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.
My reading of nsoam's comment is the implication that they are identical.
Remember, this is someone who never heard of Trayvon Martin, which suggests to me someone who doesn't know much about the US criminal court system. Which makes sense for someone who lives in Europe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50369146)[1].
While I remember that Nicole Brown Simpson and friend Ron Goldman were murdered, and are widely described as being murdered, even after O. J. Simpson was acquitted of that murder, so I have no surprise seeing Martin listed as a '“Murdered” person' even after Zimmerman's acquittal.
[1] And who, in the 5 days since starting the account, already made a disparaging comment about black people in Europe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377586 .
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.
Which is why, contra nsoam, it makes sense that Martin's name would be on a list of murdered people.
It's the same standard we use for Nicole Brown Simpson, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nicole_Brown_Simpson... :
> On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered outside Brown's condominium in Brentwood, Los Angeles, United States. Brown's ex-husband, retired football player and media personality O. J. Simpson, was charged with the murders and became a fugitive from justice after failing to turn himself in to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on June 17. ... The subsequent criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court saw Simpson tried and acquitted for the murders.[1] The trial and verdict were divisive. A later civil trial found Simpson liable for the deaths and awarded the Goldman family $33.5 million in damages (equivalent to $67 million in 2025 dollars), though little was paid.
He was acquitted of the crime of murder. A jury determined O. J. Simpson was liable for the killing. People still say she and her friend were murdered.
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.
You alluded to it. Murdered vs. found to have been murdered. There's a conflation going on there and its clear why.
The iOS summary says that he was murdered.
The Wikipedia entry states that a jury found that the person who killed him did not murder him. If what was done to him was not murder, then he was not murdered.
Therefore the iOS summary is wrong.
The jury found there wasn't enough evidence to find Zimmerman guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crime of murder in the second degree.
That is not the same thing as finding that the person did not murder him. That's why the verdicts are "'guilty' or 'not guilty'", and not "'guilty' or 'innocent'."
Take for example a hypothetical situation where I murdered someone. The prosecutor decides to prosecute me under first-degree murder, that is, premeditated murder. However, the murder was actually in a fit of passion, and the evidence for murder-1 isn't there. The jury can find me not guilty of murder-1, even if they believe I committed the murder, because the prosecution messed up and filed the wrong charge (and didn't also charge me with murder-2 or homicide as a backup). Thanks to double jeopardy, I can't then be re-charged.
Everyone can agree that I murdered that person, including me, even though I was acquitted. Jut because someone was acquitted of murder for a death they caused doesn't automatically mean the the person killed wasn't murdered.
(This is relevant to the Zimmerman's case, where you already read "The prosecution had requested that a lesser charge of third-degree felony murder, an offense that includes the commission of child abuse, be included in the jury instructions. Defense attorney Don West called the possible lesser charge "outrageous" and a "trick" by the state, because they had asked for it to be included at the last minute." That Zimmerman was acquitted of murder-2 does not mean he would have been innocent of murder-3 had the prosecution included that earlier.)
We can see that Wikipedia does not use the acquittal to determine that a killing was not a murder.
Take a look at the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nicole_Brown_Simpson... where it says Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered, and says that O. J. Simpson was acquitted for those murders, and it says "In 1997, the jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown."
According to your reasoning, were Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murdered?
Quoting now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Coyle:
> James Edwin Coyle (March 23, 1873 – August 11, 1921) was an American Catholic priest who was murdered in Birmingham, Alabama, by a Ku Klux Klan member for performing a marriage between Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican Catholic, and a recent Catholic convert, Ruth Stephenson. The killer, E. R. Stephenson, was Ruth's father and opposed what he saw as an interracial union. He would ultimately be acquitted by a jury.
Was Coyle murdered? Wikipedia seems to think so, and lists him under "People murdered in 1921" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_murdered_in_19... .
We know "murder" has a cultural meaning independent of specific determination of a legal charge, which is why things like "unsolved murders" and "murder–suicide" (where the murderer is dead and cannot be tried) exist. The iOS summary is not wrong, you simply disagree with it.
You accused them of arguing in bad faith, but it seems like the only issue here is that you disagree with them, not that they did anything in bad faith.
Its a reasonable view for someone to think that if a court finds a "not guilty" verdict, and there is no dispute over who the killer is, especially if one of the defenses raised is self defense or lack of intent, then the term murdered is inappropriate. It is also reasonable for someone to disagree with that position. I don't have a dog in that fight, i just object to accusing without further basis, anyone who disagrees as being in bad faith.
[flagged]
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.
Then have "child friendly mode" be an option and the adults can have "fuck" back. This isn't a difficult design problem.
This is just the type of thing that makes everyone hate modern technology.
I like having a phone that doesn't spontaneously insert "fuck" into my messages because it thought I might mean that. That could lead to some unfortunate situations. When I want to use the word I'm perfectly capable of typing it.
[flagged]
[flagged]
I get "fuck" and "duck". I don't get "the occupied territories", "the Hamas movement", and "Trayvon Martin".
>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.