Apple Disables iMessage “Butt” GIF Search After Bing Serves up My Little Pony Porn
Bing! We can't take you anywhere!
iMessage in iOS 10 is a weird bizarro land of new features and confusing menus, but the one that makes the most sense is the inclusion of native GIF search. That doesn’t come without its own problems, however, and Apple took measures to keep things from getting NSFW by disabling certain naughty words from the search. One they didn’t disable, however, was “butt,” and the Bing-generated results made them regret that decision in short order.
Why? Well, as Deadspin picked up on (NSFW click, but the GIF in question is there if you really need to see it), searching for probably one of the most likely words that impressionable children will search for given the chance—because butts are inherently hilarious—and one they’re probably not even searching for porn-related reasons, returned some animated My Little Pony porn. It’s not especially graphic, but it’s still not something you’d want to represent your brand new, snazzy messaging features.
So, Apple quickly disallowed the GIF search for “butt” this morning, much to the dismay of 12-year-olds everywhere (and probably plenty of grown adults), and typing the word in will now simply return no results. That’s certainly one way about it, but there are reportedly other ways to get the GIF search to show less-than-family-oriented results, and banning single words on a case-by-case basis hardly seems like a comprehensive solution. It’d be much better if the filtering was handled on Bing’s end.
Fun example: “Butts” also returns no results, but you can still search for “the butt.” Anyone who’s deliberately trying to get around dirty word filters in this way probably isn’t going to be all that corrupted by what they find, but it’s a strange solution nonetheless—not to mention one that’s likely useless, since we all know that searching anything on the Internet is going to eventually get you porn.
[Edit: I forgot Apple’s messaging app is just called “Messages,” not “iMessage” while writing about butts. Sorry.]
(via The Verge, image via screenshot)
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