The Language Barrier
Error: Site Blocked (Profanity)
Recently, a friend of mine discovered that this was the message appearing to users at one of the largest employers in a state where one of her regular blog readers worked. The blog reader worked for a state government office, and my friend’s site had been blocked on every computer in the state’s entire employee network. She writes what some might consider racy romance novels, but it wasn’t her books that got her blocked.
It was the language (including certain four-letter words) she used on her blog. Her blog being part of her website, this resulted in not only her blog being blocked but her entire website.
Her initial reaction was a defense of her creative expression. Are employers, whether public as in this situation or private, going to become some sort of unofficial arbiter of our freedoms by the power they wield in controlling large numbers of computers? And after all, she uses similar language in her books, so it seems fitting and part of her creative style to use the words on her blog, too. If readers are offended by her blog, then they aren’t going to like her books, either.
But wait a minute. Every computer in an entire state’s employee network has been blocked from her site. Not because her site (and in tandem, her books) offended any of these particular users, but because the employer policy for computer usage bans sites that use unacceptable (by their definition) language. This means plenty of potential blog readers who would enjoy her blog and buy her books can no longer visit her blog or website from work–and many blog readers read blogs at work.
And if her site was blocked at one employer, what are the chances it already has been or will be in the future blocked at others? The potential loss of traffic and product (book) sales is enormous.
Worried about her website traffic and her book sales, she immediately did a search through her blog archives and deleted all the bad language, resolving to use no more of it in future blog posts. She doesn’t intend to modify the language with which she writes her books, but with her website as her primary marketing tool for those books, she can’t afford the risk of having her site blocked for using that same language in her blog.
Losing traffic over the language used on her blog–not only losing readers who might actually be offended but even losing readers who are not due to a mass blocking–is something she’d never thought about before. What about you? Do you use four-letter words or other commonly considered unacceptable language on your blog? If you found out your site was being blocked for language, what would you do?
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That is interesting, Suzanne. Until you wrote this post, I hadn’t really thought about the whole curse word ramifications. Really gives you something to consider, doesn’t it?
Because my blog IS a marketing tool (despite the fact that it’s mostly chatty, lol) I do my best to not offend folks. No politics. No religion. No profanity.
Doesn’t matter who I am IRL. What matters is who I present myself to be. I’ve stopped reading blogs and resolved to never buy books from authors who have offended me in some way… and try not to do the same.
Now, a private blog for my friends? That’s fair game :-)
Some of those language blockers over-exert their authority. One of my favorite mystery writers, Donna Andrews, had some of her posts blocked when she mentioned her book which had the word “peacock” in it. *rolling eyes* Guess what part of the word it objected to. LOL! So she figures the book with “cockatiels” in the title (all the books in this series have birds in the title) will get the same treatment.