Comment by noitpmeder
1 day ago
How the hell can they defend banning “Trayvon Martin” of all things. Are they now the arbiters responsible for quashing social movements?
This is an _insane_ lever for censorship. Does Israel pay them to omit “the occupied territories”? Is that internal Apple policy irrespective of nation state pressure?
It's not just madness that these exist, but that they are hidden, unexposed to the user, and have no justification or rationale.
Interestingly, I didn’t know who that was so I used the “Look up” feature and it said it was a “Murdered” person, but in the Wikipedia entry it says the shooter was acquitted - ie the victim was not found to have been murdered.
I wonder where that summary came from?
Acquitted means that the jury did not find the evidence persuasive enough to decide guilt for the charged person for the charged crime. It does not mean the victim was not found to have been murdered. Juries don't decide that.
Otherwise there would not be things like "List of unsolved murders (2000–present)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_murders_(2000...
I feel like you are really picking apart hairs here.
There is not a huge difference between "the victim was not found to have been murdered." and "the jury did not find the evidence persuasive enough to decide guilt for the charged person for the charged crime". If you want to get really nitpicky, just because "the victim was not found to have been murdered", doesn't mean that they weren't murdered. Whether they were found to be murdered is a different statement than if they were actually murdered.
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IMO Trayvon was murdered. But I don't get the same reading from the acquittal that you do. Nobody disputes that Zimmerman killed Trayvon. But murder is a crime, and the jury decided that Zimmerman did not commit murder. Therefore Trayvon is a victim of homicide, but not a victim of murder. Legally, I mean, which is what the jury is deciding.
The unsolved murders list is probably the same deal, it is colloquial and not legal, and with nobody accused and put to trial, it may yet end up legally murder.
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You really didn't know who that was, but had to look into the Wikipedia entry in detail enough to read about a jury decision and then frame it in a different way than written in Wikipedia (which rightly talks about the judicial process related to specific charges brought against Zimmerman, not an absolute statement of facts, such as "victim was not found to have been murdered").
I'm flagging that this doesn't sound like a good faith discussion. The green account raises my priors.
Note that I'm not suggesting that Apple's policy on censorship is good, quite the contrary.
The person you replied to wrote "shooter was acquitted"
Wikipedia writes in the second paragraph "...but a jury acquitted him of second-degree murder and manslaughter in July 2013"
How is that framed differently than Wikipedia did?
Or do you mean the part after "i.e.", but i.e. is literally latin for "in other words". So obviously the part after i.e. was reframed, that is what i.e. means.
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This is exactly censorship via omission. What could possibly be the intent here other than to discourage use of these phrases across wide swaths of the population.
Making it so they aren't in the pool of errors that can be made. I want to be able to type swear words, but I don't want profanity to come out when I try to swipe "duck". Socially, emotionally, and politically loaded phrases make sense to require a bit more care for.
That is a general answer to your question. It is not a specific defense of the particular word list in question. But I can say I've been surprised a few times about what I accidentally swiped on Android. Bitch isn't swipable but I have "bitchiest" readily available, for instance.
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>It's simply not autocompleted.
Inaccurate. According to swipeblocked.com it is blocked with both swiping and autocomplete.
We're not censoring the book. It's simply not on the shelves. You can ask for it by name if you like. You have to spell it out exactly though, or else the librarian will deny any knowledge of it.