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!!! ;)
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 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.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
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 propaganda onto someone who hates Trump.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't, like I said.
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. 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.
See I tapped out all those characters just for you.
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?”