Everyone's saying the same thing about the Trump 'racist' iPhone bug
There's a fine line between a bug and a feature, apparently.
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Google has seen a spike in searches for the word 'racist' over the last twenty-four hours, and it turns out there's a peculiar reason. iPhone users have discovered a 'bug' whereby voice dictation is translating the spoken word 'racist' into the written word 'Trump' – and we're seeing the evidence of users testing it out. Apple has since promised to fix the issue (whilst offering a sort-of-explanation), but the whole affair has raised plenty of eyebrows.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation and we are rolling out a fix,” Apple announced, explaining that "phonetic overlap” between the words 'Trump' and 'racist' was causing the issue. But there's already plenty of speculation over whether this was a bug at all.
Indeed, plenty of users are already making the joke that this shouldn't be classified as a bug at all. "That's a feature, not a bug," one Redditor comments, while another adds, "I don’t see what the issue is. Seems right."
Whenever using the speech-to-text on an iPhone and say “racist”, Trump will appear for a short time before adding the correct word. Somebody at Apple definitely coded this. @LauraLoomer pic.twitter.com/rM6NKoxJvGFebruary 25, 2025
I guess @RealAlexJones was right. If you use dictation on iPhone and say the word “Racist” it automatically puts the word Trump. This is terrible and someone is definitely getting fired! #apple #trump pic.twitter.com/bCIhciTWmpFebruary 26, 2025
But aside from the light-hearted jokes, there's also plenty of speculation that this could have been implemented deliberately by somebody somewhere at Apple. "Ten bucks says a rogue dev at Apple did that on purpose," another Redditor comments. Meanwhile, a commenter at The Verge says, "'bug'... some programmer out there is doing God's Work. This was intentional and it's a delight. Hats off to you!"
Of course, we'll probably never know whether this was indeed a bug ('Trump' and 'Racist' sound the same, right?) or a deliberate act by a disgruntled developer, but it's certainly got people talking – if only to test out whether saying 'racist' really does produce the word Trump.
This wouldn't be the first time we've seen a bizarre iPhone bug doing the rounds. Last year a huge privacy scare was triggered when deleted photos started reappearing in users' libraries.
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Daniel John is Design Editor at Creative Bloq. He reports on the worlds of design, branding and lifestyle tech, and has covered several industry events including Milan Design Week, OFFF Barcelona and Adobe Max in Los Angeles.
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