Paypal blocks the word "Tardigrade" and "Cuba", forcing shops to rename their products

In yet another example of the algorithm only being as smart as the human who programmed it, Paypal has caused sales losses and scared off customers from buying "tardigrade ornaments" because apparently you can't use the word "tardigrade" in the sale code.

This makes it a bit difficult for shops like Archie McPhee "we make weird" to program the receipts of what customers buy, as they now have to rename all their tardigrade items to "water bear" items in the pricing system so that the sales will be accepted by Paypal. Worse still, the message shown to the user could scare the customers away from the shop itself completely, as it states that "the transaction can not be completed because it violates the Paypal user agreement"

What we have here is a classic example of the Scunthorpe Problem. It's the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a poorly constructed spam filter or search engine because the text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Residents of the city of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, England, could not create AOL accounts back in 1996, because AOL's profanity filter wouldn't accept their address. To this day, there are companies that I can not send emails to, because the Serbian surname of a legendary Russian vice-admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy sounds more like a phrase you'd hear in a feministic rap song and is usually filtered out. I'm very familiar with the Scunthorpe problem.

So what did the poor wee adorable little tardigrade do? He's just an adorable little Wasser Bär, a microscopic water bear that Lazzaro Spallanzani dubbed a Tardigradum in 1777 because of its slow-motion gait. Yes, tard as in tardy, that is from Latin retardāre (“to retard”), from re- + tardus and...... Oooooooh hang on, I see what's happening here. 

The word police that have campaigned to remove terms like retarded from GitHub, and are now busy renaming the master-slave concepts, and whitelists vs blacklists in computing have reached the inner workings of Paypal. Where they have ironically blacklisted a term they believe is offensive. While the Latin roots and later French word retardé is specifically about slowing something down and the English import of this word in chemistry, physics, and engineering, keeps this meaning of "slowing down" as in a "retarding agent", or a retarder slowing down engines or trains - people who are less versed in etymology or STEM think about one English word that they find offensive instead. That word is retarded. 

Years ago people with intellectual disabilities were classified according to how severe their "mental retardation" was, so an "idiot" had "severe mental retardation". Somewhere along the years retard just became a schoolboy bullying chant, and graduated to an offensive term - while idiot somehow survived scrutiny and is now a term describing a stupid or foolish person. So naturally a shortened version of the term, "tard", is now on a list of verboten words at Paypal. The only way to fix this issue is to rename all the products. Now how will fans of the tardigrade find their tardigrade items? This is not limited to one store, it's all the shops that use Paypal as a payment system, who sell anything with the four-letter combination "tard" in its name.

The word police that have campaigned to remove terms like retarded from GitHub, and are now busy renaming the master-slave concepts, and whitelists vs blacklists in computing have reached the inner workings of Paypal. Where they have ironically blacklisted a term they believe is offensive. While the Latin roots and later French word retardé is specifically about slowing something down and the English import of this word in chemistry, physics, and engineering, keeps this meaning of "slowing down" as in a "retarding agent", or a retarder slowing down engines or trains - people who are less versed in etymology or STEM think about one English word that they find offensive instead. That word is retarded. 

Years ago people with intellectual disabilities were classified according to how severe their "mental retardation" was, so an "idiot" had "severe mental retardation". Somewhere along the years retard just became a schoolboy bullying chant, and graduated to an offensive term - while idiot somehow survived scrutiny and is now a term describing a stupid or foolish person. So naturally a shortened version of the term, "tard", is now on a list of verboten words at Paypal. The only way to fix this issue is to rename all the products. Now how will fans of the tardigrade find their tardigrade items? This is not limited to one store, it's all the shops that use Paypal as a payment system, who sell anything with the four-letter combination "tard" in its name.

Just an FYI that @PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word "tardigrade" in the product name or description. We've contacted them and they told us we should just stop using the word tardigrade. pic.twitter.com/hEihKED10g

— Archie McPhee (@ArchieMcPhee) September 11, 2020

Here's another company that is selling a cute tardigrade pin that's having the same problem. https://t.co/fu8MNk2PBf

— Archie McPhee (@ArchieMcPhee) September 11, 2020

So, in a rush to not offend anyone, Paypal just created a new Scunthorpe problem. This whole situation is in a word, retarded. 

Our transactions for Cuban coffee were blocked by PayPal. We buy green beans from UK importer, roast & sell in UK, & are not subject to Cuba sanctions. We had to omit Cuba from title but could use it in description which isn't passed to PayPal. Then we quit using PP, they suck— Kimberley (@Kimberleypfp) September 11, 2020

This retailer claims the word "Cuba" is banned as well.

Update 2pm PST The plot thickens. Why would "Cuba" and "Tardigrade" both be banned? Tobias French points out that this is due to "TARDIGRADE LIMITED" being registered with the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list in this tweet.

Here is the reason:https://t.co/oeZbrCbwAj

There are more lists like OFAC. Let me know if you need more examples.

— Tobias Frech (@TobiasFrech) September 11, 2020

But this is, just like the Scunthorpe problem, is just as dumb. If an entity on this list has a common enough word in its name, then any online retailer using Paypal would run into this problem. The developer founder of Grokability Alison Gianotto, a.k.a "Snipeyhead" points this out using the word "box" as an example. It could just as well be "moon" or "wolf" in a banned company name, and suddenly half of the world's jewelry and t-shirts could no longer be sold via Paypal. Or what if one of the banned persons is named "Brown", then products in the color itself would run into issues.

That makes no sense though. Tardigrade is a real, normal word. It would be like disallowing the word “box” because Box-dot-com exists as a registered business

— snipe, poo doula (@snipeyhead) September 11, 2020