TinyChan

Topic: Life on the Internet is Hard When Your Last Name is Butts

+Anonymous A7.8 years ago #51,608

Natalie Weiner.jpgYesterday, 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.

As it turns out, this phenomenon is so widespread that it has a name among computer scientists. It's called the Scunthorpe problem and it's been a scourge of the internet since the beginning. Motherboard spoke to content moderation experts about its origins and why it's such a hard problem to solve 20 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Also of note: Natalie was born without a weiner and feels she should have been named Bunn.

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