I'm just agog that people are still doing dumb pattern matching for profanity filters. I just assumed that YEARS AGO people realized how dumb it is, but apparently: No.
The neural network may have taken millions of core-hours to learn to be as dumb (here) as a blind keyword search.
I worked at a place that had a profanity filter in two parts.
The first part was in C, several pages of if (!strcmp(x, a)) return 0;
After all that, it then invokes popen() to ssh to another machine and run a shell script there, which contains several more pages of string comparisons, this time in shell.
1) They got tired of having to modify C code and wait for the deploy cycle to modify the filter
2) Using, for example, the database would be more work than calling a shell script. On top of that, it might actually be beyond the abilities of the programmer involved.
3) The C code executes on an arbitrary machine. Hence the ssh to a specific machine, so that the shell script would only have to be maintained in one place
I remember being denied to post a forum post containing the phrase “tardive dyskinesia”, as it appears that it rejected anything with the string “tard” in it.
I'm not sure as to whom they think to be helping with that, but it's entirely possible that their advertisement revenue will actually suffer, if the string “tard” be found on their pages.
One man's profanity is not another man's profanity.
Of course, the personality trait of desiring censoring “bad words” seems to highly correlate with a belief in objective morality. — the others are wrong about what they find profane!