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.
This is just as wrong as people citing the first amendment in the wrong situations, but in the opposite direction.
Private censorship is censorship. Even if someone declares it "reasonable".
There is such a thing people refer to colloquially as “self censorship” but that basically means keeping your damn fool mouth shut out of respect for yourself and others. That’s different from being forced to keep quiet under penalty of law.
Calling the two the same thing doesn’t help bring clarity or reduce ambiguity. Who is penalizing you for what you say, and what the penalty is, are relevant.
Consider: is it censorship when you refuse to call your mother a c**?
Some historical context is also useful: Google took a bunch of heat when search autocomplete first came out in the 2000s for some of the foibles it made. Once you’re big enough, no matter what kind or direction of error you make, someone’s going to make hay of it.
In the end, this is merely petulant behavior by people who disagree with Apple’s choices as to how they program software. So their keyboard won’t suggest the word “n—-r”. Big deal. Complaining about it says more about the complainant than it does Apple.
But the really big issue isn't the suggestions, it's the words that won't come out when swipe typing. Even though they're in the keyboard's dictionary.
The example of swears that aren't in the dictionary at all is a much smaller matter and old old news. It's not even 1% of this list.
This is the keyboard knowing what word best matches my movement and deliberately ignoring that word when there are spooky neighbor words. It's blocking my input on purpose. Censorship.
Please don't redefine words to mean something they don't mean to suit your political purposes. It tarnishes our discourse and makes understanding each other more difficult. You can still write whatever you want, and so can Apple, so definitionally not any other kind of censorship than garden variety self-censorship.
Again, I think this says more about you than it does Apple. It'd be very illuminating for you to tell us what you intend to swipe to type.
It's the one the algorithm says fits, before they add the secondary blocking later.
As someone else put it:
> if you backspace and try swiping again, you immediately get "grocery lost". with "left wing propaganda" you can backspace and try again 100 times, you will only get "left wring propaganda".
> now ask yourself, since you insist it's probabilistic: what is statistically more probable, "left wing propaganda" or "left wring propaganda"?
It knows the word you want and refuses it.
I don't think it's redefining anything to call that censorship.
They make it impossible to swipe the word without tricking it by putting extra words in between and deleting them.
> Again, I think this says more about you than it does Apple. It'd be very illuminating for you to tell us what you intend to swipe to type.
Are you serious? Fuck off. I rarely swear here but that implication deserves no better.
Again, not censoring you. You can still write whatever you like. I don’t know why you keep ignoring this inconvenient fact.
> Are you serious? Fuck off.
Thank you for proving my point.
Not by the main input method.
> Thank you for proving my point.
What point do you imagine is proved by that?
Because if it didn’t impact your communications in some way, you probably wouldn’t be wasting cycles on this conversation.
A lot of people are affected by a list this long, I can care about things that don't directly impact me enough to make some internet comments, and most of all I don't have an iPhone.
And getting mad at an insulting attack doesn't prove it right.
But I bet millions of people are hitting this, if not most users at some point. It's a huge list and I don't like the influence on how people talk.
You've made some implications a certain kind of person hits this list but come on, "subway attack" "booty call" "smoking weed" "read gay smut" "kill me" "wife beater" "deez nuts" "couple was arrested" it could hit anyone.
Have you considered the possibility that this is not Apple’s attempting to influence how people talk, but rather to help reduce accidents made by customers who don’t actually intend to say these things? Consider how many people don’t proofread before they send messages off. It seems like folks here all too often rush to ascribe ill intent to a decision they disagree with rather than good faith.
Subway attack booty call smoking weed read gay smut kill me wife beater deez nuts couple was arrested
Sent from my iPhone
The motivation does not remove the problem.
They have a good argument, too! Why should Apple be able to hide behind the excuse that the data is crowdsourced, therefore they have no responsibility for it? Didn't the social networks try that one already?
Damned if you do and damned if you don't, in this situation.
If Apple doesn't want its autocorrect to suggest statistically likely opinions on divisive topics, then sure, whatever. But when it has a hard blacklist of input it will categorically refuse from the user and editorialize it with nonsensical changes that only serve to avoid the blacklist, that is a very, very bad look.
If the user tried to swipe-type "Tibetan independence" and got one or two letters wrong, there's still probably a 90% or even 99% likelihood that their intent was to type "Tibetan independence." Not suggesting "Tibetan independence" is censorship, it's not benign carefulness.
We're not talking about Apple accidentally turning "Buttermilk pancakes" into "Muslim extremist."
>and "we know what you wanted to type with 90% confidence
Problem is, because statistics, 90% confidence is wrong 10% of the time. Now you have a big polarizing news story about Apple pushing Trump (or Biden) propaganda onto some maximally sympathetic person who hates that sort of thing.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't, like I said!
Apple chose the sin of omission over the sin of commission. I think that's the right move. Of all the terrible options, Apple found the least terrible IMO.
But think about it, we're not talking about auto-suggest here. The distinction I made in the parent is critical. Can you imagine what the article headline is like? "I swiped 'duck' into my iPhone. It said 'fuck'." - something like that? It's ludicrous at face value, especially because you can't show this was on Apple in any way. The immediate reaction from the readers, Apple and any random bystander would be "lol the author must have swiped it in really weird". I just can't see any variation of this, even on the most divisive topics, doing any actual damage to Apple. Unlike autocorrect, it just comes off as your phone 'mishearing' you and outputting something similar that just happens to be problematic in some way, not as Apple intently putting words in your mouth. If we assume the best of intentions from Apple, they're still overreacting and purposefully setting arbitrary hard rules about how you can't use their (not your) device.
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!!! ;)
See I tapped out all those characters just for you.