Chess.com mutes sexual abuse victims for talking about their abuse

I certainly can sympathize but allowing people to accuse someone of being*one of the filtered terms* or that you wish they get "another filtered* word seem much more problematic to me 🤔

Attempting to bypass the filter may work, the filters can catch a lot of attempts, but when reported the member has no excuse for intent and could get a more severe result.

The filters warn members that something in their post in not acceptable. So abusers that don't get the message will be muted or if they try and get creative will again likely see a harsher penalty when reported.

Just allowing everything and anything isn't a viable solution.

The filter rarely works against people who bypass it. You can just put a space after each letter to type an abusive word and the filter doesnt track it.

I think this is an American site, and that can sometimes come with a bit of a culture clash for the very many non-Americans here (for example, Europeans and Australians swear very casually in ways that may easily shock a lot of Americans, especially Americans over a certain age).

To the Americans, we Europeans may seem "obscene". To us Europeans, the Americans may seem childish.

With regard to "just allowing anything and everything is not a viable solution", I think that on an automation level, it could be. Because the automated censor already isn't stopping people from being abusive anyway; it just inconveniences people.

If it were left to manual reports only, then people don't get mutes for using the wrong word, and actual abuse can still be moderated approximately as well as it was already.

The "automated filter doesn't check conversations between friends" thing is a little weak, because:

1) when did this happen, and are you sure about it? Because I've for sure been warned about such before now, between friends

2) I run LGBT Club on this site (and have done for many years), and in that capacity I often get messaged by (mostly marginalized and vulnerable) people seeking social and/or emotional support. Which can often involve talking about things that use some words related to sex. These people often don't add me as a friend first. Not only can I thus get warned/muted if I use a "bad" word (and I must guess at what words are and are not allowed), but also, they can too. Which means that not only is it a problem of me, a very seasoned Chess.com member, having to avoid the problem, but also new members who are clueless. And it has happened so very many times that someone comes to me seeking support, and gets muted in their first day on the site. And sure, they (mostly) come back the next day, but it's really a very bad welcome.

3) The problem can also occur in locations such as clubs, club chats, and the like, where who is added to whom as a friend makes no difference.

With regard to my personal motivation about this, I'll be clear:

1) I personally can work within a framework of not using certain words (although it'd be easier if Chess.com provided a list of what they are, instead of leaving us to figure it out by trial and error). I'm even a professional writer, and I have to abide by various things while writing for my mostly American audience at work. Here on Chess.com, I can still forget sometimes because I'm not so focused on my word-choices as I am at work, and unlike at work, where I can edit things 20 times before they go out, here, once I press "enter", if there's a forbidden word there, I can get a warning or worse.

2) However, it's a pain (see, that was not the first word that came to my mind, but knowing the censorship being as it is, I avoided the word that rhymes with itch) for members who don't know yet about the censorship, and/or are not thinking about "I wonder who is screening my private messages when I talk about this emotionally-charged topic". Same also for people who are not even writing in English, but use a machine translation to write it in English, and something that was culturally very normal in another language, uses a forbidden word in English. Same also goes for people who are not using translation at all, and are just writing another language and using a word that happens to be written the same as a "forbidden" word in English (I've fallen foul of this before, myself). This is an example of a case where the warnings are especially unhelpful, as it just says "your post may not meet our community guidelines" and it leaves the writer to try to work out what they said wrong, in the comment that is no longer even in front of them for examination, because the censor ate it.

3) I've been a diamond member on here, give or take a few brief spurts of other membership tiers, for almost as long as Chess.com has been a website. What keeps me coming back here every day, when Chess.com's main competitor is free, is the community aspect, and especially how it enables me to provide support to those who need it, especially in an era when more local community is hard to safely find for a lot of people under the LGBT banner.

So, yeah... It's obviously not the biggest or most critical thing that needs fixing, but if we're discussing it, then at the very least let's say, there's considerable room for improvement in order to make this (as presumably the intention is!) a pleasant environment for everyone, not just for middle class straight white Americans over a certain age.

The vast majority of members that get caught by the auto-mod are not ones using terms in a way that's not abusive.

That's not true in all cases and if someone does it they shouldn't be surprised when they get reported and get their account closed.

I'm assuming, as a moderators, you have verified this?

Can you also find if this is the case for specifically the word which got the relevant person muted?

But regardless, even if it is the case, there's a matter of degree of harm. Is muting an innocent smoker just as bad as someone geuniilenly using a slur? Meh, roughly, so I guess I guess it is worth in that case looking at the majority.

But it's much worse to mute an abuse victim than someone being called a slur. So looking at the "majority" of cases is less useful. I think you'd have to have a lot of people being called slurs before you're talking of a similar harm to muting an abuse victim for talking about abuse.