Apple is reportedly fixing a bug that blocked searches for 'Asian' as adult content

• Apple is said to be fixing a bug that caused adult-content filters to block the word "Asian."
• The bug became public in February, but a developer said he had flagged it to Apple in 2019.
• Mashable reported that it had confirmed Apple's coming iOS 14.5 update would fix the bug.

Apple is apparently fixing a bug that blocked the word "Asian" from web searches for qualifying as adult content.

The bug affected devices that had the "Limit Adult Websites" function switched on, and it came to light in February when the developer Steven Shen tweeted about it.

-Steven Shen (@Stevenpotato) February 3, 2021

In his tweet, Shen said he'd alerted Apple to the problem "a long time ago."

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Speaking with Mashable, Shen said he contacted Apple in December 2019 about the bug. He said that he received no "official" response but that an employee messaged him on Twitter to say they had flagged the issue internally.

Read more: The App Store has a fake-app problem. Here's how Apple should crack down on one of its most lucrative businesses.

Anti-Asian racism has been in the spotlight since the shootings in and near Atlanta in which eight people, six of them Asian women, were killed.

An analysis of police data published this month by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crimes in some of the largest US cities rose by 150% in 2020 from 2019.

More users have been encountering the bug recently, to the point where Google's public liaison for search, Danny Sullivan, clarified last week that the problem originated with iOS, not Google.

-Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 22, 2021

Mashable reported it had verified that Apple's iOS 14.5 beta software update - which was sent out to developers last week - fixed the bug.

It is expected to roll out to iPhone and iPad users sometime this spring, Mashable reported.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider on why the bug remained unfixed for so long and what had caused it.