Revealed: Apple’s secret list of slurs, insults, and political phrases that can’t be swiped
Macworld ·
Macworld According to a research project by Derik Kauffman, Apple has a built-in list of words and phrases that the keyboard suggested words will never complete, and the swiping keyboard will not produce. This isn’t a censorship list—typing individual characters always works—but it can slow you down if you’re looking to use swiping or suggested words to speed up your iPhone typing. The project is detailed at Swipeblocked.com , with additional code and data hosted on GitHub . There, Kauffman details his forensics to discover this feature and the blocked phrases. Here’s how it works: Apple has built into iOS a hash table of “blocked” phrases. It’s not storing plain text of words, but rather matching hashes of word IDs to a set of banned hashes. If there’s a match, the iOS keyboard will not suggest the word. And if you are swiping, it will either input some other word for your swiped word or replace an earlier word in your phrase with a different word that has a similar swipe pattern. The list of phrases has not been made public by Apple, and the company does not disclose how it chooses what goes on it. Kauffman reverse-engineered it from the hash table within iOS. The phrases are mostly what you would expect. They include vulgarities, politically and socially charged phrases, rascist terms, various forms of bigotry, and so on. You can literally type out the phrase, “smoking weed,” but if you type “smoking wee…” then the keyboard suggestions to finish off that second word will never include the obvious “weed.” Instead, you’ll get “weekend” or “weekly.” And if you’re using Apple’s QuickPath (Slide to Type), you’ll get “smoking Wed” or some other word, no matter how precise you are about swiping the word “weed” correctly. The Swipeblocked site has a list of all the English-language banned phrases in iOS 27. Warning: Many of them are not safe for work and highly offensive. But some are things that you may very well wish to type or swipe, especially in a particular context (illegal immigrant, NBA surveillance, etc.), and the refusal of the iOS keyboard to complete swiping entry or suggest the natural next word is one reason users are frustrated with it. In addition to the phrases that are blocked from the suggested word area or swiping, there is a mechanism to prevent the autocomplete and suggested word list from suggesting individual words . The iOS dictionary labels words as either vulgar, offensive, or sensitive. Vulgar words are not suggested until the user manually types them three times. Offensive words are never suggested or completed by swiping (though you can always type them out yourself). Sensitive words are similarly never offered as a prediction or completion, and some of them can’t be swiped. Why does Apple do all this? It’s likely less about policing your speech than it is about avoiding lawsuits and bad PR. All it takes is one person posting a screenshot of the iOS keyboard suggesting the word “good” after they type “The Nazis were” or “real” after Santa isn’t” (both included in the list) to cause a bad viral moment criticizing Apple’s intentions, even if the keyboard suggestions would only suggest things that the user had typed several times before. However, it’s still overreaching. A good solution would be to give users a choice. Allow a keyboard setting, enabled by default, to moderate the suggested word list and swipe keyboard to avoid offensive content, but also give users the ability to turn it off. But until then, you’ll need to type a little more slowly if you want to write certain phrases.