According to The Independent, Facebook has banned users from boosting posts with the word Scunthorpe.
This left the band October Drift enraged when trying to promote their Scunthorpe show. John Jarman, an advertiser from Scunthorpe, also had a similar experience and shared his opinion on the topic:
"My ad not approved because of the word Scunthorpe. Seriously, Facebook, are your algorithms written by 5-year-olds? I don't need to see what is and isn't approved – there's nothing wrong with the advert, it's just the fact that word Scunthorpe is in it. As soon as I type the word 'Scunthorpe' I get an immediate warning that my ad contains inappropriate language."
This is not the first time this word has proven difficult to properly classify. In fact, Scunthorpe is rather infamous in the world of profanity filtering.
Continue reading →
Microsoft apologizes after artificial intelligence experiment backfired. What could they have done differently?
Tay, marketed as “Microsoft’s AI fam from the internet that’s got zero chill,” candidly tweeted racist and sexist remarks confirming she in fact had “zero chill”. The chatbot was shut down within 24 hours of her introduction to the world after offending the masses.
Continue reading →
Recently, I was working with a customer that had a URL slip through CleanSpeak’s URL filter. The URL looked something like this:
LameCasinoSite。com
The trick this user employed to get around our URL filter was using the Unicode character “ 。”(code point 0x3002 or UTF-8 0xE38082). This character looks like a period but wasn’t in the list of valid URL separators that CleanSpeak handles.
My initial thought was to simply add the character to the list. That required me to look up the Unicode code point for it first. I then realized that there were a ton of other characters that also looked like periods. In order to properly handle this, I’d need to add all of them to the list. I also noticed that there were numerous other characters someone could use to trick the URL filter like arrows, pictures and symbols.
Continue reading →
There are a few items to consider when deciding on whether to go the route of implementing a SaaS option or an On-Premise option for a profanity filter. There is no right or wrong choice in this matter, simply what works best for your needs.
First let’s make clear what the SaaS and On-premise solutions offer:
SaaS
This is a shared, “multi-tenant” instance that is hosted by the profanity filter vendor. There is no installation required by the client. You simply integrate your product, send content through the filter, receive the appropriate response and define what action you want taken.
Continue reading →
When people hear the phrase “profanity filtering” their minds typically go directly to the gaming industry. Certainly gaming has a very strong need for filtering as communication between players in chat and forums is a key component of how companies can build and grow an online community. Many of our early clients came from the gaming industry.
Continue reading →
