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The “B” word is not a slur in all situations (3 bugs in the slur filter) (links.hackliberty.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

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In this comment my use of the “b” word was overzealously suppressed, silently without telling me. I only discovered it when re-reading my post.

There are THREE #LemmyBug cases here:

when the “b” word is used as a verb, it’s not a slur. And when it’s used as a noun, it’s only a slur if not literally referring to a dog.
my post was tampered with without even telling me. Authors should be informed when their words are manipulated and yet still presented to others as their own words.
The word “removed” cannot simply replace any word. It makes my sentence unreadable. In the very least, the word should be “REDACTED”, and there should be a footnote added that explains /why/ it was redacted.

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[–] fishos@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've seen "idiot"( I d i o t) removed in a comment while "retard" (r e t a r d ) in the same comment remained.

The OP is very correctly pointing out that even per word, the filter is very inconsistent.

And personally, I think it's a bit ridiculous to shelter every possible bad word. Bad people will come up new ones and good people will be left having to tiptoe over every word(after all, words like "Monkey" or "Ape" could be used racistly, so let's ban them). It doesn't solve the actual problem of human behaviour; it just throws a cutesy, useless bandaid over it. Besides, you will probably never be able to censor something racist like "Colin Powell was well spoken". In context we know it means "he's well spoken for an African American". A phrase used often when he was in office. A phrase that would get past filters but is clearly not ok.

[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Almost as if the whole endeavor is a ridiculous counterproductive waste of time.

It would be possible to implement a "slur filter" on the reader's side, that automatically redacted a configurable list of bad words from any comment on any instance... but I suspect that the percentage of people who would enable it, and the general community feedback on it, wouldn't be what the person who made the decision wants to hear. Doing it on the sender side provides a convenient pretense of "I'm doing a good thing here" because it prevents that feedback.

[–] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 3 points 1 year ago

Indeed people with malicious intentions will get around the filter anyway. It’s the non-malicious authors who get burnt by this filter.