LONDON — The latest victim of Twitter’s unnecessarily secretive censorship policy regarding sexual content is not, for a change, an adult performer, but a publicly pilloried U.K. politician surnamed Cummings.
Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, has been for days the subject of condemnations across the British political spectrum regarding his person-of-privilege perambulations around the realm while everyone else was under strict "stay-at-home" protocols.
This should have easily resulted in the chastised politician’s last name becoming a Twitter trending topic in the U.K. However, as The Guardian and other outlets pointed out, #Cummings was blocked by the platform as apparently too semen-evoking for a general audience.
“As a result of the filtering,” The Guardian wrote, “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 liberal news site reports that the censorship-happy Twitter filter also affected suggested hashtags, “meaning users who tried to type #dominiccummings were instead presented with one of the misspelled variations to auto-complete, helping them trend instead.”
SEO experts have a name for this situation: the Scunthorpe Problem.
The Scunthorpe Problem was first noticed years ago, when residents of Scunthorpe, an English town, couldn’t enter or find their addresses because AOL and Google profanity filters objected to the “cunt” hidden within the town’s name.
People with relatively common, yet schoolyard-titters-inducing last names like "Butts" and "Weiner" have also encountered the Scunthorpe Problem.
“Although Twitter does not publish the contents of the word filter list,” The Guardian reported, “users can check whether a particular term is blocked from trending by searching for it. By default, the site blocks all photo and video results from search terms it believes may contain sensitive content, meaning a media search for ‘porn’ or ‘Cummings’ will, unless the search filters are turned off, return zero results.”
Twitter declined to comment, as expected given their secrecy about their algorithms and shadowbanning and censorship practices.