Apple admits iPhones are replacing ‘Trump’ with the word ‘racist’ - and it hasn’t fixed it yet
Apple says it is rolling out a fix
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Your support makes all the difference.iPhones are swapping the word “racist” for “Trump”, Apple has said.
The company said the problem was not intentional but rather a bug that it was working to fix.
But it led to outrage from supporters of the president, who claimed without evidence that it suggested the devices were biased against Mr Trump.
Apple has made a number of apparent concessions to the president, including renaming the Gulf of Mexico and announcing a $500 billion investment that appeared aimed at pleasing Mr Trump.
The new bug occurs when users activate the iPhone’s voice-to-text feature, which allows people to dictate messages using their voice.
The name "Trump" appears briefly in response to a user saying the word "racist", before quickly correcting to what was actually said.
Some videos posted online show the bug does not appear every time the word “racist” is said.
Apple has said it is aware of the issue and is rolling out a fix. The iPhone maker explained that its speech recognition models may initially display words with some phonetic overlap until further analysis identifies the correct word.
The company said the bug had caused "Trump" to be suggested erroneously in response to several words that include an "r" consonant.
Some conservative commentators online have accused the tech giant of political bias.
The incident comes at a time of high political tension in the US following Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
In January, Meta was accused of boosting the profiles of Trump and others in his administration following his inauguration.
After some users complained that they had apparently automatically followed the president and Vice President JD Vance’s new pages, the tech giant quickly confirmed that this was because the accounts in question were linked to the political office and not the individual, so changed hands following the presidential transition.
This meant that if users had followed them during the previous administration, they were still following them after the transition.
Additional reporting by agencies
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