Scunthorpe problem

The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter, search engine or wordfilter because the text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task. As a result, broad blocking rules may result in false positives affecting many innocent phrases.

Etymology and origin

The problem was named after an incident in April 1996 in which AOL's profanity filter prevented people in the English town of Scunthorpe from creating AOL accounts because the town's name contains the substring cunt. In the early 2000s, Google's opt-in SafeSearch made the same error, with local services and businesses that included the town in their names or URLs among those mistakenly hidden from search results.

Workarounds

The Scunthorpe problem is challenging to completely solve due to the difficulty of creating a filter capable of understanding words in context.

One solution involves creating a whitelist of known false positives. Any word appearing on the whitelist can be ignored by the filter, even though it contains text that would otherwise not be allowed.

Other examples

Mistaken decisions by obscenity filters include:

See also

• Censorship by Google
• Cupertino effect – Software bug in a spell checker
• False positive – Types of error in data reportingPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Predictive text – Input technology for mobile phone keypads
• Rebracketing – Process in historical linguistics
• Spam detection – Methods to prevent email spamPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• String substitution – Process of replacing substrings
• Wordfilter – Script used to censor words or phrases on the internet

References