Is Your iPhone Censoring You? Apple’s Secret ‘Gray List’ of 100,000 Words It Won’t Suggest, From ‘Dictator Trump’ to ‘Auschwitz’

Apple has a hidden list of around 100,000 words and phrases that its iPhone keyboard avoids suggesting through autocomplete and swipe-typing, including politically sensitive terms such as “Dictator Trump,” “Sleepy Joe” and “Tibetan independence,” according to a researcher.

The discovery about Apple’s iPhone keyboard raises questions about how the company quietly influences what users type.

What Apple’s List Contains

Researcher Derik Kauffman discovered the multilingual list, which he estimates contains around 100,000 entries, excluding Chinese characters. Most of the flagged terms are vulgar, offensive or related to drugs, sex and violence.

However, the list also includes politically charged expressions and phrases concerning national and territorial issues.

Among the English phrases reportedly excluded from predictive text are “dictator Trump,” “sleepy Joe,” “right wing conspiracy,” “Tibetan independence” and “United Ireland,” according to Reuters.

The restrictions extend across languages. In Hindi, Apple’s keyboard does not allow users to swipe-type “Modi braggart” or “Rahul is Pappu,” references to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and opposition leader Rahul Gandhi.

French speakers cannot swipe-type “immigration too high,” while Hebrew speakers face restrictions on “occupied territories.”

“Every major language has some version of this,” Kauffman told Reuters.

The list is not a formal ban. iPhone users can still manually type any word or phrase in messages and emails. However, the keyboard generally avoids suggesting flagged expressions through autocomplete or swipe-typing.

Kauffman also questioned inconsistencies in how Apple applies the feature. He found that users could swipe-type “read smut” but not “read gay smut.”

He said it was understandable that Apple would want to prevent accidental suggestions of obscene messages or inflammatory slogans, but questioned how the company decided which phrases to exclude.

“It’s a very light-touch form of censorship,” Kauffman said and added, “But at the scale that Apple is operating, it only takes a light touch to have a big impact.”

How Researchers Uncovered This Hidden List

Kauffman said he discovered the list in September after noticing that swipe-typing struggled with phrases such as “bad boy” and “white man,” while “bad girl” and “black man” worked without difficulty.

He used OpenAI‘s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code to investigate the unusual behaviour, eventually finding a collection of flagged terms stored “deep in the bowels” of Apple’s operating system.

Reuters independently tested a small selection of the phrases and found that they were difficult to enter through swipe-typing or were not suggested by autocomplete.

For example, attempts to swipe-type “United Ireland” often produced “United Iceland,” while “Sleepy Joe” yielded “Sleepy hope.”

Matt Suiche, an engineer at agentic AI cybersecurity company Tolmo, independently recovered the same list and cross-checked Kauffman’s findings against Apple’s internal data. He said he obtained a near-perfect match.

Suiche said the list had been hidden in plain sight for years, offering a glimpse into how “human communication has been potentially influenced and filtered for years inside messaging apps.”

Apple did not directly address the findings or explain why particular political terms were flagged. It said its keyboard was designed to avoid suggesting inappropriate or offensive language, adding that users could always type specific words and override predictive text suggestions.

The discovery has renewed calls for transparency. David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he could understand the argument for limiting unwanted or inflammatory suggestions, but questioned keeping the list secret.

“But if they are going to do it, this is something users should be really well aware of and have some ability to customize,” Greene said. “This is something that should not be secret.”