Tuesday 20 September 2011

Help. I've become a swear word

I have a slightly unusual surname. Not wildly so, but Blackie isn't like Smith. Our numbers are in the thousands though.

And like everyone else I occasionally have my emails go into people's junk mail folders.

Well I'm mildly distressed to see that my name is considered a profanity by a leading provider of online moderation tools.

This means that if I comment on Facebook pages or some websites and mention my surname then I'll be automatically put into a moderation queue, and disappear from websites. And it might explain some of my emails disappearing.

This feels like the first step on the slippery slope to being airbrushed out of history.

Still as my colleague Karin Robinson points out, Olympic gold medal gymnast Mitch Gaylord must have it much worse.