Ken Kocienda - Creative Selection

Ken Kocienda writing about designing and developing the keyboard for the original iPhone:

As everyone on the Purple hallway used the software day in and day out, we made surprising discoveries about what the autocorrection dictionary should contain. We found we had to add a complete collection of hate speech to the dictionary and explicitly mark those words to prevent the software drom ever offering them as autocorrection—imagine trying to type "nugget" but narrowly mistyping the first vowel or the last consonant. We didn't want to offer racial epithets as a "helpful" aid, and we resolved that we would never provide software assistance for attempts to slur or demean.

Like everyone else, I never want to say "ducking" (once we've typed the expletive a couple of times, can the iPhone please remember it?), but it's worth noting that this was a concern before the first iPhone was even announced, let alone shipped.

Imagine if the folks over at YouTube or Facebook were that prescient, or spent focused on their threat model while designing their algorithms as opposed to scale at any cost.