> I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like.

"When testing autocomplete, we found some cases where it produces undesirable outcomes. Imagine if someone typed 'nazis are' and the autocomplete suggested 'good'. How fast would that screenshot get around social media with a tweet comparing iPhone to Grok, and turn into a news headline?"

I'm guessing that that's how this started. Then, a few steps later, "we're getting into China, what do we need to do to not get in trouble", "hey, we've got this mechanism, what if we add 'Tibetan independence' to it". (Which is bad, but on the same scale as all the other things businesses do to get into what they see as a large market that they can be blocked from at any time.)

Then, a few steps later, after some seriously questionable decision-making, someone had the bright idea to add "iMessage is down" to it. Frankly, that's the one I'm actually most baffled by here, because everything else seems like the natural consequence of a combination of bad-PR-avoidance and geopolitical kowtowing.