More surprising censorship

[Chris F Waigl]

Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> The sports blog Deadspin has often ridiculed the censorship of user
> comments on ESPN.com, e.g.:
>
> http://deadspin.com/sports/espn/man-that-commenting-feature-is-totally--235084.php
> http://deadspin.com/sports/espn/espn-turns-douche-into--252920.php
>
> Earlier today there was a post about similar censorship on
> FoxSports.com, where "BLEEP" is inserted in place of offending words:
>
> http://deadspin.com/sports/whatever-happened-to-sterling-hitchbleep/fox-sports-protects-us-from-the-horrors-of-boof-288512.php
>
> Referencing censored bits here:
>
> http://community.foxsports.com/blogs/Morisato/2006/07/13/The_Worst_Trades_In_Baseball_History
>
> "The San Francisco Giants trade pitchers Joe Nathan, Francisco
> Liriano, and BLEEP  Bonser to Twins for A.J. Pierzynski." [censoring
> "Boof" Bonser]
>
> "They were tradinBLEEP oung player who had put up some nice numbers,
> but wasn't projected to be a star..." [censoring the letters "g a y"
> in "tradinG A Young player"]
>
>

The Foxsports approach is new to me and puts a new spin on the topic: On
the Foxsports page, the "BLEEP"s are hyperlinks which lead to a page
entitled "About Censoring":

====

FOXSports.com encourages our users to express themselves on their blogs,
story comments, or message boards. We don't want to slow down your game
when you're dishing on your favorite teams and players.

At the same time, we recognize that not everyone out there loves a potty
mouth. So if there's an obvious bad word on a blog, story comment, or
message board post, we'll try to censor it.

Feeling brave, mature, and adult-ish? Or just want to get in touch with
your inner sailor? You can choose to have FOX Sports do nothing, and
leave all those R-rated words alone. If you do, you may see some coarse
language from time to time in the community. Don't say we didn't warn you!

*Would you like FOXSports.com to automatically censor content you view?*

http://community.foxsports.com/CensorSetting.aspx?url=http%3a%2f%2fcommunity.foxsports.com%2fblogs%2fMorisato%2f2006%2f07%2f13%2fThe_Worst_Trades_In_Baseball_History
[for example]
====

Below this are two buttons. I clicked "No, don't censor" and now get the
unbleeped pages.

Leaving aside the inane rules for censored strings, which are far from
catching only "obvious bad words", even if you believe in such a thing,
there are two remarkable things about this:

- They unapologetically call it "censorship"
- They offer "censorship" as a customer service feature

Now the latter is not that different from search engine filtering, which
is usually set to "moderate" (i.e., switched on, but not set to the most
radical value) by default on image searches. Google and Yahoo! do this.
If you want content filtering on the text searches, you have to switch
it on yourself.

Chris Waigl

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