While emailing their editors updates on their project about getting access to abortion clinics, the journalists at The Daily Beast realized that their phones would not correct a misspelling of the word “abortion”.
With their interest piqued, the news team decided to do an analysis of the words that Apple’s iPhones refused to auto correct, with words like “abortion,” “abort,” “rape,” “bullet,” “ammo,” “drunken,” “drunkard,” “abduct,” “arouse,” “Aryan,” “murder,” and “virginity” being some of them.
Other words include “bigot,” “cuckold,” “deflower,” “homoerotic,” “marijuana,” “pornography,” “prostitute,” and “suicide”.
The team came up with two misspellings for 250,000 words that can be found in a computer's dictionary and ran these misspellings through a computer program that imitated that of an iPhone.
After this experiment, the team selected 20,000 words that seemed controversial, used 12 more misspellings and ran it through the same program.
Words which were not auto corrected were added to the list of supposedly banned words.
Although this is not outright censorship, the article proves that technology is mediating our freedom of speech in the most insidious of ways, almost as though it is discouraging us from speaking about issues which play an important role in our lives.
Though unsurprising, this article shows that the often overlooked subtleties in technology influence us more than we think.
[via News Beast Labs, The Daily Beast]