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Saturday, February 12, 2022

Ridiculous Zuccs: Times Live (Dean Hutton - "*** W*** People")

Addendum: To add insult to injury, a previous version of this post got unpublished by Blogger after it "was flagged to us for review" because "Your content has violated our Spam policy". So it looks like Google's algorithms have also gone mad. Unfortunately, I've had to redact select bits to try to keep this version of the post up.

Blogger's Community Guidelines claim that "Hate speech is content that promotes or condones violence against or has the primary purpose of inciting hatred against an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization". Apparently, mentioning the results of a court case and/or documenting Facebook censorship is hate speech. Go figure.

Since this version of the post neither uses disparaging language nor mentions any protected group, hopefully the algorithms will not go crazy this time.

In April 2021, I got a 30 day zucc (there's a bug where if you're a repeat offender, it will not show the true duration in the alert) for accidentally sharing a link (damn embedded share buttons on websites) from Times Live, which is "South Africa's second-biggest news website".

"'*** W*** People' exhibition is art‚ not hate speech - court (this was on Dean Hutton's racist "art exhibition"). [Addendum: The URL is https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2017-07-05-warning-explicit-language-f-k-w****-people-exhibition-is-art-not-hate-speech-court/ - replace the asterisks with the rest of the word beginning with "w" for the true URL]

The zucc was upheld on appeal, too. I was so pissed off, I tried to go to the appeal board, but they didn't want to hear my case.

Presumably the algorithm (and human reviewer) saw "w*** people" and "hate" and/or "f-k" together, and concluded that this was hate speech. Even news sites are not safe to share on Facebook. Addendum: Nor, it would seem, Blogger.

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