Arabic version: القائمة الرمادية من آبل تقيّد النص التنبؤي في آيفون

According to The Guardian, Apple has restricted more than 100,000 words and phrases from being completed by iPhone predictive text through a so-called “grey list” embedded in its operating system.

The list was discovered by independent researcher Derik Kauffman after he noticed difficulty swipe-typing certain phrases on his iPhone. Kauffman found a table containing the encoded list, which can prevent predictive suggestions and cause swipe typing to produce altered results. “United Ireland,” for example, may become “United Iceland,” while “Tibetan independence” may change to “Tibetan independences.”

Entries include references to drugs, sexual acts and “iMessage isn’t working,” as well as phrases with political implications. Kauffman described the list to Reuters as a “light-touch form of censorship.” Examples cited include “Dictator Trump,” “NSA spies,” “Trayvon Martin,” “Kashmir dispute,” “Muslim extremist” and “male chauvinist pig.”

In Hebrew, predictive text will not autocomplete “the occupied territories,” while in Arabic it will not autocomplete “the Hamas movement.” Apple said its keyboard is designed to avoid offering inappropriate or offensive predictive suggestions. The company said users can still type specific words or phrases themselves and override predictive-text suggestions.

The findings offer another look at how autocorrect functions. Earlier systems checked typed words against word tables, while later systems used statistical n-grams to predict likely next words. Apple launched a transformer-based autocorrect system last year, and its keyboard has previously drawn attention for changing expletives into alternatives such as “fork” and “ducking.”