Ridiculous Valleywag Headline: Apple's 'Freedom From Porn' Enforcer Drawn To Porn Stars and Escorts on Twitter

Long story short: Phillip Shoemaker is employed by Apple. He’s heavily involved in the App Store app approval process. It turns out that prior to employment with Apple, he was an app store developer. 7 of his apps are currently available, and they’re all pretty lame.

The first part of this pulitzer-worthy journalistic effort is that Apple has rules against this sort of thing. Wired was first to make note of this in their own overly-sensationalized write-up:

Typically, Apple employees are prohibited from selling apps in the App Store unless they gain special permission from an executive as part of a policy to avoid conflicts of interest, according to Evan Doll, a former senior iPhone software engineer at Apple.  Doll left Apple about a year ago to start his own company, which now produces the popular Flipboard iPad app for reading news content.

“Apple employees are generally prohibited,” Doll told Wired.com. “You have to get a special exception from a VP. Otherwise, big no-no.”

“If he was doing it pre-Apple then he’d have an easier time getting an exception,” he added.

Valleywag’s take:

The publication of the apps appears to violate Apple’s own employment policy for app store employees.

It’s worth noting that Valleywag is relying on Wired’s article. Neither site seems to have any real information about whether Shoemaker was deemed an exception based on the fact that his apps were developed (and submitted) “pre-Apple”.

So, if you’re looking for the facts which would allow Valleywag to come to the above conclusion…good luck.

So, Wired and Valleywag track this guy down, pour over his posts to various social networks, and are shocked to find that he has since deleted his Twitter account:

Meanwhile, Shoemaker has deleted a Twitter account that, we’ve discovered, showed him following lots of escorts and porn stars on the microblogging service, a public indulgence in precisely the sort of content his boss Apple CEO Steve Jobs has deemed too harmful and corrosive even to touch the app store. 

That’s pretty much the short version of the rest of the article, which is a lot of words saying, in effect: “There’s nothing wrong with following sex escorts on Twitter, there’s nothing wrong with looking at porn, but the fact that THIS GUY does those things, while also attempting to disallow pornographic apps from Apple’s app store, is a clear conflict of interest.

Keep in mind that Apple only disallows pornographic content when it comes to distribution through their app store. Go ahead and see what happens if you try to watch a pornographic video on youporn.com, using the iPhone’s web browser. 

I doubt you’ll have much trouble, nor want for a more hardcore experience.

In other words, Valleywag is determined to make a scandal out of this guy’s personal life, based primarily on his “embarrassing, porny Twitter account”. 

Let’s assume the worst: Shoemaker does indeed follow porn stars and even sex escorts on Twitter, and actively sought those people out. So? This is only a conflict of interest if it can later be shown (through some actual investigative journalism) that the porn stars and escorts he follows somehow get priority treatment or even availability on the app store.

If the argument is that it’s a conflict of interest for Apple employees to view porn, to follow porn stars on Twitter, to go to strip clubs and watch women shake their titties—I suspect a lot of Apple employees need to be fired.

Now, for kicks, let’s assume a less salacious scenario: According to the Valleywag screenshots, Shoemaker follows around 20 escorts and/or pornstars, and they all appear in a cluster. In total, he follows over a thousand twitter accounts including “TheExpert”—a guy who can help you “make money on Twitter.”

It seems reasonable to assume that maybe, just maybe, Shoemaker blindly followed anyone who followed him first? It’s even possible that Shoemaker’s account was set to automatically follow everyone who followed him. Has no one at Valleywag ever experienced the sort of spam followers one gets by posting even the most innocuous of tweets?

Given that Shoemaker’s job involves filtering pornographic content, his tweets may well have been attracting a lot of pornographic spammy followers, right?

The moral of the story:

More to the point, it could also lead people to wonder if it’s not hypocritical for Apple to repeatedly insinuate that merely allowing adults to look at porn through specialized apps on its tablet and phone-sized computers is somehow immoral, corrupting and intrinsically harmful to families — given that the very Apple employee deemed moral, incorruptible and otherwise trustworthy enough to gatekeep said apps was publicly subscribed to 16 escort and porn star Twitter feeds, at minimum.

Ryan Tate wrote this article, and this is the same Ryan Tate who got into an ill-advised, drunken back and forth email/rant with Steve Jobs regarding Apple “no porn” policy. (Speaking of conflicts of interest…cough.)

Tate also, predictably, misrepresents Jobs’s comments on the matter. Jobs may, in fact, think porn is immoral and corrupting and inherently harmful to families, but what he actually said is that the app store “offers freedom from porn” and that Ryan Tate might feel differently about the subject if he had kids. Jobs hasn’t elaborated much, but he has indicated that porn is (as I mention above) easy enough to find, even on an iPhone, and that Apple simply isn’t interested in pushing it.

Most importantly, any attempt to tie an app store policy to the personal life of an app store employee—possibly destroying his reputation as part of the process—is simply absurd at best and irresponsible journalism at worst.

Not that anyone would expect more from a Gawker Media joint.

One last note: About an hour ago, I tweeted:

Just curious about something: Sex Escort Service.

While writing this story, I received an email informing me that MISS_KNOCKOUT is now following me on Twitter.

Score!