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iTunes unhappy with “racist” S***ks and Specks app

iTunes rewords a "S***ks and Specks" app, worried the word may be deemed too offensive.

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ABC has asked Apple’s iTunes to reconsider an iPhone trivia app for Spicks and Specks, after it automatically deemed its title inappropriate.

iTunes has amended the title to S***ks and Specks, worried the word may be deemed offensive to Hispanics.

The app is described as: “Inspired by the show, the S***ks and Specks Quiz has all your favourite games from the series with a few new ones thrown in, so all you trivia fanatics out there can keep the fun going backstage, on tour and everywhere in between.”

I guess they’ve forgotten all about The Bee Gees.

Screenshots still state the full title.

An ABC spokesman said, “It’s just a technical hitch because iTunes is a US-based platform [and] it automatically censors words which mean something offensive in America.

“We’ve asked them to review it and are waiting for a response.”

Source: PedestrianTV

34 Responses

  2. Pete & davo: You say that not living in a country with a high hispanic population. This word is incredibly offensive in America and I don’t blame iTunes for censoring the word. They’re a huge corporation who if they left it uncensored would get their asses sued off.

    It’s unfortunate but understandable.

  3. Well, they can clearly work around it because neither the album nor the song title are censored on the US iTunes store.
    itunes.apple.com/us/album/spicks-and-specks/id401870275

    @Trix – good advice but I had a glass of wine instead of a hot cuppa.

  6. I saw that on the App store a few days ago and thought it was a joke..

    Oh well.. for some reason I thought that word was offensive to Jewish people, you learn something new everyday I guess

  10. @Bowie, spot on – you get what the problem is. For quite understandable reasons, there’s filtering of certain language and/or terms on download sites as there happens to be some nasty s##t out there! But this is just a case of a wide net catching an innocent prawn. Or shrimp. I’m sure everyone’ll take a deep breath, have a nice hot cuppa and sort it out.

  12. @GuanoLad,

    I suspect Barry Gibb just made up ‘spicks’ or used it to counterbalance ‘specks’ in the song.

    You know, a speck is a tiny spot – like a speck of dust; or a speck in the distance; so when Barry wrote:

    Where are the girls
    I left far behind
    The spicks and the specks
    Of the girls of my mind

    They (the girls) have faded away to almost nothing – specks. So I think ‘spicks’ was just something to suit the song.

  13. “An ABC spokesman said, “It’s just a technical hitch because iTunes is a US-based platform [and] it automatically censors words which mean something offensive in America.”

    Warning – racist slurs ahead.

    That ABC spokesman clearly isn’t old enough to remember went white Australians used the term ‘spick’ to identify Mediterraneans (in particular, Italians); along with d*go (Italians and Greeks) and wog (just about everybody who wasn’t British).

  15. I know I would probably just leave it as it is, despite the asterisks. If the name of the app is changed, it loses its name. Where as, it is common sense that it is merely censored due ‘Spicks’ also being a derogatory term, and that when it is found out that the context and intention of the naming is innocuous, it would completely lose its offensiveness. I think it is an overreaction by Apple Inc.

  19. The good old Yanks who root for their sporting teams.If we did that in Australia we’d be thrown out of the ground and charged with lewd behaviour.
    See Yanks,words can have more than one meaning.

  21. It’s got nothing to do with being overtly PC at all. It’s explained in the article…..just read it. Since iTunes is a US-based platform, it automatically censors certain offensive terms, of which ‘spic’ or ‘spick’ is one, because in the US it is a highly offensive term referring in a derogatory manner to a Hispanic person (not just “may be deemed offensive”).

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