The Metropolis

Orange Censoring Red?

Chuck Ansbacher | Wednesday 9 March, 2011 12:20

A fascinating discovery by Media Monkey over at the Guardian: Orange has been blocking communist leaning emails!

It transpires – from an outraged Guardian reader, natch – that the mobile operator has been blocking emails sent to its customers containing the words “Marx”, “Marxism” or “Marxist”. Not only does that seem a bit political for a phone company, but frankly we don’t find that funny around here.

Oh come on, communists using cell phones? Participating in a capitalist framework that their ideological forebearers would have surely despised, and then complaining to the internet when said framework prohibits them from discussing said despising forebearers? That’s at least kind of funny.

But OK, we get it. Censorship; not cool. Orange, to their credit, claim the censorship, while real, was totally accidental and was the result of some sort of spam filtering gone awry. But to their discredit, both sides of that claim are only half-believable.

While it’s hard to believe that a big company like Orange would be so anti-commie, and specifically anti-Marxist, that they’d go through the trouble of censoring any utterance of it’s eponymous architect’s name, it seems EQUALLY preposterous that any spam mastermind would use any communist’s moniker to try to trick people into buying pills that make your dick bigger.

Preposterous… until you consider that most spam comes from Russia? MYSTERY SOLVED.

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