There is a thread in another community regarding some controversies happening in women’s chess. I posted to that thread, recommending a book written by WGM Jennifer Shahade who is a multi-time US women’s chess champion. I also linked to a review of the book, the url of which contained the book title.
The Open Library page about the book is here: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5849601W
it seems that the title, as chosen by the female author with considerable self-awareness, contains a word that is sometimes used as a sexist slur. You can see the title by clicking the link above. Unfortunately some kind of bot censored the title from both the post, and the review link (to chessbase.com) that I had posted. I was able to fool the bot by changing a few characters, but the bot’s very existence is imho in poor taste.
We are adults here, we shouldn’t have robots filtering our language. If we act sexist or abusive then humans should intervene, but not bots. Otherwise we are in an annoying semi-dystopia. The particular post I made, as far as I can tell, is completely legitimate.
Frankly, I also hate this sort of word filter. I fully agree with the OP here because the issue is not the specific words that you use, but what you convey through those words within a certain context. The book title is a great example of that, as “bitсh” is partially reclaimed and the author is using it to label a group that she is part of.
It’s also damn easy to circumvent this sort of filter, as I’ve exemplified above, so it’s often useless.
i have to partly disagree. there are certain words which must be censored to prevent right wingers from spamming when mods are offline such as the n-word but yea I think bi*ch is too ambiguous to be filtered.
is there any evidence that this actually happens, or would happen?
all i ever see is humans being blocked or frustrated by the bot. i have never seen any kind of malicious spamming that could have been prevented by such a bot. spammers are normally thwarted by human mods.
the bot seems obsolete.
check hexbear modlogs you will see it, people trying to find their ways around blocking. However, even such a simple deterrence would prevent some spammers atleast.
here?
most of those behind were for being “reactionary” or “not an answer”. sounds more like general censorship of ideas and opinions. there was even a post banned for “bad faith arguments, downplaying severity of western settler-colonialism, and both sidesing Ukraine conflict”.
the mod logs interesting. but i don’t see anything relevant. or maybe i don’t see how it is relevant.
Well obviously you’ve gotta block slurs but all common swear words should be fine
Not even slurs are so much of a clear case. Two reasons:
- When the right-wingers want to vomit their hate discourses, they’re damn quick to circumvent this sort of filter.
- In some cases, even the usage of words often considered as slurs can be legitimate. It depends on what the word conveys within a certain context; the OP provides an example but I don’t mind crafting another if anyone wants. (Or explaining the underlying mechanics.)
A third albeit weak reason (as it’s a bit of a slippery slope) would be the possibility that this creates precedent for instance admins and comm mods to say “it’s fine to filter specific words, regardless of what they’re used to say”, once something similar to automod appears. If that happens, they won’t stop at slurs, as shown in Reddit.
Here’s another example, not from here. Before celullar phones, before television, before broadcast radio and even before the telephone, there was the telegraph. Communications with it were done in Morse code, by operators tapping away on telegraph keys. Telegraph keys were typically made of brass, and people who used them all day were called “brass pounders”. That profession is long since obsolete, but there are still ham radio enthusiasts who use Morse code as a hobby, and there is a group of them called the BPL, for “Brass Pounder’s League”. There are also people who simply try to honor the history of the venerable telegraph even though they recognize it as being a relic from the bygone era.
Anyway, where am I going. Someone started a pretty good site about telegraphy and telegraph keys, called “brasspounder.net” which was a really cool name. Unfortunately Google’s algorithm seems to have classified that name as that of a porn site, because it saw the word you get if you ignore the “br” at the beginning, leaving “ass pounder”. Whoops. The site ended up changing its name to telegraphy.net, which is fine but less evocative in my opinion. Oh well.
The above is an example of the so-called Sremovedhorpe problem. Let’s see if Lemmy has that too.
It would be nice if the filter was like an optional reaction instead of like a hard ban
