The problem? People on the internet swear too much. The solution? A content filter that blocks profane words and naughty letter combinations. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong? #technology #internet #history #historyfacts

The year 1996. The problem. People on the internet swear too much. The solution. A content filter that blocks profane words and naughty letter combinations. Sounds like a great idea with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong? Turns out the English language. The filter started nuking innocent words like the perfectly respectable town of Skuntorp. I’m sorry, Skunthorp, England. When the resident Doug Blackey tried to sign up for the service, AOL basically told him to off their pigs. AOL forcibly renamed the town to Scunthorp, coining a new term, the Scunthor problem, which continues to this day, forking up small towns, ducking over people with unfortunate surnames, batch slapping Pokemon cards, dog breeds, and even Super Bowl 30. Sometimes the dirtiest thing is the filter.

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38 Comments

  1. Contact filters like that are a waste of time. To me it's just censorship. It's a censorship filter. And I want to kick the ass with the person who thought it was a good idea. I am not changing my mind if that mother fucker is in a wheelchair or some shit.

  2. yeah, in my language is the similar problem. middle parts of some words are similar to some curse words like "оскорблять", "блёстки" or "страх". So you could get banned for completely innocent conversation

  3. Ifunny is notorious for abusing this problem. The small community on that app now have an entirely separate set of profanity. The n word gets corrected to “noon”. A person who likes kids is corrected to “emu”. So on and so forth. They even have one for Indian people, but I forgot it after all these years.

  4. Reminds me of a story I heard of this guy who's xbox username was "Nasser" but the game censored "a$$" and made it say "N***er" which is a LOT worse 😂

  5. Going to school in the early 2000s with a bunch of refugee kids from Iraq and watching those kids invent their own english slurs to use against white kids has 100% convinced me all censorship is pointless.

    You take kids, with barely any life experience and no grasp of the language they still found a way to say hateful things. If they can do it, terminally online adults can do it too.

  6. The amount of times i see a bad censor makes me scream, its class not cl*** arrgh!
    Like have some intern type the words in instead of have a fliter that searched the letters in a order ffs

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