Slashdot Mirror
Instagram Rolls Out 'Keyword Moderation Tool' That Will Filter Out Offensive Comments (macrumors.com)
In an effort to "promote a culture where everyone feels safe to be themselves without criticism or harassment," Instagram has introduced today a "keyword moderation tool" that anyone can use to block offensive or inappropriate words. Mac Rumors reports: Referred to as a "keyword moderation tool," the feature will let each user type in words they find to be offensive, effectively hiding any mention of them in the comment section of their posts. The comments containing the harsh language will still be available for other Instagram users, but the company believes that allowing each user to determine which words to hide from their personal collection of photos will cultivate a "positive and safe" environment. To deal with abusive accounts, Instagram already lets users swipe to delete comments, report inappropriate comments and block accounts.
Sounds like all this will do is allow the Instagram users to wrap a virtual towel around their heads.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I've already noticed on other forums a tendency to construct a cocoon where nothing disagreeable gets in, but the people try to do it by driving out or shutting up anyone with a contrary opinion. This tool will allow them to create their own little universe without having to eject or muzzle the meanies who insist on saying things they don't like. Everyone can now have their own customized online "safe room".
...like Niggardly? ...or Pussy (as in pusillanimous)?
Because nobody's ever figured out how to get around filters before.
-Styopa
don't bow down to communist gov blocks.
I would love to have it filter out all prepositions to see what it comes up with.
It's instagram. The idea is for 99% of people to post garbage pictures of themselves for fun. It's not about learning some life lesson about dealing with a world full of anonymous assholes who now can say what they want without looking someone in the face to do so.
. . . at no extra charge.
Somebody explain to me, just when words, of and by themselves. became objectionable and people started claiming trauma for just SEEING them ?
The Internet was SUPPOSED to bring free and unlimited communications and information to all. Instead, it's becoming a psychological minefield with individually-set DMZs.
The Sweet Meteor of Death can't come soon enough. . .
It isn't enough that I can decide what I can see, I want to decide what everyone can see! *TANTRUM*
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Choose your safe space and get lost. But leave me alone. I, and only I, should be the person deciding what I want to see and what I do not want to see. It's not your prerogative to tell me what I may or may not see, and sure as FUCK it ain't yours to say what I may or may not say!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't use twitter, but I'm sitting here trying to imagine some words that I'd never want to read, and I can't think of any. Maybe today I'm not feeling like hearing "Donald Trump" or "Hillary Clinton" or "Politics", but then maybe tomorrow I will want to hear a bit.
I know there are words that others find vulgar or offensive, but I don't care about words, I care about ideas. And how the hell do you filter out ideas? For an example, I don't care about any of these words: "I can't wait to shred your daughter's vagina", but when put in that order, I do. Another example: "Black lives matter".
Or are other people's lives so simple that they merely excluding certain words makes the pain go away? I'm interested to know which words people find, under all circumstances, offensive.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
It is not a government imposed censure, but a company which decided on their private turf to censure it (as an aside I think personally that that argument misses that some speech will be censored by most if not all private company and the effect is as good as government censorship).
In the very end this is a private entity which can do whatever on their turf, including censoring swear word, sex stuff, certain political parties, or heck any instagram not starting by a vowel.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
****triggered****
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I can compile my own dicktionary. Please cuntinue the good work.
-- Make America hate again!
Why does this censorship article use the censorship icon, while the previous Facebook censorship article uses the facebook icon? Why not use the censorship icon for both?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
That's nice, now we can comment on and discuss people's images in private among ourselves, without them seeing our comments.
All we need to find out is what offends them.
While I am in the camp of those who would never filter out anything, I am not offended easily, I see this as the best possible solution to let those who find certain words or concepts "offensive" to opt out and stop trying to force their values on the rest of us. Putting the onus on the individual rather than the company to decide what she/he sees has to be the way forward if we are going to protect freedom of expression.
While I agree this may cause "bubble" syndrome and allow for self-imposed isolation of various groups from each other, I think it could also provide some interesting life lessons. Think of a person who does a heavy self-censor without realizing the consequences, then hearing from friends that she missed out on a fun post because of it. Might cause people to start to question why they don't want to hear certain things or think certain thoughts.
I can see the next big celebrity/athlete protest of intentionally using hashtags of broadly censored words just to draw attention to the fact that people shouldn't hide from realities they may disagree with or find scary.
Pretty much this.
Humans have been quite inventive, during the ages, at coming up with substitutes for taboo words. It's still possible to insult someone as long as everyone involved knows what's meant. "You N-Word" will simply be the new racist slur, everyone knows what's meant, and as a "bonus" the racist even gets to mock the politically correctness.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The same people that will get up in arms about their "freedom of speech" to show up and call someone faggot/nigger/etc will also get up in arms about other people's freedom to ignore them.
If you show up at someone's house and shit on their rug, they're not infringing on your freedom if they start locking the door.
A world without critisism is a world without meaning.
The summary says that the tool doesn't prevent the posts from being made, it just prevents the user who started the discussion from seeing them. It's no different from a user-adjustable spam filter, really.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This idea is ing stupid.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
They are leaving you alone. Noone is forcing you to use instagram. If instagram wants to be a safe place for their chosen audience, that is their choice.
It's a photo sharing service, for chrissakes. Not a debating forum central to the survival of democracy. Not a bullying-deathmatch server. Not your soapbox.
If you don't like it, find or make one that does what you want.
Your freedom of speech grants you the right to post what you like on _your_ site.
Noone else is obliged to host your whiny rants, listen to them, respect them, or respect you.
sudo ergo sum
Indeed...bunch of over-sensitive melon farmers
I think it would get very quiet here...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
That's less of a concern, more Instagram is putting themselves into hot water if they start to policy speech on their site, they automatically forfeit any claim to being a common carrier.
In a nutshell, once you start to censor, you have to continue.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually, you can still post your rantings on Instragram. But other people may choose to ignore your rantings.
It's exactly like freedom of speech; you can say whatever you want, but you can't force me to listen to it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
for starters block.
kardashian, west, jenner, swift, spears, grande and.......
Don't forget to add "Anonymous Coward" to the list.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
Now how do I know that's your reply? You could just be saying that it's yours while you're really complaining that allowing Instagram to filter is another example of the SJWs being out of control.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't think most people will care if anyone wants to go off and create their own little space where they set the rules and can exclude those they do not wish to permit entry to and I expect that most people do this to some limited degree. The issue is when these people suddenly insist on their space being all-encompassing and wanting everyone to follow their rules, while not respecting the rules of anyone else. It's happened historically with religions, social groups, political movements, and many other areas.
We're better off teaching people that it's better to face those things which they find disagreeable instead of blocking them out, and that even if something is found to be utterly detestable to tolerate it to the extent that basic civility is maintained.
1. Slashdot has such a tradition of misunderstanding what a common carrier is. Instagram don't have common carrier status and aren't about to lose it by "policing speech".
2. This is individual users getting to hide certain messages based on their choice of free-input keywords, which is quite the opposite of a sitewide censorship policy.
The problem with the "safe space" rhetoric is that it suggests some new concept rather than one that has existed since the dawn of private property. Think of a "safe space" as analogous to your ability to stop people from using your stereo amp to e.g. announce that your mother is a fat cunt while they're visiting your house, because that's all it is.
Welcome, citizens, to the Age of Mass Censorship! Are you triggered constantly by rude, boorish people on the Internet who post rude, boorish things about politics, race, and religion? Does getting all stirred up and being so thoughtlessly yanked out of your comfort zone just plain ruin your endlessly happy, unnaturally positive, SSRI-induced mood? Is hearing about people all over the world and just down the street from you being oppressed, harassed, beaten, cheated, and killed just too much of a downer for you, and curdle the milk in your tea? Well fear not, citizens, now you can just block out all that nasty thought-provoking content with the click of a mouse button! Imagine the serenity of never having to deal with the Real World ever again! Refugees? Deleted! Protestors? Deleted! Terrorism? Deleted! Mass shootings? Deleted! Race-related police shootings? Deleted! Oppressive regimes bombing their own citizens? Deleted! Injustice in your own back yard? Deleted!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Kill files based on keywords and users would be a boon. It's not so much about being "offended", it's more about killing a lot of crap.
I'm fine with this. The idea of freedom of speech is about allowing people say what they think, even if it is unpopular. However, there is no mandate that people have to listen to you. Creating tools to help people filter out speech they aren't interested in hearing in such a way that it only affects the listener is a great idea. If some people want live in their own little bubble /safe-space let them, it doesn't hurt anyone else. This is a much better solution than other sites (cough twitter cough) use that would remove the post altogether. A mechanism we've seen abused again and again to stifle speech that is unpopular.
They're not just encroaching on the internet. They're encroaching on everything.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You hurt my feelings! But if you pay me $1,000, I'll just pretend nothing happened
This is a clbuttic mistake that a lot of people buttume will improve things, but when the people from Slabiamajorishorpe, England try to use their service, things tend to go haywire. And heaven help you if you play a buttbuttin in a game and get asked to buttbuttinate your target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Indeed. Censorship has been around in various forms.
1. Ultima Online
Origin Systems had a list of "bad word" which included "ass".
Unfortunately, they had a bug -- they checked substrings instead of only checking whole words.
So if you said the word "assassin" it got translated as "*****in*"
Simple solution: use spaces or a separator such as dots.
a.s.s.a.s.s.i.n.
2. Steam censors the word "retarded" and replaces them with hearts.
WTF.
Again simple work-around:
Steam censorship is r.e.t.a.r.d.e.d.
I ran a game for a while that developed something of a meme with people saying they were kicking one of the other players. I don't think he cared, but over time it got kind of heavy and seemed a little aggressive, so I put in a snippet of code so that any time someone said "kicks playerx" it would say "hugs playerx". There were workarounds, of course, like the punctuation above, but the first few times someone new stumbled one it and caught themselves hugging instead of kicking, it was pretty funny. Eventually I changed it back, once enough people had gotten the point, and the meme sort of dried up.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
But more importantly, I'm betting John has never been threatened with and felt the very real fear of rape and murder for the crime of being a woman on the Internet.
This doesn't look much different to business as usual to me - can't see where the outrage is coming from.
Honestly, this looks no different to Usenet kill files, which I personally have been (lightly) using for around twenty-five years. On Reddit I've also got a fairly extensive kill file-alike set up, via RES and the Alien Blue app. Really don't see the issue in them introducing this, sounds more like a nice-to-have feature that some people will use, some people won't.
Unfortunately, they had a bug -- they checked substrings instead of only checking whole words.
Ah, the Scunthorpe effect.
When substituting, it can lead to hilarious results, like Svaginahorpe, buttbuttination and leahomosexuale.
Penis Vanlesbian is a clbuttic example.
Ah, so there is a name for that phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
LOL -- those are awesome examples BTW !
I believe this is a fundamental Internet right and that it should extend to Web pages and advertising and products as well
We should be able to share our block list with each other. This is how markets work, with our focus and attention as currency
Jeoin
Will be the first thing the people at EA will type into the the tool.
Language evolves. Those internet keyword-searching algorithms will be out-of date within hours of a new version being published.
Fsck, how do "educated" people remain so gullible?