News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by russelldjimmy on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:27PM (#50407240)
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.

Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by ryandrake on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:41PM (#50407390)
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.
Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by JumpCrisscross on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:48PM (#50407440)
> user intent is identically clear

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.

Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by Detrytus on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:50PM (#50407449)
> The user intent is identically clear, regardless of the mode of input

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.

Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by ryandrake on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:56PM (#50407492)
How precise does the swiping have to be before you agree that user intent is clear? If my swiping centers on the letters d i v t a t o r - t r u m p, there is absolutely no reason to suspect my intent was anything other than "dictator trump." If the auto-correction failed in that case, they cannot blame it on a lack of precision.
Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by recursive on Saturday November 07, 2026 @03:06PM (#50407567)
Swiping passes through a continuous path. Even determining what letters were "centered on" requires some heuristics.
Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by uptrails on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:48PM (#50407436)
One of the blocked phrases is "iMessage isn't working".
Re:Apple Keyboard has a blacklist of phrases you can't swipe by tavavex on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:56PM (#50407491)
A lot of input methods are probabilistic in their nature. Some other examples are voice to text and even regular digital keyboard input (fat-finger correction that tries to pick the letter you wanted to tap instead of the letter that you actually tapped). So even with your distinction, actually spelling it out with the digital keyboard would not make a difference because the software still has to make a call there. Even if you plugged in a physical keyboard, Apple could still say that the signal passes through its software, which can constitute endorsement, so it should run the checks against that too, just in case. Nothing in your argument stops that.

I fully reject that this makes the situation any better or more justifiable. The job of the software that picks what you have likely just said, swiped or tapped should only concern the given word. If the algorithm decides with 95% certainty that the input was "dictator", that's what it should output. If context is used to better select the candidate word, it should only be done for the purpose of slightly re-weighting the possible options with one transparent algorithm, not for checks against a blacklist.

The reason why I think this is that your line of thinking is unbounded, and there is nothing stopping the next logical move - if Apple can decide 'not to endorse' (representation isn't endorsement, but whatever) views by blacklisting its algorithms from forming certain phrases, why can't they uplink entire paragraphs of your text as you're typing it to dynamically analyze them instead of using a dumb filter, and then decide if the entire text is something they want to allow?