😣The Scunthorpe problem: A clbuttic digital dilemma

Sitting through roll call in school is bad enough if you have a last name like Weiner, Butts, Cummings, Medick, Dickman, or Suconcock. The digital age has made it worse: Just try getting past the first stage of an online registration process. The internet-related woes of people with dirty-sounding last names are officially known as [the Scunthorpe problem](. Websites routinely use tools to prevent users from making accounts with fake or obscene words—but overzealous filters and poorly written code often flag innocent phrases that either happen to contain obscene words within them, or are legitimate use cases of such words. Obscenity filters aren’t new. On the contrary, they’ve been plaguing internet users since, well, the internet. What’s telling is why two decades of machine-learning advancements haven’t improved them. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( [Quartz Obsession] The "Scunthorpe" problem September 14, 2018 What's in a name? --------------------------------------------------------------- Sitting through roll call in school is bad enough if you have a last name like Weiner, Butts, Cummings, Medick, Dickman, or Suconcock. The digital age has made it worse: Just try getting past the first stage of an online registration process. The internet-related woes of people with dirty-sounding last names are officially known as [the Scunthorpe problem](. Websites routinely use tools to prevent users from making accounts with fake or obscene words—but overzealous filters and poorly written code often flag innocent phrases that either happen to contain obscene words within them, or are legitimate use cases of such words. Obscenity filters aren’t new. On the contrary, they’ve been plaguing internet users since, well, the internet. What’s telling is why two decades of machine-learning advancements haven’t improved them. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( Origin story Woe be Scunthorpe --------------------------------------------------------------- The name “Scunthorpe problem” refers to the issues that residents of the English town have with online [profanity filters]( because of a certain profane word contained within the town’s name. It’s an extra indignity for the town, which has been a punchline [since the music-hall days]( for its [name]( and the conditions that came from being the country’s steel-processing capital: “in the club I was in last night in Scunthorpe they kept a pig on the counter as an air freshener” is one from [the late Ken Dodd]( considered “the last of the great music-hall comedians.” (But it’s [pronounced]( “skun-thorp.”) It was way back in [1996 that AOL’s filter first]( blocked residents from creating accounts. In [2004]( Scunthorpe felt the wrath of Google’s SafeSearch filter, which[blocked local sites like]( ThisIsScunthorpe.co.uk and ScunthorpeDistrictCatsProtection.co.uk, a site for adopting cats. (The same SafeSearch feature came under fire for being so sensitive as to block any site that contained the string of letters “sex”—to the frustration of the proprietors of ArkansasExtermination.com, and EssexCountyBeeKeepers.org, among many others). AOL responded by changing the name of the town to [Sconthorpe]( in its systems; if you’re visiting, you can avoid any awkwardness by calling it [“Scunny.”]( Giphy Pop quiz Which is not an English town that also suffers the Scunthorpe problem? WhakataneLightwaterClitheroePenistone Correct. This town is in New Zealand, where the municipal free internet once blocked its own name. Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. In the news Algorithms gonna algorithate --------------------------------------------------------------- The latest innocent person to run into an overly cautious algorithm is journalist [Natalie Weiner]( who noted on Twitter in August that she got an “Offensive language discovered in the last name field” message when trying to register for high school sports outlet MaxPreps. She couldn’t join with her actual name—a pretty common one at that. Cue a plethora of responses from similarly bedeviled internet users. A man named Steve Suconcock claimed to have “the worst name possible for usernames”—and said that even employers [laugh at him in interviews](. Philip Sporn had to [set his name]( as “Spron” on his computer. This problem happens [to Ben Shmuck]( “all the time.” Ditto for [Kyle Medick](. The “struggle is real” for [Mike Dickman](. And [Matt Cummings]( has “been there,” too. Giphy Great moments in... Filter frustration --------------------------------------------------------------- [1996:]( Congress mandates that all TVs include the “V-chip,” which blocks children from watching programs of a certain rating. But the ratings mostly failed to reflect prohibited content, and parents mostly didn’t bother to use it. [2001:]( Jonah Peretti, a master’s student at MIT, foils a filter to get the word “sweatshop” onto a pair of custom Nikes. The story goes viral, leading Peretti to help launch HuffPost and then BuzzFeed. [2003:]( An email filter system causes “chaos” in the UK’s House of Commons when it blocks emails discussing a sexual offenses bill and a consultation paper on censorship. [2004:]( One in five messages sent by London’s Horniman Museum are blocked by email filters. [2006:]( A search-and-replace error in a Reuters article about bees leads to the sentence “Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.” [2010:]( The Beaver, Canada’s second-oldest magazine, is forced to change its name to the (considerably drier) Canada’s History after filters cause its web traffic to plummet. [2018:]( A graduate of a Christian home-schooling program ends up with a cake reading “Summa … Laude” after a filter used by the supermarket Publix censors the Latin word for “with.” Reuters/Kacper Pempel Brief history The Clbuttic mistake --------------------------------------------------------------- The “Scunthorpe” dilemma is unfortunate for those who just want to create normal logins. But it gets worse when programmers try to write code that swaps out offensive sequences of letters for more innocuous synonyms. That’s when you wind up reading about intelligence agencies’ secret plots to [buttbuttinate]( world leaders, maybe reported by the Buttociated Press. It’s a clbuttic blunder, but [perhaps not a common one](. Jargon watch The master expurgator --------------------------------------------------------------- Back in the day, content filtering was artisanal, and no one wielded a more careful scalpel than Thomas Bowdler, a Renaissance man whose kid-friendly The Family Shakespeare was so (in)famous that his name is synonymous with sanitizing, which is why we know it as to [Bowdlerize](. Some of his edits were modest, like changing “Jesu!” to “Heavens!” but he did a bit more violence to the text by making Ophelia’s drowning accidental. Reuters/Keith Bedford Fun fact! The words socialism, socialist, and specialist have been known to snag filters for containing the substring Cialis. Million-dollar question Why can't we get obscenity filters right? --------------------------------------------------------------- It simply isn’t easy to create an algorithm that understands the vast nuance of the English (or any) language and the ways people use it. Even with advances in machine-learning algorithms, it’s still hard to create a filter that understands words in context, machine learning researcher Michael Veale [told Motherboard.]( As a result, many platforms (ahem, Facebook), are relying increasingly on human moderators. The bots may be coming, but as in many things, when it comes to parsing intention in conversation, it turns out humans still take the cake. Last year, Google offshoot Jigsaw rolled out a public interface for its Perspective project, which [uses]( “machine learning to automatically detect insults, harassment, and abusive speech online,” trained on Wikipedia discussions and newspaper comments and using the wisdom of crowds to determine what’s “toxic.” But like any newborn, it’s slow to learn. Jigsaw’s early tests rated “racism is bad” as 60% toxic, while “racism is good” scored just 35%. “Hitler was an anti-semite” was 70% toxic; “race war now,” just 24% toxic. “The hope is over time, as this is used, we’ll continue to see more and more examples of abuse, and those will be voted on by different people and improve its ability to detect more types of abuse,” a Jigsaw project manager [told Quartz](. Giphy Poll How often does your name cause a headache? [Click here to vote]( NeverAll the timeHigh school was rough but it's better now Today’s email was written by [Edmund Heaphy]( [Jessanne Collins]( and [Whet Moser,]( produced by [Luiz Romero](. 💬 Let's talk! 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