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.

> It’s not a censorship issue, at least in the USA, because they’re not afraid of legal pressure from the U.S. government.

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".

In another universe, there's an HN comment complaining that when Apple's un-fucked-with crowdsourced predictive autocomplete suggests Sleepy Joe, Apple is "passing along coercion."

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

To me, there is a big difference between an Apple algorithm saying "we saw what you typed, would you like to follow that up with <suggestion>?" and "we know what you wanted to type with 90% confidence, but we wouldn't want to say things like that, would we now?". One is predictive, the other acts after the fact.

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.

Exactly. A lot of posters here are excusing this by saying, well, Apple is guessing and doesn't want to guess wrong. They are ignoring the strength of the user's intent, and the calculated likelihood that they intended to type something in one of these blacklists.

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

Sounds great.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.