> Among the many banned words and phrases on Gaggle’s list are "suicide," "kill myself," "want to die," "hurt me,” "drunk," and "heroin."
Children growing up in this sort of environment will come to expect it from their government.
I wonder if they have any data at all that shows they can actually prevent catastrophes with this sort of system or if this is just a placebo with dangerous social side effects?
Anyway, yeah, restricting a few key phrases is amateur hour. It doesn’t actually help, and kids will just find ways around it anyway. Wait until they discover Unicode homographs!
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/like-this-image-to-die-instan...
It's totally true though - no amount of word filtering is ever going to serve a real, tangible purpose for people who are having a consensual conversation between each other. Further, if AIM or ICQ back in the day had filtered my conversations, my friends and I would have just moved to one of the other many services that _don't_ use such filtering. It was bad enough when they started showing automatic previews of URLs in messages, the last thing I need is something actually modifying or acting on the text content of the messages.
Public school systems and employees are the government.