My 9 year old daughter is a major fan of Disney’s Club Penguin. She loves to go online in this virtual world, hanging out with her friends, updating her status and buying virtual items to trick out her igloo.
Photo Credit: Chaos1017
Josie was sad this week when she attempted to login to Club Penguin and was denied access.
“A moderator has banned your account for 24 hours”
She asks her mom as she had no idea what the message meant or what she had done. Unsure either my wife contacted Club Penguin support. After validating that we were her parents (Club has decent parental controls where you can monitor access) the representative informed us that Josie was banned automatically from the system for using profanity in a status message.
What was the profanity? Josie had updated her status for Penguin with, “Quietly shits the door.”
Oops. I guess moderation tools aren’t able to account for accidental misspellings yet. 
It was an interesting conversation explaining to our daughter what this four letter word meant and why she was banned.
Poor Josie! Funny story though!
As her mom, I get enormous pride out of the fact that I first had to explain what "inappropriate language" was..
And yeah, she still didnt get it.. thank God for Animal Crossing during those brutal few hours.
good example of censorship doing more harm than good by placing so much emphasis on the words to begin with
I dunno lynstly. I am all about free speech, but this is a kids place.
would rather suffer a little outage than have a bunch of profanity.
lynstly, i think you misunderstand what censorship actually is.
they didnt censor her at all – they merely enforced the rules she (and we, her parents) agreed to when we signed up.
and good for them! i’m frankly tired of reading thru all sorts of useless profanity on every website i visit because kids and adults alike think it makes their responses look funny or interesting.
There was a much simpler solution to it though…
You attempt to change status to something with a typo making a rude word… Simply don’t allow the change to go through. Leave the status as it was and the user will try again. No need to ban them and draw attention to it!
omg. I got banned on club penguin because i misspelled rap.( I put a e on the end oops). It’s just not fair i feel ya josie.
Good to know there was a reason after all. Sure she didn’t do this on purpose, but if she would be banned without any reason that could be really hurting for her. And knowing that all that she did was just unintentional mistake will maybe give her occasion to find out how internet rules sometimes work, and to feel that someone is watching all the time. Internet could be dangerous place, good that she is learning to deal with it, and with that penguin adventure I’m sure she will think about that a lot. Maybe one day it will give her a boost to become administrator of such service