The Filter That Ate the Web
In 2013, a visitor to the British Library attempting to access *Hamlet* over the institution's Wi-Fi encountered an unexpected obstacle. The wireless service had blocked Shakespeare's tragedy, flagging it as 'violent' content . The absurdity was almost Pythonesque: Britain's repository of human knowledge censoring one of its greatest cultural achievements because an automated filter had parsed the text and found murder, suicide, and fratricide. No human hand had made this decision. No librarian had weighed the literary merit of regicide against the sensibilities of patrons. An algorithm, deployed in service of child safety, had simply done what it was programmed to do.