Controversial iPhone keyboard change unintentional: Apple

Multinational technology company Apple has said that iPhone The controversial change to K’s keyboard was unintentional.

Commentators, including Rachel Riley, host of the British game show ‘Countdown’, recently noted that when a user types ‘Jerusalem’ using the iPhone keyboard, an emoji appears. Palestinians The flag comes up. Earlier, the Israeli flag emoji was displayed.

In the 1967 war, Israel took control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from Jordan. These areas are internationally recognized as occupied Palestinian territories. The Palestinians want these three areas to become part of the future state.

Reilly said the change came following Apple’s recent operating system 17.4.1 update. He said that the flag emoji was not displayed at all in most of the capitals.

He tweeted to Apple’s official account and to Tim Cook, calling for the change to be reversed. This tweet has been viewed millions of times.

“Showing double standards regarding Israel is a form of anti-Semitism, which itself is a form of racism once morest Jews,” he wrote.

‘Please explain whether this is a deliberate act by your company or whether you have no control over the rebel programmers.’

This behavior seems to only appear on iPhones whose keyboard language is based on the local version of English for the UK, Singapore and South Africa. For example it didn’t happen to people who had the US English setting working.

Now Apple has said that it is aware of the flaw in the emoji suggestion feature. The company told The Independent that the change was not intended and will be fixed.

The company hasn’t given any information regarding when the fix will be made, or what it will change. He didn’t even hint at how the change happened.

Apple’s text suggestion features, of which emojis are a part, can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to predict what a user wants to type. Apple’s support pages state that ‘as you type, you’ll see words and phrases you want to type next. They are based on your past conversations, writing style, even the websites you have visited using Safari (browser).’

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Thus what is suggested may be of a personalized nature. It might just pop up automatically based on what you wrote. However, Riley has claimed, without any evidence, that the change was ‘deliberate’.

He wrote in a post on X: ‘In my opinion a multinational company like Apple would not want to publicly admit that this was a deliberate act by an employee or employees. So the explanation is ‘flawed’ but I hope that at least the people responsible internally will no longer work for the company.’

Apple’s recommended emojis have caused controversy in the past. For example, the Taiwanese flag appears to have been removed from the emoji keyboard in Hong Kong and Macau in 2019.

When Apple released the latest 17.4.1 update to the operating system, it said only that it ‘fixes major bugs and includes security updates and is for all users.’