> It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.

I realize that there are many reasons to be critical of our digital overlords. This is not one of them.

This is in no way comparable to a physical keyboard stopping you from typing something, because what you are typing is entirely deterministic. Most computer software will underline only misspelled words or grammatical errors, not politically charged statements, because it is a literal interpretation of what the user typed.

Swipe typing and auto-complete are different because they are interpreting the user's input. There is no way to ensure the interpretation is correct. For the sake of both the users and the company, you ensure the interpretations are the ones that cause no harm.

I'll restate a lot of what I have said in this thread that I think is still very relevant to what you said.

1. I realize that swipe input is probabilistic as opposed to using a physical device. I just think it should not matter - if it's probabilistic, they should have specific hard rules that are obeyed in all cases. For example, if the software concludes that the input is likely to be this dictionary word with 95% certainty, it should output that word. The context surrounding the word can be used to fine-tune the certainty, but not to cross-check against blacklists of banned phrases.

2. The reason for #1 is that if the CYA approach is allowed, there are no arguments left to prevent Apple from looking at your entire paragraphs of text and then dynamically deciding to discourage certain predictions, to prevent their device from being used to create something they don't agree with.

3. Additionally, because typing on a digital keyboard is also predictive (the touch zones of keys are weighted depending on what it thinks you're likely to type next), this would also allow them to literally make typing certain 'unsafe' things more difficult.