Apple has publicly pushed back on viral claims that it wiped village names in southern Lebanon from Apple Maps.
In a statement provided to Mirror US, the company said: “We are aware that some outlets have incorrectly reported that certain village and town names in Lebanon were removed from Apple Maps.
“These locations have never been featured. The newer, more detailed Apple Maps experience is not currently available in that region. While we continue to expand where the new maps experience is available, it is not available in all regions across the globe.”
The response has been met with criticism from social media users, with many taking to the comments section of WIRED Middle East’s article titled Apple Says Southern Lebanon Villages Weren’t Removed From Maps. It Never Had Them to dispute the idea that the issue boils down to Apple’s “newer, more detailed” maps not reaching Lebanon yet. Commenters have argued that the end result for people on the ground has remained the same — their villages are still largely invisible on one of the world’s biggest mapping apps.
PEDESTRIAN.TV has also asked Apple to clarify where the “newer, more detailed Apple Maps experience” is currently available, and whether there are plans or a rough timeline to roll that more detailed experience out to Lebanon and neighbouring countries, including the south. At the time of writing, those questions remain unanswered.
What people are seeing on Apple Maps
The controversy started when users began sharing screenshots comparing southern Lebanon on Apple Maps and Google Maps. Social media users have pointed out that similar zoom levels, Apple’s map view appears to show far fewer village names across much of the south, while Google Maps clearly labels smaller towns like Aita al-Shaab and Bint Jbeil.
In many of the Apple screenshots, Tyre is one of the only visible place names in the area, even as nearby parts of Israel and Syria are more densely labelled.
That might sound like a technical quirk, but it’s landing at a moment when southern Lebanon is under heavy bombardment and facing an Israeli ground incursion, with entire communities displaced along the border, hence the increased criticism of the map’s shortcomings.
Activists are calling it “erasure” and urging a boycott
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition shared a post on Instagram accusing Apple of being part of a broader pattern. “@apple has erased most of the towns and villages in Lebanon from ‘Maps’,” the caption says.
“The same strategy was already used by Google and Apple in Gaza. This isn’t a glitch. It’s erasure, complicity, and part of the genocidal propaganda machine.” The post ends with “BOYCOTT GOOGLE AND APPLE” and calls on people to tag the company and “demand accountability now”.
Similar posts have started circulating across X, TikTok and Facebook, with some users explicitly calling for a boycott of Apple products over the issue.
This isn’t the first time maps have been controversial in the region
Part of why this blew up so fast is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Similar accusations have been made for years about how Palestine appears on major mapping platforms.
Viral posts claimed Apple and Google had “officially removed” Palestine from their maps in 2020, and the idea spread quickly among supporters of the Palestinian cause. Fact-checkers later clarified that “Palestine” had actually never been labelled as a country name on those services, with searches instead showing the Gaza Strip and West Bank as territories, not an independent state.
Even with that clarification, the criticism didn’t go away. Palestinian advocates and researchers have argued that when long-standing villages are missing from commercial maps, it can make it easier for governments and developers to act as if those communities don’t exist.
“The omission of longstanding villages in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon, gives Israel the power to facilitate demolitions without anybody noticing,” journalist Ashley Boulos said on TikTok.
Lead image: Supplied / X
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