Apple's Ethics

Apple faces criticism as light is shed upon an electronics supplier of theirs, Foxconn, unethical treatment of their employees. Organizations like SumOfUs.org and Change.org have led a petition calling for "ethical IPones" and have over 250,000 signatures online. Apple has responded by saying "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. We insist that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made."

Despite these statements Apple customers visited six Apple stores around the world on February 9th and peacefully delivered petitions to the store managers. "I'm a big fan of Apple products but I can no longer ethically support products that harm the people that make them," said Shelby Knox, director of Change.org. Apple no has to put its word into action and start to either change the way Foxconn treats their employees or find another supplier.

Kony2012

By now I'm sure everyone has seen the now viral video distributed by the non-profit group Invisible Children but not everyone nows the truth behind them. There was almost an immediate reaction to the video Kony2012 with hashtags #stopkony and #kony2012 being the most popular tweets on wednesday but not all of it was good. Controversy has now surrounded Invisible Children and separating fact from fiction takes looking at valid sources, not the countless blogs. Speaking of blogs one of the most viewed ones, Visible Children, was in fact full of inaccurate information and some accurate info that was taken out of context.

I don't want to take the time to debunk some of the rumors going around but I do want to point out that the organization was formed as an advocacy group. They are not intending to directly aid central Africa (about 37% of their budget goes to do so though) but rather to show people the horrors of the Lord's Resistance Army or LRA and get rid of their leader Joseph Kony. And guess what, its working. This video has projected Kony into the limelight and has started conversations on a grand scale. Within 24 hours of the video surfacing it has over 15 million hits on YouTube and Vimeo combined. Lets put the controversy aside and align our values with theirs, this man is a danger to innocent people and needs to be taken out. America's 100 military "advisors" were likely to come home soon but probably won't after this viral video, it has simply become to much of a heated topic. For the first time in history America is taking action based solely on the cries of its citizens and global community.