As a result of Twitter's new bad word blocker, users couldn't search for rock group The Kinks without the results being flagged. The engineering geniuses now in charge of Twitter appear to have run headlong into the infamous Scunthorpe Problem, so named because it's a big town whose name is likely to trigger ineptly-designed censorship code.
That sent guitarist Dave Davies down a Twitterhole, unleashing a flurry of tweets in which he told chief Twit, Elon Musk, that he's tired of waiting for him to get it right. "Dear @elonmusk would @twiiter please stop putting warnings on everything from 'the Kinks'. We are just trying to promote our Kinks music," Davies tweeted on Wednesday. The tweet linked to a previous one in which Davies invited fans to check out the band's TikTok promo for the set, which featured a message at the bottom that read, "We put a warning on this Tweet because it might have sensitive content."
… "The word robot should be banned. We got robots running our lives. At least I'm a Kink and not a f–in robot."
Why is this happening? A thought. As it grows revenue from recurring subscriptions, Twitter is maybe getting snarled up in the banking industry's extreme conservatism about adult content. Twitter is one of the last platforms to allow porn, and the fundamental reason it's able to is (1) that it didn't do much credit card business and (2) occupied a uniquely imposing position in the media ecology which allowed it to ignore political and commercial pressures against hosting porn. Neither of those two things are true anymore, just as they stopped being true for Tumblr a few years back.
Note that Twitter boss Elon Musk was the founder of a banking startup that merged with another to form PayPal. Musk was fired as CEO of his original company due to his inexperience, and then fired as CEO of the merged company due to his ineptitude (and replaced by none other than Peter Thiel). So it's understandable that Musk is sensitive to these concerns and possibly aware that while politicans loudly debate free speech, banks quietly silence it.
