I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like. Despite the outcome, I doubt the devs were pitching censorship as the reason for implementing this.
To the shocking number of people here who are justifying this or explaining how it only affect swipe input as if that makes it better: soft coercion is still coercion. If I made a physical keyboard that stops keys from working when you're about to finish typing something I don't want you to type, but you can still circumvent it, I still made a censorship keyboard. It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.
I wrote something like this a long time ago. The customer's request was: "don't make this software produce swear words on its own". Note: on its own.
Producing "trump is …" when a user wants that is one thing. Producing that when the user wants something else could be construed as coming from the software itself, and we all know that people looking for a shitstorm will seize the opportunity.
So probabilistic software like a swipe interpreter will often be written to avoid some guesses, to lessen the chance of a shitstorm. Users who want that output have to use a dependable input method instead of one based on probabilities and guesswork.
IMO this avoidance isn't among the ten worst consequences of shitstorms.
An even more generous interpretation (not saying this is the case and a complete excuse, but might explain some of the choices) is that there are some phrases people do not want to type by accident.
“Male chauvinist pig” is something many would be very upset to send to their boss by accident. So it’s perhaps understandable some such phrases are not excluded from the guesswork.
Isnt the regular keyboard on iOS typing also probabilistic? I thought the entire claim to fame of the original iPhone keyboard was how it could determine which key you meant based on letter frequency / word usage / etc. Does that mean it can also stop you from typing certain things? So whats the difference between the swipe interpreter and the fat finger interpreter?
- There is a chance, quantified by some metric, where a person is suggested a word that is offensive to them or their culture because a probabilistic model made the wrong decision.
- There is no chance that the above happens.
Apple will choose the latter, time and time again, because they are risk averse and freedom is not particularly high on their values list. I used to work at Apple.
Not to dismiss your assertion, but here’s another way of looking at it:
Keyboard swiping involves some prediction work from the system. It is ultimately making a best guess from the keys your finger has passed through. The only truly “accurate” output would be for the keyboard to spell out the gibberish that arises from showing every key that the finger has swiped over. Anything intelligible is a guess.
Now because it is a guess, some may question the system or its makers, “Why did you guess this, and not that?” It is easy to see how this can make the maker of the system the target of a politically motivated group. For example, there is a difference between typing out “Dictator Trump” and my keyboard refusing to spell it out - a clear sign of censorship. However, when swiped, because of the guessing nature of the technology, I can understand that the maker of the system (Apple in this case) would not want to be seen endorsing these views. Hence, they do not offer up these politically charged phrases. We are free to type them out, because it is easy to point out that the intent is entirely from the user. However, it is harder to argue for this from the swiping keys gesture.
In my view, this is a more reasonable explanation.
I honestly don't see the difference at all. The user intent is identically clear, regardless of the mode of input. What if it was speech-to-text and the software refused to input my clear annunciation of "fuck"? STT requires some guessing and judgment calls too, but I would definitely call it censorship if the software refused.
My Samsung phone can search images by keyword and it actually works super well. It would be infinitely more useful to me if I could search by a certain class of "pics" and it helped with that. Especially when going through nation boundaries.
These all seem like phrases that people say a lot. If I had to guess what happened here, I’d suspect that the LLM being used for AutoCorrect was not successfully “alignment” (i.e. corporate happyspeak) tuned, it instead reflected the actual statistics of the internet, and the engineers resorted to inelegant brute force after having enormous difficulty getting it to talk like anything but a South Park caricature of Tourette’s.
Come to think of it, intuitively any attempt to solve this by tuning the LLM would make texters sound subtly like claude- in which case absolutely the blacklist is better.
I agree with you that the whole concept of restricting terms on a keyboard is dystopian and your analogy to a physical keyboard which prevents you from typing certain terms is apt.
Apple should not be in the business of editorializing their users’ writings. The whole deferral to “well you can just manually type it out” raises the obvious question “then why can’t I swipe it out?”
> raises the obvious question “then why can’t I swipe it out?”
Because then it could look like they're suggesting the word to you, rather than you explicitly selecting it, and they don't want to be accused of suggesting any terms that might be controversial, for the same reason they don't want to be accused of suggesting profanity to their users.
This is the level-headed explanation I can imagine being made earnestly in the board room. But it still boils down to coercion -- in this case, Apple is anticipating and passing along the coercion from sources it believes it could be embarrassed by.
This is how censorship works best, if folks start anticipating and avoiding it so the censors dont even have to exert pressure.
It’s not a censorship issue, at least in the USA, because they’re not afraid of legal pressure from the U.S. government. It’s a public relations issue. Every day, “journalists” and “influencers” are conjuring up some new controversy for the masses to get their panties in a twist about. It’s reasonable to want to avoid that.
HN is hardly immune from this; it’s no small irony that there will be people doing that very thing right here in these comments.
In another universe, an HN comment is complaining that Apple's raw autocomplete (ie straight from crowdsourced data with no post-processing) suggests Sleepy Joe, and that this suggestion means Apple is "passing along coercion" from the crowd....
I remember way back when, Google bombing was still a thing. Lots of people linked the term "miserable failure" to George W. Bush's White House page. Then searching for "miserable failure" in Google ended up with the White House page being the top link.
Much hay was made in some circles that Google was saying George W. Bush's White House was a miserable failure. No tech company wants to be the target of that sort of campaign today. Especially not with a petulant thin skinned narcissist in office that already has demanded protection money to ward off tariffs and other retribution available to the Presidency.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg for the iOS Keyboard's issues. They've tried to fix it multiple times, and while it is undeniably better than its lowest point - it is still staggeringly worse than Google's native offering on the Pixel range. Swiping is just so painful, and Microsoft's Swiftkey keyboard is on life support.
Considering arguably the keyboard itself is one of the most common "touch surfaces" on iOS, the level of neglect and level of overall quality is staggering. There's some serious incentive problems at Apple if nobody is tasked with making one of the best digital keyboards in the world.
PS - Whoever came up with the concept, on swipe-style touch keyboards, of the "Tap Map"/Heatmap wherein keys visible location doesn't match their touch area - so that BY DESIGN it always provides an inconsistent user experience needs to be fired into the sun. You literally cannot disable it on most mobile keyboards. It is on iOS's native keyboard AND Microsoft's Swiftkey.
Of course; but my point is just add it to the giant pile of problems with iOS's keyboard. Every part of it has bugs, broken stuff, or annoyances like this, it isn't fit for purpose, and needs significant work.
The fact Apple aren't embarrassed by the iOS keyboard is very surprising and disappointing.
I'm surprised by the people here who think this is some way unique to Apple. I'm 99% sure Gboard on Android does the same thing. It seems to be implemented differently and to be a bit more responsive to learning my behavior over time, but I've highly suspected it's been there for years. And I'm surprised no one has noticed this until now?
I'd have tried to work out more detailed behavior but I'm poor enough at swiping (at least with Gboard) that there's little point in trying to pin it down that well, at least for me.
Not predicting to something controversial when doing predictive text isn't censorship. You can still type any of these things. When I swing my finger around wildly it's making a best guess; not jumping to a phrase that makes me look bad or get arrested (in some countries) isn't an awful design choice.
You're deft at using it well enough that their predictive engine can guess your intent. There's never been a swipe keyboard that isn't guessing. Your finger literally goes over many chars it doesn't use. The team building the predictive engine has to make calls balancing their accuracy vs failure modes.
Yea it's not the best option in all situations but fixing voice dictation glitches is way less tapping over the long haul; fingers no go numb using it as much as possible by saving the tap tap tap for absolutely necessary moments
True, it's a very user-oriented feature. That's why they let you disable it, and also let you edit the blacklist, so that you can prevent accidentally typing words that are offensive in your own cultural context.
... Actually I'm not sure if they let you do those.
Try getting things done on such a device in a military context. A thousand acronyms adopted by generals who dont know the internet from a hole in the ground. I saw a Gunnary Seargent scream when he saw his rank acronym (GySgt) get autocorrected on a form to gynocologist (i suspect he hit a suggested word popup). It is bad enough having to deal with the keyboard rejecting capital letters in the middle of a word.
They should just roll back the keyboard 5 to 10 years. Lately the keyboard is super temperamental. Sometimes it works pretty good and sometimes I have to retry multiple times until I get a simple sentence completed. It's really frustrating and it seems to be getting worse.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. And to people complaining that this is censorship, it is absolutely not. You can still type these words just fine, it's just not going to interpret swipes that are inherently probabilistic and often ambiguous as potentially risky terms.
This seems like a feature, because I swipe all the time and send messages without realizing I got a word wrong, especially because the word it chooses is usually with the same first letter and approximately same length.
All this is doing is avoiding high-risk words and terms, and making you type them out letter by letter to ensure you aren't sending an accidentally sexual/swear/political message to your Mom/boss/colleague.
This would be problematic and censorship if it were preventing you from typing the phrases at all. It's clearly a helpful feature, however, to prevent you from accidentally typing risky phrases when using something as error-prone as swipe typing.
> Apple’s iPhone will not autocomplete references to drugs, sexual acts and, perhaps in the spirit of corporate protection, “iMessage isn’t working”.
It will be interesting as corporate predictive text generators take over the world and companies like Apple will literally build the Jobsian reality distortion field into their products to portray their services as working better than they are.
Well I just swyped it into this comment, and double checked in iMessage, although hilariously, it types “isn’t” correctly, but then when I type “real” it “corrects” it by removing the apostrophe.
and all I wanted to do was make a bad joke about how I’m thankful Apple won’t let me ruin my five-year-old’s dreams by sending her an accidental soul crushing text.
On a real note, though, if they could just find a way to fix the issue where every time I type an “i” to say “I“ it instead types an “o” all by itself like I’m some kind of 17th century bard, and then anytime I want to type “a“ as an indefinite article, it will type a single “s” by itself, which almost never makes any grammatical sense in the English language unless you’re talking about the letter “s” itself.
Any company that is concerned about their PR image has to do some filtering of this sort, otherwise they get hit pieces like [1][2] though in both cases, it was (aggregate) human behaviour that was beneath said issue.
The answer seems obvious to me: train a user’s predictive swipe engine on solely their own messages. It gives them an easy out on controversy while removing the need for a filter list.
They do not, in fact, have to. They choose to. Don't ever let parties off the hook for choosing to do something just because they claim to fear PR blips if they don't.
I just don't get this logic. It's a keyboard, after all. It's meant for typing. It's like if my camera refused to take a picture of my butt because it might offend someone.
> It's like if my camera refused to take a picture of my butt because it might offend someone.
Which the iPhone conveniently also does [1].
The problem is, media loves something to feed outrage, and Evangelical pressure groups love to raise a stink over bullshit any journalist with an ounce of self respect would discard.
That's not equivalent and you know it. This, to use your analogy, is like if your camera had an AI upscaler that inserted butts into the picture when they weren't there. Apple is blocking that and so it means you actually have to put the butts in the frame.
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.
Interestingly, I didn’t know who that was so I used the “Look up” feature and it said it was a “Murdered” person, but in the Wikipedia entry it says the shooter was acquitted - ie the victim was not found to have been murdered.
You really didn't know who that was, but had to look into the Wikipedia entry in detail enough to read about a jury decision and then frame it in a different way than written in Wikipedia (which rightly talks about the judicial process related to specific charges brought against Zimmerman, not an absolute statement of facts, such as "victim was not found to have been murdered").
I'm flagging that this doesn't sound like a good faith discussion. The green account raises my priors.
Note that I'm not suggesting that Apple's policy on censorship is good, quite the contrary.
This is exactly censorship via omission. What could possibly be the intent here other than to discourage use of these phrases across wide swaths of the population.
Making it so they aren't in the pool of errors that can be made. I want to be able to type swear words, but I don't want profanity to come out when I try to swipe "duck". Socially, emotionally, and politically loaded phrases make sense to require a bit more care for.
That is a general answer to your question. It is not a specific defense of the particular word list in question. But I can say I've been surprised a few times about what I accidentally swiped on Android. Bitch isn't swipable but I have "bitchiest" readily available, for instance.
Look at all the armchair tough guys crying like children over the slightest whiff of behavior that goes against all these sweatshop child labor exploiting first worlders list of speculative harms.
How adult of you to die on this hill of all hills.
As global COL rises due to Americans hands off political approach the world watches as yall bitch about iPhone keyboards.
That is why people hate modern technology; the people in the industry are out of touch coddled first worlders lacking perspective.
We're not censoring the book. It's simply not on the shelves. You can ask for it by name if you like. You have to spell it out exactly though, or else the librarian will deny any knowledge of it.
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'.
> a brief glitch in which users of the dictation feature saw the name “Trump” flash across their screen when they spoke the word “racist” into their iPhones
"Glitch" more like "Easter egg" I suspect.
There was an emoji search/copy-paste web site that I use when I need to find an emoji. Once upon a time, when you typed "Trump" into the search, one of the results was the poop emoji. It no longer returns that, but it does return the Russian flag.
If I want mainstream, my two other choices are Google and Samsung, and they are both even worse than Apple when it comes to "strangers poking around in your brain".
Should I give up on mainstream smartphones? Should I give up on smartphones entirely?
To the shocking number of people here who are justifying this or explaining how it only affect swipe input as if that makes it better: soft coercion is still coercion. If I made a physical keyboard that stops keys from working when you're about to finish typing something I don't want you to type, but you can still circumvent it, I still made a censorship keyboard. It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.
Producing "trump is …" when a user wants that is one thing. Producing that when the user wants something else could be construed as coming from the software itself, and we all know that people looking for a shitstorm will seize the opportunity.
So probabilistic software like a swipe interpreter will often be written to avoid some guesses, to lessen the chance of a shitstorm. Users who want that output have to use a dependable input method instead of one based on probabilities and guesswork.
IMO this avoidance isn't among the ten worst consequences of shitstorms.
“Male chauvinist pig” is something many would be very upset to send to their boss by accident. So it’s perhaps understandable some such phrases are not excluded from the guesswork.
- There is a chance, quantified by some metric, where a person is suggested a word that is offensive to them or their culture because a probabilistic model made the wrong decision.
- There is no chance that the above happens.
Apple will choose the latter, time and time again, because they are risk averse and freedom is not particularly high on their values list. I used to work at Apple.
Keyboard swiping involves some prediction work from the system. It is ultimately making a best guess from the keys your finger has passed through. The only truly “accurate” output would be for the keyboard to spell out the gibberish that arises from showing every key that the finger has swiped over. Anything intelligible is a guess.
Now because it is a guess, some may question the system or its makers, “Why did you guess this, and not that?” It is easy to see how this can make the maker of the system the target of a politically motivated group. For example, there is a difference between typing out “Dictator Trump” and my keyboard refusing to spell it out - a clear sign of censorship. However, when swiped, because of the guessing nature of the technology, I can understand that the maker of the system (Apple in this case) would not want to be seen endorsing these views. Hence, they do not offer up these politically charged phrases. We are free to type them out, because it is easy to point out that the intent is entirely from the user. However, it is harder to argue for this from the swiping keys gesture.
In my view, this is a more reasonable explanation.
That's the whole point: swiping is a very imprecise method, and the user intent is not clear at all, so Apple avoids making "controversial" guesses.
Which is another way of saying identically ambiguous.
Resolving for a safer option when given a choice isn’t censorship in my view. I can, at the end of the day, type out fuck.
Come to think of it, intuitively any attempt to solve this by tuning the LLM would make texters sound subtly like claude- in which case absolutely the blacklist is better.
Apple should not be in the business of editorializing their users’ writings. The whole deferral to “well you can just manually type it out” raises the obvious question “then why can’t I swipe it out?”
Because then it could look like they're suggesting the word to you, rather than you explicitly selecting it, and they don't want to be accused of suggesting any terms that might be controversial, for the same reason they don't want to be accused of suggesting profanity to their users.
This is how censorship works best, if folks start anticipating and avoiding it so the censors dont even have to exert pressure.
HN is hardly immune from this; it’s no small irony that there will be people doing that very thing right here in these comments.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Much hay was made in some circles that Google was saying George W. Bush's White House was a miserable failure. No tech company wants to be the target of that sort of campaign today. Especially not with a petulant thin skinned narcissist in office that already has demanded protection money to ward off tariffs and other retribution available to the Presidency.
There were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site".
When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site" button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before you could click it!
Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site" button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse!
Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)
Considering arguably the keyboard itself is one of the most common "touch surfaces" on iOS, the level of neglect and level of overall quality is staggering. There's some serious incentive problems at Apple if nobody is tasked with making one of the best digital keyboards in the world.
PS - Whoever came up with the concept, on swipe-style touch keyboards, of the "Tap Map"/Heatmap wherein keys visible location doesn't match their touch area - so that BY DESIGN it always provides an inconsistent user experience needs to be fired into the sun. You literally cannot disable it on most mobile keyboards. It is on iOS's native keyboard AND Microsoft's Swiftkey.
The fact Apple aren't embarrassed by the iOS keyboard is very surprising and disappointing.
I'd have tried to work out more detailed behavior but I'm poor enough at swiping (at least with Gboard) that there's little point in trying to pin it down that well, at least for me.
Alright, well some of us are actually deft at swiping text on our phones and would very much like the keyboard to type the word we entered.
The models know which words we intend to type. The problem is those specific words are on unchangeable and hidden block lists.
Yea it's not the best option in all situations but fixing voice dictation glitches is way less tapping over the long haul; fingers no go numb using it as much as possible by saving the tap tap tap for absolutely necessary moments
... Actually I'm not sure if they let you do those.
I suppose it must be region bound, with different phrases per region?
This seems like a feature, because I swipe all the time and send messages without realizing I got a word wrong, especially because the word it chooses is usually with the same first letter and approximately same length.
All this is doing is avoiding high-risk words and terms, and making you type them out letter by letter to ensure you aren't sending an accidentally sexual/swear/political message to your Mom/boss/colleague.
This would be problematic and censorship if it were preventing you from typing the phrases at all. It's clearly a helpful feature, however, to prevent you from accidentally typing risky phrases when using something as error-prone as swipe typing.
It will be interesting as corporate predictive text generators take over the world and companies like Apple will literally build the Jobsian reality distortion field into their products to portray their services as working better than they are.
Well I just swyped it into this comment, and double checked in iMessage, although hilariously, it types “isn’t” correctly, but then when I type “real” it “corrects” it by removing the apostrophe.
and all I wanted to do was make a bad joke about how I’m thankful Apple won’t let me ruin my five-year-old’s dreams by sending her an accidental soul crushing text.
On a real note, though, if they could just find a way to fix the issue where every time I type an “i” to say “I“ it instead types an “o” all by itself like I’m some kind of 17th century bard, and then anytime I want to type “a“ as an indefinite article, it will type a single “s” by itself, which almost never makes any grammatical sense in the English language unless you’re talking about the letter “s” itself.
I suppose ditching Apple is "two birds with one stone" :)
The others are blatant censorship.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/google-autocomplete-vile-suggest...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Which the iPhone conveniently also does [1].
The problem is, media loves something to feed outrage, and Evangelical pressure groups love to raise a stink over bullshit any journalist with an ounce of self respect would discard.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/07/02/facetime-in-ios-26-will-freez...
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.
I wonder where that summary came from?
I'm flagging that this doesn't sound like a good faith discussion. The green account raises my priors.
Note that I'm not suggesting that Apple's policy on censorship is good, quite the contrary.
That is a general answer to your question. It is not a specific defense of the particular word list in question. But I can say I've been surprised a few times about what I accidentally swiped on Android. Bitch isn't swipable but I have "bitchiest" readily available, for instance.
This is just the type of thing that makes everyone hate modern technology.
How adult of you to die on this hill of all hills.
As global COL rises due to Americans hands off political approach the world watches as yall bitch about iPhone keyboards.
That is why people hate modern technology; the people in the industry are out of touch coddled first worlders lacking perspective.
Inaccurate. According to swipeblocked.com it is blocked with both swiping and autocomplete.
Swipeblocked: The phrases your iPhone won't suggest
https://swipeblocked.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50394070
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
"Glitch" more like "Easter egg" I suspect.
There was an emoji search/copy-paste web site that I use when I need to find an emoji. Once upon a time, when you typed "Trump" into the search, one of the results was the poop emoji. It no longer returns that, but it does return the Russian flag.
For every trick you catch them at there are a thousand you didn't
If I want mainstream, my two other choices are Google and Samsung, and they are both even worse than Apple when it comes to "strangers poking around in your brain".
Should I give up on mainstream smartphones? Should I give up on smartphones entirely?
Or yeah, just don't use a smartphone. I still don't.