I write a weekly eLetter, Thinking for a Change, that goes to about 8,000 people around the world. I get comments from readers on a weekly basis. I love that. (If you’d like to subscribe, follow this link. Thinking for a Change)
Imagine my surprise that, when after the February 11th
edition, I received several messages from subscribers all employed by a large,
well admired Wisconsin company saying that they’d received a message that my
weekly message had been blocked because it contained
language identified as
inappropriate for use on COMPANY computing systems. It included language that
is abusive, sexually explicit or racially disparaging.
What, they asked did you say?
I have to admit, that I paused trying to imagine what I
could have written that would get that slap-on-the-hand. Then it dawned on me.
I quoted a comment about Abraham Lincoln’s behavior written by an historian.
(Note: I can’t recount what I wrote because I’ll start
the same issue for those people who subscribe to the RRS feed of this blog.
What I can do is provide this link to the Thinking for a Change archive so you can
go there and read my so-called offensive edition. No matter what the system,
there’s always a way to get around it.)
I realized I had inadvertently stepped into the same
Twilight Zone situation that blocked women who had a friend who received a
breast cancer diagnosis from doing an internet search about treatments while at
work. How people searching for information about reproductive choices at a
public library might be blocked from getting complete information.
My offensive comment was a reference to race in the context of Lincoln’s 200th Birthday. I was surprised when I heard Henry Louis Gates, Jr, a longtime Harvard professor, say it on CBS Sunday Morning . That’s what learning does to you. Jolts you out of what you think you know into another perspective. That to me, made it a legitimate issue about change, worthy to pass on in order to start a dialogue. Evidently the SPAM filter didn’t agree.
No one dislikes SPAM more than I do, especially the icky sexual stuff and offensive racial slurs. But, if we can send an astronaut to the moon, can’t we develop a spam filter that can tell the difference between garbage and thoughtful dialogue?
I continue to believe that conversations we can’t have can never fix problems we do have!
II can totally relate to your SPAM blocks. As you know, my husband and I have identified a specific disease that happens to get blocked for all of the same reasons you mentioned. Somewhere there HAS to be a tech guru working on this, right?!
Posted by: Kim of Kim & Jason | April 23, 2009 at 05:29 AM