Too rude for Facebook: the ban on Britain's historic place names | Hacker News Reader

Too rude for Facebook: the ban on Britain's historic place names

theguardian.com

23 pointsKaibeezy17 comments

Surely it's possible to develop more sophisticated filtering methods than simply banning words that are spelt the same as "naughty" words. Seems like an obvious opportunity for machine learning.

After all, the Scunthorpe Problem is not new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

The UK has many places with riské names by modern standards: there's a Faggot in Northumberland, a Fingringhoe in Essex, a Bitchfield in Lincolnshire, and so on.

At least the word "Scunthorpe" really does contain a rude word. "Bitch", "dyke", "faggot" and "hoe" are non-rude words for a female dog, a ditch, a bundle of sticks and an agricultural implement for removing weeds. "Faggot" is arguably a bit historical, but the other three are still in fairly frequent use. What would I even call a "hoe" if I weren't allowed to use the word "hoe"?

Until recently there were a lot of roads in the UK called "Gropecunt Lane", and I think there are still a few of them left. The name really is rude: no alternative meaning of "grope" or "cunt" is involved. But it was also the official name.

As well as the sticks/fascine meaning, faggots are pork offal meatballs. This meaning is still common in the UK.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282049626

“Fag” is also a widely used colloquialism for cigarette. As in “I’m gasping for a fag.” Although it’s become more common as a slur here in recent years, that’s more of an American English usage than a BrE one.

Has the sibling comment (to which I cannot reply) been autoflagged for the same reasons?

What lovely irony if so.

Seems that Facebook has reinvented censorship based on indecency. It's scary that they are actually more oppressive than the FCC was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

I’m afraid that FB censorship is benign compared to what’s going on with WSB, Twitter, etc.

One more reason censorship (especially for "rudeness") is just a lost cause that should be allowed to die already.

Why doesn't Facebook whitelist place names, people names, proper nouns?

They have identified (nearly) everyone, living or dead. Going so far as creating shadow profiles for anyone without an account.

There are multiple geographical databases.

Why is this still a problem?

Facebook has a huge geographic database, so the actual problem here is telling people who are genuinely living / are from there from people who are trolling or simply don't want to disclose that data. If you ask me, this is a non-issue - where I live or where I was born is not Facebook's business.

FB are concerned about the quality of the data they are selling to their customers, if they sell a batch of records / API requests and disproportionate amounts of them have birth places that are small villages with ridiculous names, the value of that data decreases.

I was able to find a ghost town near my hometown to give Facebook. According to Facebook, a few hundred people came from there. If true they’d all be over 90.

And still, tons of small businesses all over the world are using Facebook as an advertising platform and spending thousands of dollars/euros on them. It's a matter of time until enough of them find out the data those ads use to "think" is garbage and we see a #facebookgate or something similar.

Tom Scott did a short bit on this topic, Why Web Filters Don’t Work - https://youtu.be/CcZdwX4noCE

The title actually should be "Too rude for Americans". I've never quite understood the propensity to bleep out or put asterisks in words. Like it or not, these words are part of the richness of the language.

My former job was bought by an American company. They had a slack banning the word "slut". This is just the word for "end" or "out of" in Swedish.

When living in Trondheim, Norway I always had a chuckle going to the airport - the bus drove through the municipality of Hell, so I could quite accurately and without hyperbole claim that I had to go through hell to get wherever I was going.

Another good reason to ditch Facebook !!

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