iPhone’s built-in adult filter appears to be having a hard time understanding what needs to be blocked and what not. If the adult filter is enabled in an iPhone, then every search, including keywords like “Asian” and “teen” gets blocked by the device assuming it’s porn.
Charlie Stigler, a Twitter user, found that he can’t search anything using the keyword “Asian,” including searches like “Asian hairstyles” or “Asian Food.”
Stigler even went on to say that an entire culture is blocked as “adult content” by Apple.
Weird bad thing:
iOS built-in adult content filter blocks all searches with the keyword "Asian,” assuming it's porn-related. Which means a 12 y/o Chinese-American girl might Google "Asian hairstyles" and find out that her culture is blocked as "adult content."
— Charlie Stigler (@charliestigler) February 18, 2020
Also, if that’s wasn’t enough, then searches like “teen mental health resources” are also blocked because you know, keywords like “teen” can’t go with anything but “porn.”
“Searches like “teen mental health resources” are also blocked because “teen” is on the blacklist. Which is so dumb for a feature that’s probably being used BY TEENS!” Charlie Stigler wrote on Twitter.
Stigler discovered this on his iPhone 8 running iOS 13.3.1. However, Softpedia confirmed that this same thing is happening on “an iPhone 11 Pro also running the latest iOS version.”
Now, you might think that if the keyword “Asian” is blocked, then Apple would also block searches, including the keyword “Asians” (with an ‘S’). Well, you can’t be more wrong. That is because “Asians” gets the green signal from Apple’s adult filter even though this exact keyword is also used to search for porn.
If you own an iPhone, you can test if this is true or not by turning on the “Limited Adult Websites” feature.
You can do that by navigating to Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions > Web Content.
