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.
