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The Spamming Beaver Issue: Dumb Publishers and Smart Junk Mail

by Matthew Zuras on March 29, 2010 at 04:10 PM

The BBC's Jude Sheerin recently penned an interesting article about the problem of spam filters when it comes to a language rife with double entendres. Sheerin tells the tale of one of Canada's oldest magazines that has recently been forced to change its name due to constant spam warnings. The moniker in question: The Beaver, that grand animal dear to Canada's heart. Most of the 30,000 viewers to hit the magazine's site each month only stayed for about ten seconds, apparently seeking the wrong furry creature.

Deborah Morrison, publisher of the unfortunately titled history journal, tells Sheerin, "Back in 1920, The Beaver was a perfectly appropriate name... And while its other meaning is nothing new, its ambiguity began to pose a whole new challenge with the advance of the Internet." You know what else was considered appropriate nearly a century ago? Lawn jockeys and recreational cocaine use. Oh, and lynching.

So, as much as some of us are envious of our friends to the north and their maple syrup and socialized health care (although we're moving on up in the latter regard), it appears that some people in Canada's publishing industry are willfully ignorant of the fact that the English language is fluid. We wouldn't name a donkey trade magazine 'Asses Weekly,' now would we?

But therein lies the problem for anti-spam programmers, claims Sheerin. Since roughly 98-percent of the Internet is made up of pornography (we're rounding down), it becomes difficult for spam-catching programs to decide what's crude and what's not. Some spam is getting smarter, throwing spaces or errant letters into the middle of sexy words in order to slip past your filter unnoticed. But filters aren't smart enough, sometimes sending your perfectly reasonable e-mails into digital quarantine. Sheerin gives an example of spam filters replacing "flagged" words with more innocuous synonyms, like "breast" for "tit." In 2008, the American Family Association's Web site censored an Associated Press article about Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay; the headline was transformed into 'Homosexual eases into 100m final at Olympic trials.'

While we agree that spam moderation is often challenging (as known by our devoted commenters, who will recall an abundance of hemorrhoid cream and UGG boot ads on this very site), it is also up to content producers to not be incredibly thick-headed. 'Gay eases into 100m final' is just as problematic a headline even without ridiculous spam filter spell-checkery. The problem lies not only in the spam -- which, spawning like some mutant bacterium, accounts for 400 billion emails globally every day -- nor even in the filters that find a dirty word in the name Scunthorpe, England. If the publishers of 'The Beaver' had thought at all about their intended and unintended audiences, they may have switched titles sooner rather than later. They're writers, after all; they should know what words mean. [From: BBC]

Tags: canada, filter, language, media, print, spam, spam filter, SpamFilter, TheBeaver, top, TysonGay, web

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