Black & white 3

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I got flagged

This evening I was back-dating a few posts and consolidating the blog when I got a red screen.  I asked a friend to verify it and sure enough he saw it too, which confirmed that it came from the top.  I was a bit frantic and then later, blip!  The screen was gone.  Doing my best to secure my blog I erased the last post (sorry), thinking it may have carried some malicious code.

Later I looked in my email folder and found 6 messages in the spam.  They detailed the posts that had been erased and warned that if I continued in like fashion my whole blog would be removed.  They were the very posts that I myself had been re-wording or consolidating.  I suppose this is a lesson not to meddle with the past.

A few years ago I read a post by the fellow who runs a Tumblr I enjoy called We Had Faces Then.  It is a blog mostly about old Hollywood.  He was frustrated by the fact that his pictures were being flagged as obscene because the algorithm that was patrolling them picked up the curve of a bosom or a jutting naked elbow.  This was after the great reckoning when Tumblr went 'clean'. 

In my case the offending content was textual.  If any of you have seen the film The Day the Earth Stood Still you will know who I mean when I mention Gort.  He is the policeman, a machine intelligence.  So, although I included a picture from 1984 in this post, the great difference is that in this case there are surely no human agents behind it.  It's an algorithm.

Not sure what to do now, and not even sure what I did wrong.  As content goes, mine is rather innocuous. I feel a bit like a marked man haha.  I admit that I have been quite active here lately, having lost my job due to COVID-19.  I doubt that this diary is of any great import, and in the greater scheme of things is not really seen by that many people, some thousands a day only (on a good day haha).

Summer is slowly arriving up here in Canada.  Maybe I'll lay low for the season.  Biking weather has arrived and my mechanic says my wheels are ready to be picked up.  I'll think about it and let you know.  Cheers.

The art of Kenney Mencher