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Move Over Big Brother, Big Business Is Here

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One of the largest internet credit card processors in the world has recently announced a policy of zero tolerance regarding the use of certain words on sites it represents. How long will it be before all the others follow?

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Contributor: paulmcl
paulmcl  

I got the same email from the same website.

The weirdest one to me was that "celebrity" was censored from a couple of my stories. And one story, with a large part set in a hospital, reads weirdly since every use of the word "drug" was censored.

As you say, the big worry is not that I can't put the word "rape" in an erotic story (I don't write stories about rape anyway). It is where the slippery slope ends.

05/07/2013
Contributor: Jenny Swallows

I've just received a more complete list of "banned" words. Again, you will notice that no actual vulgarities are included, but there's a lot of very innocent terms whose sexual connotations, while conceivably negative, are almost extraordinarily minimal. Okay, deep breath (you'll need it)...

rape (and variations... raped, raping etc)
scat / skat (and variations... scatology, scatalogical etc)
be[a]stiality
incest/incestuous
abduct (and variations)
kidnap (and variations - so there goes any attempt to dicuss Robert Louis Stevenson's second best-loved novel)
Lolita (ditto Vladimir Nabokov's best-loved book)
hypnotic, hypnosis, hypnotize, hypnotherapy... in fact, any word beginning with hypno-...,
drugs
celebrities (and variations/abbreviations thereof)

other terms... necrophilia, pedophilia (and associations - underage, pre-teen etc), zoophilia... fall into illegal territory, so their presence on the list could be considered understandable. At the same time as they bightly highlight another iniquity of this regime, the absolute absence of any human agency in actually checking the context of these words' usage. If you are going to police the Internet, then police it properly.

Right now, the companies employing this system are essentially practicing the linguistic equivalent of racial profiling... the assumption that all uses of a given word are illegal, just because a small handful of them might be.

And it's only going to get worse.

05/07/2013
Contributor: Jenny Swallows

Paul - "celebrity" completely baffles me... well, a lot of the words on the list do so, but that one in particular because I cannot even think what purpose it serves. There is a market for so-called celebrity-porn, but that just goes ahead and uses actual names. As for drugs - I guess there'll be a few less authors singing the praises of Viagra and associated medicines; and more librarians being careful about what they get up to in the classic literature section.

Oh and I just realized - the Christian Dior perfume I bought for a friend's birthday gift... half banned. "Hypnotic" is out, but "Poison" is still allowed.

05/07/2013
Contributor: Karuil Dryke

I have to agree on this one, it has become absolutely ridiculous. A company should not be able to censor the internet in any way, shape, or form, especially if said company exists within the confines of the United States or Otherwise. Where's a petition to ban this sort of behavior?

05/07/2013
Contributor: Jenny Swallows

Me again... I just heard from a different webmaster who published a list of the banned words as a warning to potential contributors. DO NOT USE THESE TERMS. Guess what? The company flagged them all, and he has to take them down.

So, we have a set of rules which, if you break them, you are in breach of the company's regulations. And if you tell contributors what the rules are to make sure they don't break them... you are in breach of the company's regulations.

05/07/2013
Contributor: SaucyxGirl

The sad part is that a completely innocent story could have some if not all those words in them. I once encountered something similar on a site that did not allow content that adult of nature. Some idiots took it upon themselves to create a program that could scan stories to detect "offending terms" and then those stories were flagged and removed without ever a person having read them. The end result was a lot of back lash against the people who created and were using the program and the actual site. Oh course it also took people writing G rated stories about a Pussy (cat) and Cocks (male chicken) and the use other "crude" terms in more creative ways while others wrote completely x-rated stories using terms that wouldn't be flagged. Oh the fun times had there during that time.

05/07/2013
Contributor: SaucyxGirl

I would like to add something that I didn't touch on, because I hit the post button by accident..lol

When ever I see a company that deals with the public, be it a pharmacy that refuses to have Plan B to a book store that refuses to stock a book because it's owner is offended or it goes against their religious or moral beliefs, I always wanna smack them up side the head and yell "Why then did you decide to go into that type of buisness? Why should another persons religious and moral beliefs result in something being restricted to me. Don't like Plan B...don't use it. Don't like smut...don't read or watch it. Quite a simple thing really.

05/07/2013
Contributor: geliebt
geliebt  

Well this is plain disturbing. I think the phrase, "I don't want to live on this planet anymore." Is applicable. Very much so...

Um.. so what can be done to combat this?

05/07/2013
Contributor: spiced
spiced  

Could you share which company this is? I'd like to boycott them. I strongly believe THAT is how we beat bullshit like this.

05/09/2013
Contributor: edeneve
edeneve  

The name of this private company, one of the largest IPSPs on the entire internet needs to be revealed so that internet retailers can change to a company that will meet their needs. And this information needs to flood the internet so that everyone becomes aware of their unethical practice. In so doing, the company will either change or lose so much business that they will go under due to their foolish business tactics.

I have never heard about this issue. If this company is heading in the direction as you said, they need to be cut off at the pass. Thanks for the information.

05/26/2013

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