A writer for SB
Nation named Natalie Weiner posted a screenshot of a rejection
form she received when she tried to sign up for a website. Her
submission was rejected because a spam algorithm considered her
last name "offensive." After she posted about this, hundreds of
other people with similarly "offensive" last names sounded off
about how they had experienced similar issues.
This phenomenon is so widespread that it has a name among
computer scientists. It is called the Scunthorpe problem and it
has been a scourge of the internet since the beginning. The name
began after an
incident in 1996 when AOL's dirty-word filter prevented
residents of several English towns and counties, among them
Scunthorpe, Penistone, Lightwater and Middlesex — from creating
accounts with AOL because it matched strings within the town
names to "banned" words. If you look close, you will find the
letters that seemingly make up the words.
One reason the problem has yet to be solved is because creating
effective obscenity filters depends on the filter's ability to
understand a word in context. Despite advances in artificial
intelligence, this is something that even the most advanced
machine-learning algorithms still struggle with. Ah, English
is an amazing language that computers still cannot decipher.