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Comment by bl4k | Hacker News Reader

during one of the twitter hacks the blacklist application was accessed and facebook was on the list (as was google and a bunch of other brand names)

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I'm curious about this and Googling failed me, do you have a link?

I took a screenshot on my other machine - I will upload it when I am on there next

There were hundreds of items on the list

(Edit: here is this link for now: http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/another-security-tip-for-tw...

I am sure that I saved the entire page of blacklisted words)

That screenshot shows which of the current (more or less I guess) topics need to be blacklisted. Not which words are always blacklisted.

Wow. So twitter censors disparaging comments about companies? Wow.

More likely that terms that are continuously mentioned in huge numbers (and therefore don't count as "trending") are omitted.

There are more principled ways to do that than a blacklist, though, like looking at current frequency compared to typical frequency. That way even something commonly mentioned could still genuinely be trending if it gets mentioned much more than usual on a particular day.

(It's possible there are scale-related reasons that make this infeasible, though.)

Just not tracking the frequency of the most common words that will never be in the trending topics is probably a big performance win. I'm sure there is an additional blacklist that includes stuff like "and" and "the".

You know you've made it when your brand name is a stopword.

No, it just prevents comment from trending. Not just disparaging comments, all comments, it seems.

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