I was banned from commenting on MSN for using the French word for courtesan, putain, as a mocking surname for Putin; additionally, apparently, I was banned for making fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebeck, two of the looniest and most incompetent members of our present Congress. Greene is also one of the most absurdly antisemitic public figures.
I requested review of my banning and have received approval to return to commenting *five times in the past week*. Yet I remain blocked from commenting! It appears that MSN's "moderation" system is wholly automated with no humans intervening in any decision-making.
It's particularly troubling that MSN's robotized algorithm for editorial review was created without the ability to assess subtleties of language -- to "know" the difference in meaning and morality between "Adolf Hitler was a great criminal" and "Adolf Hitler was a great man." Even more troubling is the fact that mentioning the terms "Adolf Hitler," "Jew," or "antisemite" in a comment will often be automatically refused as "against guidelines." I have had to type "J\_w," "members of the Hebrew faith," and even "the Mel Brooks people," to get my comments *against* antisemitism approved.
Actual Nazis/antisemites have learned to employ such linguistic dodges as "joos," "oven dodgers," and the like to get sometimes baldly pro-Nazi comments accepted for online display. Editorial judgment is always a hard task: "Should I allow explicitly bigoted comments to be published to expose the ugliness of such hatred? Will readers generally recognize the bigotry for the trash that it is, or will some people be more encouraged to hate?"
Publishing hateful free speech allows other free speakers to criticize and oppose hate. The solution to free speech being more free speech. But what do we do when free speech is employed by police-state propagandists, political propagandists, criminals, and other hostile actors to harm, to radicalize, or to spread political division that aids the enemies of democracy? As a weaponized editorial defense system, the MSN auto-moderator critically lacks a key app: onomatopoeic detection of incoming hate. This failure is the equivalent of creating an antimissile system without the radar capability to detect incoming missiles. I think we should ensure that human beings, in consultation with other human beings, be allowed to return to the daunting and subtle task of editing MSN comments for publication.