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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmp9v/life-on-the-internet-is-hard-when-your-last-name-is-butts [vice.com]

Weiner’s Twitter thread is a who’s who of people with birth names that throw algorithmic obscenity filters through a loop, but the problem is hardly new. These sorts of false positives have been an issue for spam filters pretty much since the beginning of the internet and were so widespread that computer scientists have even christened the issue. They call it the “Scunthrope problem.”

[...] According to coverage in RISKS Digest, rather than fixing the problem, AOL “announced that the town will henceforth be known as Sconthorpe” in its systems. As Rob Kling, then a member of the Association of Computing Machinery’s committee on computers and public policy, noted in the RISKS forum, “I can imagine there might even be some people with the last name of Scunthorpe. The willingness of AOL to excise identities in the name of ‘decency’ raises big issues of genuine decency in my view.”

In retrospect, Kling’s critique was remarkably prescient.

Original Submission