Apple News boots conservative outlet for 'advocat[ing] views overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community'

While Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest have been getting all the headlines for deplatforming lately, Apple News proved last week that it could deplatform a news outlet too for possibly political reasons.

What are the details?

The Western Journal is a Christian publication with an editorial staff that "advocates for broadly conservative positions on most issues."

According to the Western Journal, it was pulled off of Apple News last week. A quick search of the Apple News app shows that at the time of this writing, the outlet is still not included on the Apple News platform. Like social media, Apple News is a big driver of traffic and readership for a wide variety of publications.

In an email provided by the Western Journal, Apple's News Team said that the publication's "channel has been disabled" and its "content removed from Apple News" because the Western Journal had apparently violated Apple's guideline regarding content that "advocates views overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community."

The Western Journal's Shaun Hair told TheBlaze that while his outlet had received no confirmation as to what exactly led to Apple's decision, he and his colleagues "cover stories related to abortion where we assert that life begins at conception and that pre-born babies are human" and also "cover stories that point out problematic assertions about climate change/global warming."

He suggested that it was possible that one of these topics had been the cause of the issue, although he stressed that this was just speculation. Hair said that his organization had been trying to get more information from Apple about why exactly it had been deplatformed.