Player behavior word censoring harms discussion about the censored words by causing misunderstanding

Baka Red·6/6/2019, 6:32:37 AM·2 votes·2,111 views

If people are trying to discuss about something, lets say cars, it isn't useful for the discussion to have an autocensoring system which censors most words about the topic. In the example of cars, imagine what would happen if words 'cars', 'bmw','fiat','mercedes','ford' etc were censored and people were trying to talk about cars? The same happens in player behavior right now. Instead of discussing about the problems caused by use of word 'x%%%%%%%', we are trying to guess what this 'x%%%%%%' means for each person discussing it. Censorship of words should imo therefore be removed from player behavior boards.

16 Comments

ModThe Djinn6/6/2019, 11:52:07 AM4 votes

Pretty much the only things that are censored on the board are certain incredibly problematic links (which I have never seen in logs), hate speech, and a pejorative commonly used to insult someone's intelligence, which begins with an r and which we have only censored the remaining letters up to ensure that player behavior can tell the difference between it and hate speech.

If you see a series of % characters, it is safe to assume hate speech. If you see a r followed by a series of % characters, it is safe to assume pejorative language.

Umbral Regent6/6/2019, 12:21:34 PM3 votes

I don't see how - or why, for that matter - one would really go about discussing hate speech, especially if we're comparing said discussion to discussions about cars.

There's very little guesswork involved in determining what a variant of hate speech is. If there's six %'s, then there's really only two possibilities; it's either a racial slur, or a homophobic one. If there's three, it's the shortened homophobic slur. If there's a long string of percent signs, it's almost certainly a phrase making a mockery of another language.

And, of course, I have to ask; what really is there to discuss about hate speech? It's awful language almost always used to insult and degrade people based on unchangeable aspects of their character, such as race or disability. The problems caused by the words don't really need discussed, since, again; the words are virtually always used to degrade people.

Beyond that, why do we need to see the word explicitly in order to discuss it? As mentioned above, there's so few words that get censored that the few that cause confusion need only be clarified - is that six-letter string of percent signs homophobia, or racism? - we don't need to see the word to know what it is, much less to discuss the problems surrounding the word.