Why this Tokyo Olympics question had some Chinese netizens blaming Apple’s Siri – morningtidings

It looks like Apple’s voice assistant has been the target of anger of some Chinese social media users. According to a report by South Morning China Post, a technical glitch led to Siri not able to respond to the simple question “how many medals China has won at Tokyo Olympics”.
The report says that users took to Weibo, China’s popular social media platform, and posted screenshots of Siri not able to tell them how many medals China had won. One image posted revealed that Japan had 11 gold medals, China and US had 10 medals. However, Siri couldn’t read out the number of China’s medals.
According to online report, it was a technical glitch earlier this week which led to this. Siri could read out the name of only one country if two countries had the same amount of gold medals, which was the case here with US and China. Siri ‘chose’ to say US and this led to the ire of China’s netizens on Weibo. The ‘bug’ was reported on Tuesday and was apparently fixed the next day. But that didn’t stop complaints against Apple on social media.
The social media platform had complaints like Apple had deliberately ignored China because of the trade tensions between the two countries. Some also said that Apple was deliberately discriminating against China, according to online reports.
China remains an all-important market for Apple and often the company has been accused of having different rules for China compared to the rest of the world. The Chinese ‘nationalists’ have been anti-Apple as Huawei was banned by former US president Donald Trump, which led to trade tensions between the country. While Huawei remains banned in the US and it has hurt the company massively, Apple continues to make billions from the Chinese market.