As if that sounds any better in English. It's probably better just to ignore us English speakers anyway. Anyway, apparently Oberfucking and Unterfucking still exist?
> Will English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?
As long as the rest of the world willingly lets them, yes.
> This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton, embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.
>>Will English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?
It's not English speakers, it's Americans specifically. Their corporations and their media have infiltrated the rest of the free world and are basically telling everyone what is and what isn't ok. People grow up watching American films and shows, accepting American morality and norms as "standard" even though frequently they absolutely aren't elsewhere. People use American social media from young age, letting American corporations censor and control the content they are seeing, again, even if the content shouldn't be controversial where they live.
Yes, I understand the hypocrisy of posting this on an American website. But I believe there is a large portion of non-American users here and it's important to remember that this is happening and should be fought against wherever possible.
I must say that as a Swedish citizen this wasn't a problem until quite recently. We have the SJW movement here now too, but I've never throught about it coming from the US.
A friend of mine stayed over in Canada for a couple of years, and he said everyone was very easily offended and politically correct.
The worst is when people intentionally misinterpret what you say to start an argument, kills me inside when someone pulls that trick. I remember a year or so ago I was seeing a VERY leftist girl that kept doing that. Ended up walking out on it all.
I guess that the infamous Scunthorpe problem [0] is still raising issues all around, hopefully they will get the page back soon, it is a bit scary that the page got taken down and there have not been any response from Facebook at the time of that article.
At this point the "intelligent" content filtering algos at fb and yt are a caricature of what they were meant to be.
Not so long ago a popular chess Youtuber had a few of his videos taken down simply because of some phrases including words like "black" and "white" alongside "strong" and "weak"[0]. This was of course deemed racist by YT's clever algos. It's insane.
"what they were meant to be." is probably not a correct characterization, it's likely that the algorithms are intended to prevent "bad" content at all costs, a high false positive rate is likely, if not intended, an accepted consequence.
I think from Facebook's perspective, they will get more public anger and nasty articles written about them for hosting racist content than for taking down some chess video.
Yes, we should all resort to playing chess in our heads. Though it's troublesome as we'd have to communicate the pieces names. Kings have opressed people through history do that wouldn't work, since at some point in history a far distant relative of mine was killed in a war initiated by kings orders.
Yeah we should probably just remove everything that is either black or white from the world. Yellow too while we're at it. And of course brown. Maybe red as well?
Nowhere in that citation is there concrete support for your claim that these words led to the video being taken down.
> 4:15 But if that's the case, then I'm pretty sure all of my 1800 videos will be taken down, as it's pretty much black against white to the death every video, and I don't think it's supposed to work like that.
Please note that it is actually unclear why his video was taken down. It's extremely common for chess videos to Feature the words "white", "black", "weak" and "strong".
I'm fairly convinced that 99% of all content filtering are poorly written RegEx rules, just like 99% of all ad targeting is showing people more of what they've already bought.
This is the anecdote that is most egregious to me in this article:
> This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton, embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.
As long as other countries continue to willingly comply and bend to the will of the US, the US will continue being the bully that it is.
Well, the 1800s were also when not bending to the will of European powers was likely far harder and more damaging than not bending to the will of the US (even today) in many parts of the world. There has been some improvement in the overall bullying problem, in my book, and hopefully that will continue.
Your example comes from 1881, about 75 years before the US would become anything close to a superpower. So the simplest explanation is that the French simply agreed that it sounded weird in English to have it on all official letters, in stead of a superpower bullying it's allies into submission.
> There's an opposite example, search for Boris Nemtsov Plaza.
This is an 'opposite example' in the sense of the US modifying a street name to intentionally spite a country (naming a street after a Russian dissident to spite Putin), not an 'opposite example' in the sense I was requesting: a case of the US modifying a street name to appease an ally, like France did.
To me it sounds like the name was mocking the Americans, by renaming what the Americans considered "bitch" to United States, implying the US was the bitch.
Right, it couldn’t possibly be a request to an ally based on the coincidence of a totally fine French name with an unfortunate meaning in English. Similarly, if for some reason the French end up on Merde Avenue, we should be equally offended when they request a different name with which to correspond. Because this matters. A lot. And it’s absolutely worth a mortal slugfest in a comment section about the great evil of the western world making an accepted diplomatic request of precisely zero consequence several thousand years ago.
You fight the good fight. Show us our follies. Perhaps France should have invaded Maine over this inordinately egregious insult of insults.
To be fair its more like they build their own library (facebook) noticed its really bad at containing and preserving information and now start to burn it down.
There should be a difference between the "official Facebook of X" and the "official site of X". Billy Bob and Aunty Jane should be free to communicate to the world via Twitter, but the government, IRS, emergency services, etc. better avoid the level of indirection. Provided they care, of course.
At what point do we recognize that privately owned social network is completely incompatible with the governments need for communicating with it's constituency and pull all government organization off those platforms?
It could easily be argues that any organization that reserves the right to ban users/contents outside that have yet been determined to be illegal by the courts cannot be considered electable for government contracts for communication services, as the government have an absolute duty the principles of due process, and have to give all of it's citizens equal access to all government funded services.
I mean, I think a bunch of people (myself included) realized this a long time ago.
If your real question is "at what point do we fix this?", it's unfortunately a bit of a catch-22: realistically we need to get rid of things like lobbying, two-party system, gerrymandering, etc. in order to get good reform going. Unfortunately fixing those things might be difficult before we reform social.
Like ranked choice voting or something might be a good idea, but why would our existing selfish legislators vote for something that will effectively reduce their power by tbrowing non-left/right partisans into the mix.
> I want to know what Elon musk's son goes through with that name.. that poor thing with insane parents..
He's going to be socially maladjusted regardless of his name. Also, I wonder if they're just lying about his legal name to try and protect the kid a bit. Though, if I were them, I'd lie that his name is "John Smith". It's tough to steal someone's identity when you don't know their name.
> ‘ The place is called 'Bitche'.. like it's one of the first places going to get hit when some lazy developer implements their algorithm.’
Or, lazy Americans. It’s the sort of gaffe that gives foreign developers the idea they must create their own social network and that their community may just agree with them.
This reminds me of two brothers who did a road trip through Britain to visit all the towns with naughty names and street names. I can't find a reputable link but here's one from the Mirror: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rude-map-britain-revea...
Back in the day, there was a pornographer who arranged to have his material mailed from these towns. That proved to be his undoing. He claimed that his material was of scientific/medical value, but the fact that he chose these towns for his postmark was considered evidence that his primary purpose was pornographic.
Related: I'm providing a JS implementation of Weizenbaum's ELIZA [1] on my website since 2005. Recently, Twitter decided that this is sensitive content, probably, because the page mentions that Weizenbaum's original program was written in MAD-SLIP on a IBM 7094. (I can't think of any other trigger.)
This tainting has apparently propagated to my account, which is linked to the site in the description. Now, tweets in context of my site (e.g., announcing a blog post) are randomly marked as sensitive content, as well. Last week, someone sent a Tweet thanking me for putting ELIZA on the web. A simple reply, "You are welcome.", was marked as sensitive content. (My site is up since April 1999 and there has never been any offensive or sensitive content. The same applies to any of my tweets.)
Also, there is no process to report such an erroneous tainting. A Tweet to TwitterSupport linking to said "You are welcome"-Tweet was tainted, as well, and doesn't show up in search results. (If not logged in, a direct link to this Tweet [2] results in "This is not available to you" on Safari, but is accessible using Firefox.)
I'm glad Finnish is so isolated and marginal as a language. This allows us to have names like these below (freely translated/paraphrased to English) with the FAANG AI having no idea whatsoever:
Asseye Pond, Assfried's, Ballswax, Bollocks Island, Boob Island, Cape Cunt,
Crabs, Dick Hill, Dick Island, Gay's Pond, Glans Bay, Haemorrhoid, Horse Ass
Bend, Horse Ass Hill, Horse's Ass, Juggbottom, Knackers Creek, Nigger Island,
Perv's Ditch, Pervert's Rock, Piss Island, Pisshead, Pussy Island, Pussy Pond,
Tit Hills, Wanker's Field, Wank River
There is another town called Bitsch [0] in Switzerland. I am sure you can find any offensive english word, and find some villages / cities in the world that have this particular offensive name.
Undoubtedly this will get censored again, since for some reason it appears to be morally just to dig in Stallman's past but not in Zuckerberg's. According to newspapers, Zuckerberg had a business card that said "I'm CEO, Bitch":
The double-meaning has been noted for a very long time.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the French had a harsh, high-security dungeon-like prison at Bitche for British POWs who had caused problems in the regular prisons (trying to escape, attacking guards, etc.). The British troops referred to being sent there as having been "Bitched".
Dear English speakers of the United States of America, please be advised that
1. The English language is not earthspeak.
2. The town of Bitche has been around for almost 500 years more than when colonies united.
3. Before judging, stop using odious names for your spawn and town names (Sir, I'm going to Bumpass with your daughter, Anna-Lee, it'll be our only stop before reaching you in Satans Kingdom).
98 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadWill English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria#Name_ch...
Edit: why is this down voted? It IS ridiculous! ...
As long as the rest of the world willingly lets them, yes.
> This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton, embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.
Especially the native ones being the most ignorant of other languages (and often of their own)?
Cultural/linguistic diversity is important, but people are more worried about the low-hanging (centered on their Anglo culture) fruit.
It's not English speakers, it's Americans specifically. Their corporations and their media have infiltrated the rest of the free world and are basically telling everyone what is and what isn't ok. People grow up watching American films and shows, accepting American morality and norms as "standard" even though frequently they absolutely aren't elsewhere. People use American social media from young age, letting American corporations censor and control the content they are seeing, again, even if the content shouldn't be controversial where they live.
Yes, I understand the hypocrisy of posting this on an American website. But I believe there is a large portion of non-American users here and it's important to remember that this is happening and should be fought against wherever possible.
The worst is when people intentionally misinterpret what you say to start an argument, kills me inside when someone pulls that trick. I remember a year or so ago I was seeing a VERY leftist girl that kept doing that. Ended up walking out on it all.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
https://www.dw.com/en/austrian-village-of-fucking-decides-to...
Edit: Damn someone beat me to it.
Not so long ago a popular chess Youtuber had a few of his videos taken down simply because of some phrases including words like "black" and "white" alongside "strong" and "weak"[0]. This was of course deemed racist by YT's clever algos. It's insane.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23729156
Maybe we need less automatic moderation and more humans in the loop. Or just accept that sometimes content is just visible.
As if humans are never wrong or have no biases.
Chess mains
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2qje9o/til_t...
Gave me a good laugh
> 4:15 But if that's the case, then I'm pretty sure all of my 1800 videos will be taken down, as it's pretty much black against white to the death every video, and I don't think it's supposed to work like that.
> This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton, embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.
As long as other countries continue to willingly comply and bend to the will of the US, the US will continue being the bully that it is.
Can you name a comparative example of the US renaming a street at the request of an ally?
This is an 'opposite example' in the sense of the US modifying a street name to intentionally spite a country (naming a street after a Russian dissident to spite Putin), not an 'opposite example' in the sense I was requesting: a case of the US modifying a street name to appease an ally, like France did.
You fight the good fight. Show us our follies. Perhaps France should have invaded Maine over this inordinately egregious insult of insults.
By Tom Scott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE
It could easily be argues that any organization that reserves the right to ban users/contents outside that have yet been determined to be illegal by the courts cannot be considered electable for government contracts for communication services, as the government have an absolute duty the principles of due process, and have to give all of it's citizens equal access to all government funded services.
If your real question is "at what point do we fix this?", it's unfortunately a bit of a catch-22: realistically we need to get rid of things like lobbying, two-party system, gerrymandering, etc. in order to get good reform going. Unfortunately fixing those things might be difficult before we reform social.
Like ranked choice voting or something might be a good idea, but why would our existing selfish legislators vote for something that will effectively reduce their power by tbrowing non-left/right partisans into the mix.
Edit: "Twit" definitely is offending. (Don't use this nasty word, even, if it's part of a company name!)
rather than 'Facebook bad', I feel for the few people who implemented this..
I want to know what Elon musk's son goes through with that name.. that poor thing with insane parents..
He's going to be socially maladjusted regardless of his name. Also, I wonder if they're just lying about his legal name to try and protect the kid a bit. Though, if I were them, I'd lie that his name is "John Smith". It's tough to steal someone's identity when you don't know their name.
Or, lazy Americans. It’s the sort of gaffe that gives foreign developers the idea they must create their own social network and that their community may just agree with them.
Blue Balls, Pennsylvania
French Lick, Indiana
Middlesex, New Jersey
Back in the day, there was a pornographer who arranged to have his material mailed from these towns. That proved to be his undoing. He claimed that his material was of scientific/medical value, but the fact that he chose these towns for his postmark was considered evidence that his primary purpose was pornographic.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/11/phuc-dat-bich-kicked...
"Australian with 'misleading' Facebook name thanks supporters" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34897404
"the Australian man with a name so awkward no one believes him" https://www.smh.com.au/technology/phuc-dat-bich-the-australi...
This tainting has apparently propagated to my account, which is linked to the site in the description. Now, tweets in context of my site (e.g., announcing a blog post) are randomly marked as sensitive content, as well. Last week, someone sent a Tweet thanking me for putting ELIZA on the web. A simple reply, "You are welcome.", was marked as sensitive content. (My site is up since April 1999 and there has never been any offensive or sensitive content. The same applies to any of my tweets.)
Also, there is no process to report such an erroneous tainting. A Tweet to TwitterSupport linking to said "You are welcome"-Tweet was tainted, as well, and doesn't show up in search results. (If not logged in, a direct link to this Tweet [2] results in "This is not available to you" on Safari, but is accessible using Firefox.)
[1] https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/
[2] https://twitter.com/mass_werk/status/1378062262905286657
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsch,_Switzerland
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267295/Bill-Gates-...
Cited also here, if you don't trust the Daily Mail:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/opinion/zuckerberg-elizab...
Ok, perhaps all newspapers are wrong, but in that did not prevent anyone from posting similar stories about Stallman.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the French had a harsh, high-security dungeon-like prison at Bitche for British POWs who had caused problems in the regular prisons (trying to escape, attacking guards, etc.). The British troops referred to being sent there as having been "Bitched".