There is a thread in another community regarding some controversies happening in women’s chess. I posted to that thread, recommending a book written by WGM Jennifer Shahade who is a multi-time US women’s chess champion. I also linked to a review of the book, the url of which contained the book title.

The Open Library page about the book is here: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5849601W

it seems that the title, as chosen by the female author with considerable self-awareness, contains a word that is sometimes used as a sexist slur. You can see the title by clicking the link above. Unfortunately some kind of bot censored the title from both the post, and the review link (to chessbase.com) that I had posted. I was able to fool the bot by changing a few characters, but the bot’s very existence is imho in poor taste.

We are adults here, we shouldn’t have robots filtering our language. If we act sexist or abusive then humans should intervene, but not bots. Otherwise we are in an annoying semi-dystopia. The particular post I made, as far as I can tell, is completely legitimate.

  • Lvxferre
    25•1 year ago

    Frankly, I also hate this sort of word filter. I fully agree with the OP here because the issue is not the specific words that you use, but what you convey through those words within a certain context. The book title is a great example of that, as “bitсh” is partially reclaimed and the author is using it to label a group that she is part of.

    It’s also damn easy to circumvent this sort of filter, as I’ve exemplified above, so it’s often useless.

  • @[email protected]
    18•1 year ago

    It is not a bot that censored your post but the lemmy.ml server itself. For some reason lemmy.ml (and I think lemmy.world) filter some words from posts. If you don’t like that you’ll have to change to another instance.

    I am using feddit.de and I can write “chess bitch” if I want.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      Do you have any idea if the blacklist/list of communities filtering profanity is publicly accessible anywhere?

    • @betterdeadthanredditEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      The lemmy.world instance doesn’t have the profanity filter enabled.

  • amio
    17•1 year ago

    Automated censoring is stupid anyway. The people interested in evading the filter will find it trivial, the people who are really so fragile they can’t handle seeing mild profanity on the Internet should probably invest in some client-side censoring solutions, or go reinvent Club Penguin or something.