsibility in the world,” he said.
