Massive operating system updates usually come with unexpected problems. With Apple’s iOS 10, a number of iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users found that upgrading had temporarily bricked their devices. The company addressed the problem, but another, more explicit issue has raised its head.
It seems that the iMessage GIF search feature had been surfacing pornographic results from fairly innocent terms. Deadspin found that when typing in the word “butt,” one of the top results was a gif of female My Little Pony character Fluttershy dropping her underwear.
A sexualized cartoon character isn't great, but worse was to follow. A woman contacted The Verge to report that her eight-year-old daughter had been presented with an image showing “a woman giving oral sex to a well-endowed male.” The young girl, who was sending a message to her Dad, hadn’t been searching for anything explicit, just the word “huge.”
"I see the image come up like, holy sh*t, whoa whoa whoa, that's a hardcore porn image," said the girl’s mother,Tassie Bethany. "I grabbed the phone from her immediately. She typed in the word 'huge,' which isn't sexual in any nature. It's just a word, not like butt or anything else."
"My daughter uses it because there's cartoons and fart jokes, that kind of stuff. That's hardcore porn. People making out she might see on ABC. That's something that could potentially be pretty traumatizing for a small child,” she added.
The inappropriate gifs aren’t limited to pornographic images; it turns out that searches for the term “power” were bringing up images of the Power Rangers performing a Nazi salute as they stood in front of a swastika. The words “Heil Hitler” appearing above them.
Apple has since added the terms “butt” and “huge” to its GIF search blacklist. Looking up these words, along with explicit or biological terms, won’t show up any results.
Apple has yet to comment on the Bing-powered GIF feature.
https://www.techspot.com/news/66355-ios-10-accidentally-brought-porn-nazis-imessage-gif.html
