Apple has compiled a confidential list of approximately 100,000 words and phrases in multiple languages that the iPhone keyboard carefully avoids in its automatic typing suggestions.
The information was uncovered by an investigation by the Reuters news agency, raising questions about how the American company filters what its users see.
It is a so-called “gray list” that does not prevent users from typing the words or phrases it contains, but keeps them from appearing as suggestions when using autocomplete or swipe typing.
According to researcher Derrick Kaufman, who discovered the list, the practice reflects Apple’s effort to balance the predictive text system’s functionality with avoiding offensive, vulgar or politically sensitive expressions.
He warns, however, that such intervention could affect how millions of users communicate without their being aware of it.
“It’s a very subtle form of censorship. But given the scale at which Apple operates, even such a subtle intervention can have a significant impact,” Kaufman told Reuters.
What makes the discovery more contentious is that the list contains not only swear words and terms related to drugs, sex and violence, but also political expressions.
Among them are the phrases “dictator Trump” and “Sleepy Joe,” a disparaging reference to former U.S. President Joe Biden.
Expressions such as “right-wing conspiracy,” “Tibetan independence” and “United Ireland” have also been identified on the list.
The restrictions vary by keyboard language. In the Hindi version, for example, certain disparaging expressions about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political rival Rahul Gandhi are not suggested.
Meanwhile, the French-language keyboard avoids the expression “immigration too high,” while the phrase “occupied territories” has been identified in the Hebrew version.
Kaufman says each major language has its own version of the list, but also points to inconsistencies in how the restrictions are applied. For example, the keyboard suggests “read erotic texts” but avoids a variation referring to gay erotic content.
Kaufman came across the list last September after noticing that swipe typing struggled with certain expressions, such as “bad boy” and “white man,” while having no such problem with “bad girl” and “black man.”
That prompted him to investigate further using artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code.
During his research, he found a file buried deep within Apple’s operating system containing the words and phrases that did not appear in keyboard suggestions.
He estimates that they number around 100,000, excluding Chinese characters.
Reuters also conducted its own tests on an iPhone, checking some of the expressions identified by the researcher. In some cases, the keyboard did not suggest them at all; in others, it replaced them with different words.
For instance, attempts to type “United Ireland” often resulted in the suggestion “United Iceland,” while “Sleepy Joe” was replaced with “hope for sleep.” “Dictator Trump” also did not appear as an autocomplete suggestion.
The findings were also confirmed by Matt Swiss, an engineer at cybersecurity company Tolmo, who said he had independently recovered the same list and found an almost complete match with Apple’s internal data.
Apple, for its part, has not commented directly on the list’s contents or size. The company has said only that users can type any word or phrase they wish, regardless of the system’s suggestions.
Nevertheless, the discovery has sparked debate about the influence technology platforms’ algorithms can have on everyday communication, and where the line lies between preventing offensive content and filtering political expression.
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