funny to think about the guy who thinks his keyboard is broken because he uses so many slurs day to day. the volume of words seems a touch excessive

Censorship like this isn’t really decided to by one particular person or team of people deciding what to censor.

It’s mostly automated, controversial phrases or topics are detected by analyzing various data sources and getting sentiment analysis from interactions that people have in response. Anything that causes overwhelming polarization or negative reactions or meets other criteria gets blocked. There is no agenda.

How the hell can they defend banning “Trayvon Martin” of all things. Are they now the arbiters responsible for quashing social movements?

This is an _insane_ lever for censorship. Does Israel pay them to omit “the occupied territories”? Is that internal Apple policy irrespective of nation state pressure?

It's not just madness that these exist, but that they are hidden, unexposed to the user, and have no justification or rationale.

Skip the article.

Swipeblocked: The phrases your iPhone won't suggest

https://swipeblocked.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394070

When you ask me, thats a kind of good. When I see how people use autocorrect and autocomplete without thinking, I wouldn't wonder when someone is put into jail because a sentence that he never planned to type but send it without knowing because autocorrect has changed it. This feature protects people that mindlessly use autocorrect/complete from jail, bad discussions with their employer or political correct 'friends'.

if apple suggest it, they predict gov't would come at them anyways. So they just preempt all that.

Related:

Apple's predictive text restrictions include 'Dictator Trump' and 'Sleepy Joe'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50391486

I dumped Apple's word list

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50357782

Ah yet another "nudge" type behavioral psychology intervention. I'd say these technology companies should be strictly regulated, but they're doing Uncle Sam's propaganda so I doubt that alone would help.

It would be nice certain companies could be chartered by the U.N. I think it would be much more difficult for them to do evil stuff if the majority of states had to agree on their charter. Not that there isn't a subset of things that all states want that sucks ass, but it's much less.

Researcher behind this project here! What I find really interesting here is how of these phrases are something that no one would type by accident. For instance, "Baghdad by the bay" or "iMessage isn't working". And the suppression extends beyond autocomplete/autocorrect to swipe typing. That's why I don't buy Apple's comment that this is just about avoiding inappropriate suggestions.

Some blocked phrases are quite arbitrary: Australia, India, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, and the US are the only countries you can't say are bad or poor. Trayvon Martin is the only full name you can't write. You can call Putin, Biden, or Xi a dictator, but not Trump. In other languages, the suppression can be even worse.

And some are ridiculously overbroad: "is important" and "black woman" are blocked! When I try to swipe them, I get "is impotent" and "blank woman".

I think it's not totally unreasonable for a list like this to exist, at least for autocomplete, but it ought to be transparent so people can see the impact Apple's choices are having on our use of language. Individually it's a small nudge, but on the scale of billions of iPhones it can shape the discourse.

https://swipeblocked.com

Do you enjoy the feeling of a stranger's fingers poking around in your brain? I sure don't. So don't buy Apple products.

For every trick you catch them at there are a thousand you didn't