Well it’s no use arguing if they’re censoring it or not: it’s pretty obvious they are.

This need not be a directive set by google management, it could be individual speech annotators censoring the transcripts. I've worked with systems like this and remember a group of mormon house wifes not being font of curse words.

I wonder if anything else happens on the backend when a user attempts to say these banned words...

While other nations are condemning China for their actions in Hong Kong, once again, we see Google developing solutions for authoritarian regimes under the guise of "complying with local laws". More like complying with authoritarianism. Instead of joining the world to put pressure on China, Google is enabling them. Pretty shameful, I think.

This probably won't score any brownie points with the US government while they are being investigated (unless the gov't actually wants Google to do anything to get more integrated with China for intelligence reasons, which I could see as a possibility).

The reason I wonder about what is happening on the backend:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/14/17861962/google-china-dra...

For what it's worth — my Chinese-speaking friend tried this on his iPhone using voice dictation in Chinese. He was able to voice dictate 法轮功 — 'Falun Gong' in mainland (not traditional) Chinese with no problems.

But what country does your friend reside in?

United States.

What if someone lives in Taiwan or the United States or Singapore or anywhere outside of the PRC? This is exactly the type of sociotechnical pressure the PRC wants to enforce over its diaspora.

Falun Gong is a religious movement banned by the Chinese Communist Party.

I noticed the other day that Apple has added some weird censorship terms to their swipe keyboard. They used to just censor “swear words” like “fuck”, but they seem to have added some additional phrases that I can’t come up with a charitable explanation for. For example, of the phrases “black man”, “black woman”, “white man”, “white woman”, you can only type “black man” on the swipe keyboard. If you try to swipe type one of the others, it will always change one of the two words to something else.

Wow I just tested that and you're right. That's a weirdly specific bug.

"Bug"

Is this something do to with typing two words as though they were one word? If you swipe out the word 'black', and then swipe out the word 'woman', does that work?

Can confirm. Just tested on iOS 13.4.1. So weird.