Facebook takes down (and restores) official page for French town of Bitche

"what they were meant to be." is probably not a correct characterization, it's likely that the algorithms are intended to prevent "bad" content at all costs, a high false positive rate is likely, if not intended, an accepted consequence.

Maybe chess masters should do like github and rename their tools to not include those words?

Maybe chess grandmains can evolve too with the time and use more inclusive words like pink and blue for example

Nowhere in that citation is there concrete support for your claim that these words led to the video being taken down.

> 4:15 But if that's the case, then I'm pretty sure all of my 1800 videos will be taken down, as it's pretty much black against white to the death every video, and I don't think it's supposed to work like that.

Please note that it is actually unclear why his video was taken down. It's extremely common for chess videos to Feature the words "white", "black", "weak" and "strong".

I'm fairly convinced that 99% of all content filtering are poorly written RegEx rules, just like 99% of all ad targeting is showing people more of what they've already bought.

Most mindblowing is that in honor of the "enlightening intervention" they even renamed it to United States Square.

Well, not bending to the will of the US used to be a lot easier in the 1800s. But the way it looks now, hopefully it'll soon be a lot easier again.

Nonsense, that's just standard diplomacy - no reason to purposefully insult an ally.

The US of 1881 wasn’t in a position to bully France. That came after the two world wars.

To me it sounds like the name was mocking the Americans, by renaming what the Americans considered "bitch" to United States, implying the US was the bitch.

Right, it couldn’t possibly be a request to an ally based on the coincidence of a totally fine French name with an unfortunate meaning in English. Similarly, if for some reason the French end up on Merde Avenue, we should be equally offended when they request a different name with which to correspond. Because this matters. A lot. And it’s absolutely worth a mortal slugfest in a comment section about the great evil of the western world making an accepted diplomatic request of precisely zero consequence several thousand years ago.

You fight the good fight. Show us our follies. Perhaps France should have invaded Maine over this inordinately egregious insult of insults.

According to Wikipedia, the name Place de Bitche was moved to another square in Paris.

I don’t even understand how “MAD-SLIP” could be offensive.

I mean, I think a bunch of people (myself included) realized this a long time ago.

If your real question is "at what point do we fix this?", it's unfortunately a bit of a catch-22: realistically we need to get rid of things like lobbying, two-party system, gerrymandering, etc. in order to get good reform going. Unfortunately fixing those things might be difficult before we reform social.

Like ranked choice voting or something might be a good idea, but why would our existing selfish legislators vote for something that will effectively reduce their power by tbrowing non-left/right partisans into the mix.

> I want to know what Elon musk's son goes through with that name.. that poor thing with insane parents..

He's going to be socially maladjusted regardless of his name. Also, I wonder if they're just lying about his legal name to try and protect the kid a bit. Though, if I were them, I'd lie that his name is "John Smith". It's tough to steal someone's identity when you don't know their name.

> ‘ The place is called 'Bitche'.. like it's one of the first places going to get hit when some lazy developer implements their algorithm.’

Or, lazy Americans. It’s the sort of gaffe that gives foreign developers the idea they must create their own social network and that their community may just agree with them.

Yeah, it seems a bit one sided. If they censored equally for every existing language I wonder how many words we'd have left.

They recently renamed the village. It's Fugging now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria#Name_ch...

This small Austrian village already changed the name to Fugging. Someone did notice.

> Will English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?

As long as the rest of the world willingly lets them, yes.

> This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton, embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.

> Will English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?

Especially the native ones being the most ignorant of other languages (and often of their own)?

Cultural/linguistic diversity is important, but people are more worried about the low-hanging (centered on their Anglo culture) fruit.

Policing is pretty strong.

>>Will English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?

It's not English speakers, it's Americans specifically. Their corporations and their media have infiltrated the rest of the free world and are basically telling everyone what is and what isn't ok. People grow up watching American films and shows, accepting American morality and norms as "standard" even though frequently they absolutely aren't elsewhere. People use American social media from young age, letting American corporations censor and control the content they are seeing, again, even if the content shouldn't be controversial where they live.

Yes, I understand the hypocrisy of posting this on an American website. But I believe there is a large portion of non-American users here and it's important to remember that this is happening and should be fought against wherever possible.

Intercourse, Pennsylvania

Blue Balls, Pennsylvania

French Lick, Indiana

Middlesex, New Jersey

Back in the day, there was a pornographer who arranged to have his material mailed from these towns. That proved to be his undoing. He claimed that his material was of scientific/medical value, but the fact that he chose these towns for his postmark was considered evidence that his primary purpose was pornographic.

That one turned out to be a hoax: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-34918491

It can if it's run by the administration of the place

To be fair its more like they build their own library (facebook) noticed its really bad at containing and preserving information and now start to burn it down.