Anti-porn filters stop Dominic Cummings trending on Twitter
Twitter’s anti-porn filters have blocked Dominic Cummings’ name despite Boris Johnson’s chief adviser dominating British political news for almost a week, the Guardian can reveal.
As a result of the filtering, trending topics over the past five days have instead included a variety of misspellings of his name, including #cummnings, #dominiccummigs and #sackcummimgs, as well as his first name on its own, the hashtag #sackdom, and the place names Durham, County Durham and Barnard Castle.
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This sort of accidental filtering has gained a name in computer science: the Scunthorpe problem, so-called because of the Lincolnshire town’s regular issues with such censorship.
Bizarrely, the shortened hashtag #cumgate has also trended, since the first word of the sentence is not included in Twitter’s filter list, apparently in an attempt to avoid the Scunthorpe problem applying too broadly – for instance, by blocking words such as “scum”, “cumbersome” or “cumulative”.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/27/anti-porn-filters-stop-dominic-cummings-trending-on-twitter
See, you knew there had to be some advantage to a name that everyone took the piss out of at school ...