Continuing the discussion from President Trump attempted to "blackmail" TV hosts with threat of tabloid smears, they claim:
Spinning off into a new topic.
I’ve noticed that BB has started censoring words. What the fuck?
Notably “cuck” gets boxified to cuck.
What else is deemed inappropriate?
Can i type cuckwad, making this useless, or will it censor all words containing that sequence of letters. What other words are affected? fuck? cock? cunt? hell? *internal discomfort* (deleted)? Nope, just that, and just in a useless way.
Edited to delete the most common American racial slur (probably) and to ask @orenwolf and @codinghorror to possibly clarify this.
Interesting.
All I find in a search of the bbs is these:
The post from Jul '16 is a Beschizza post.
[Edit for clarity: I meant that that particular Reply with the boxified word was posted by Rob (the discussion is about one of his blog posts) – by which I meant to suggest that perhaps he himself may have chosen to boxify it for his own reasons (humor, perhaps? I don’t know) rather than the system automatically boxifying it as we are seeing with ficuswhisperer’s boxified word.]
I’m guessing the censoring is to keep certain types of trolls from showing up en masse?
I am not seeing it… possibly your browser? Cause I can type fuck without issues.
eta okay i see it now… not sure where my brain was earlier that it was just missing that.
So, per the July '16 article there’s at least something other than cuck, the only thing to show up for me as boxes, that gets blacked out.
@TobinL: None of the words on my browser went to black boxes for me, at least once i added the -wad suffix to “c u c k”(i feel like such an idiot typing it that way).
Yes. There are certain words we do not want associated with Boing Boing or the discourse here. They would all most often result in post removals if used.
Censoring prevents the words from being visible until a mod deletes the post. It is a living list and subject to change.
No mystery here.
Yet so many words that are definitely inflammatory and unlikely to be used “ironically” appear to be fine. I call shenanigans.
ETA I just sent myself a PM using the most foul and offensive words I could think of. Only cuck was blocked out.
Are any words actually inflammatory? How about the word “inflammatory” itself? People get so hung up about perceiving emotional values in words that I made its own topic, to avoid derailing every other topic - yet when the issue is laid bare, suddenly nobody is interested.
The “problem” with context is that it is subjective, so people use the presumption of shared context in their partisan shitshows. Claiming or giving a word to a certain “camp” is simple divisive tribalism. The reality is I think that the content does not matter, it doesn’t matter which words you want to be pejorative/ameliorative of whom. The problem is the process of tribalism creeping into discourse. People should not be presumed to share “our” or “their” cultural or political contexts based upon which words the choose. Knee-jerk reactions make for bankrupt rhetoric and bickering people.
You brought it up. YOU don’t need to debate it, but I think sites generally need to be decisive about how level-headed they prefer discussion to be. If maturity means people being responsible for their feelings and actions, then this includes them not abandoning their own critical faculties because some special word was uttered.
I am quite marginal in many ways, but I feel more threatened by mass fear causing people to shy away from open discourse about social issues than people trying to provoke me by calling names. Censoring denies the reader the agency (and maturity) of applying their own values and interpretations, when they should instead be encouraged to do precisely that.
What I’m trying to say is I would like this thread to stay on topic for BBS censorship standards and why cu*k is not ok, but any numbers of overtly racist, sexist, or homophobic words are unadulterated.
There’s been plenty of threads here waxing philosophical on what ought to be/not be offensive and there threads often end up with a lot of anger and hurt feelings.
If you want to discuss that topic further, go for it. I just kindly ask that it gets forked off into its own non-#meta thread.
