Ho ho ho - fun with a social media check

Can you spot anything wrong with the post, above, about me colouring my Story Of Joseph strip for Bible Society, back in 2018? Me neither. But I'll tell you who did find a problem with it. A company called Social Media Check.

You may recall, way back in January 2022, I appeared, with my Scottish Falsetto Socks, on Britain's Got Talent. Or rather I didn't. I filmed my audition on the stage of the London Palladium in January, our photo appeared in the launch publicity in March, and then, after a few months, it was clear that our appearance wasn't going to be broadcast. I naturally put this down to our performance not having been that great, and thought no more about it.

Until this week when, for various reasons, I remembered that back in March 2022 I'd been sent the results of a check that had been run on my social media, for Thames TV, by Social Media Check. And I wondered, could that have had anything to do with the decision not to broadcast our performance? So I looked again at the results. They came in two documents. The first was my Social Media Certificate.

It states, under Overall Risk Assessment, "Online Behaviourial Risks: Found" (above).

It then goes on to identify four categories. In Online Communication it reports "any findings within Swearing & Profanity and Consistently Negative Sentiment" and says that the  "Findings within this section were identified as potential risks and the original material signposted within the Digital Risk Assessment for review."

It does the same for Cyber Conduct, identifying Hate Speech and Banned or Proscribed Groups; for Personality Risks, identifying online trolling and verbal abuse; and for Digital Behaviour, identifying "pornographic and lewd content". In all four sections it says I have posts that are identified as potential risks.

In short, this Social Media Certificate makes me out to be some kind of cross between Gary Glitter and Osama Bin Laden.

I wasn't sure these results could be trusted. So, having let the thing lie in a drawer for 18 months, I checked out some of the links that were given in the accompanying document, the detailed Social Media Check Report. This broke down the fact that it had looked at my Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, had examined 23,066 posts (rather helpfully telling me these had been viewed 161,462 times), and found 868 of these to have 'findings'. This, they said, was 4% of my posts.

4% problematic might not sound all that bad, but it still had me worried. I was being accused of using Hate Speech and posting pornographic content. And I was being accused in a formal document that had been paid for by, and sent to, a potential employer - who ended up not employing me.

Above you'll see, from the linking image in the PDF, that the Social Media Check Report clears me of any Negative Sentiment or Violent Images. This is ironic, given the thoughts I was having, already, towards Social Media Check.

I looked first at Potential Nudity. There was just one post in this section. Brace yourselves for it, it's a bit of a shocker. I was sharing a headline and a photo from The Guardian, and accompanying it with a rather funny joke I thought. And here is that "potentially nude" photograph...

Yes, you're right. It is a picture of Boris Johnson's face. This is the item of "potential nudity" that led Social Media Check to alert my potential employers at Thames TV that I was an Online Behavioural Risk. I felt the rest of the document merited exploration.

Under Hate Speech they had included the following link (and others similar) highlighting the word "Pansy". This post, and the others, were related to the fact I was writing and drawing the strip Pansy Potter in Beano comic at the time.

Also in Hate Speech they had included every time I have used the word "loon". Loon is an affectionate term for a small child in Aberdeen. I am from Aberdeen.

Also in Hate Speech they had included every time I have used the word "Nazi" in a post about a news story. Even though, on every occasion, I am being critical of Nazis. Somehow this has been counted against me.

Also in Hate Speech they had included this post and selected the word "chink" from the phrase "chink in the armour". I would suggest they are being the racists there.

Also in Hate Speech they had included this post (pictured below) suggesting it uses the word "ching" in it twice. Where do I begin? Firstly I would have to ask whether "ching" is even a word, let alone an offensive word. Secondly I would have to point out that their system has misread the image which featured only the words "clutching" and "aching" from which the system has made new words, then decided that they were offensive.

Also in Hate Speech they had included this post (and others similar) where they suggest I have used a word I have not used and that does not appear anywhere in the post. In this instance they suggest the word "coon" appears. It does not. The system has mis-read the word "cool".

Under Swearing and Profanity they had included this post (and others similar) highlighting the word "cock". The system has misread, from an image, the word "sock" which appears many times, being the title of my comedy show The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.

This is a mention of the Morecambe and Wise writers, Sid and Dick (you can guess which word is flagged as offensive). Similarly they'd flagged up a word from the name of Buster comic character Clever Dick, singled out part of the name Dick Van Dyke, and there was also a reference to the comic character Desert Island Dick, but I'd already removed that one myself.

Then we come to the Ho's. Oh, so many Ho's.

This became the most hilarious part of the search, as I went through the Social Media Report to find dozens of instances where Social Media Report's bots had identified the word "ho" - which they are under the delusional belief that a middle-aged white man living in Wales has ever used to describe anything other than a gardening implement - and in every instance they have identified something totally inoffensive, or not even that word:

This is a reference to the film director Bong Joon Ho.

This is a post in Italian, where ho means "I have".
This post contains the word "ho" - as part of the word "psycHOtic"
This post contains the word "ho" as part of the logo of The PHOenix comic.
Other posts include laughing pirates (see above), and Santa Claus, and indeed me laughing at something, or echoing the Seven Dwarves' "Hi Ho". 

Here, if you want to research them yourself, are the other instances of "Ghost Hoes" that I was researching when, mysteriously, I had to stop.

I had to stop searching on Tuesday afternoon when, inexplicably, the posts in question suddenly disappeared from Facebook. Posts I'd searched earlier had suddenly become unavailable, as had posts in the Social Media Check Report that I had still to look at.

This was very suspicious, and I have asked Social Media Check whether they had anything to do with the posts' disappearance. They haven't replied and, by Wednesday morning, the posts have returned to Facebook.

There are more instances I can tell you about from this erroneous document, for example this post, which says it contains the word "ass" (it doesn't); this one, of many, that says it contains the word "cock" (it doesn't); this one, of very many, which thinks it has the word "shit" in, but has in fact imagined the word after seeing the last letter of "year's" and the first letter of "hit" in the phrase "last year's hit show"; this post which has the word “Beaver” singled out as swearing, in a cartoon of the animal, the beaver; and this which misreads the word “titles” as “tities” which, I assume, is how it thinks I’d spell “titties”.

Amusing as these findings are, they are of course serious. This document was sent to a potential employer, who commissioned it in order to find whether a potential employee's social media would be embarrassing or problematic to them. The Social Media Certificate, taken at face value, very much suggests that I, the person named on the document, would be just that.

It would need an employer to search individually through the 800 posts listed in the Social Media Report to be able to identify that, in fact, the accused person was totally innocent and had been unfairly maligned. Would all employers do this? I don't know.

I have been assured by Thames TV that this Social Media Check was not the reason I didn't appear on BGT. I was clearly just not very good telly, as I had already concluded. But my concern remains for anyone whose employers or potential employers have used Social Media Check to examine their posts. I would urge you to check through the document yourself, link by link. And if anyone finds such a document has been used unfairly against them, I would urge them to seek redress.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do, and posts to send. These Hoes won't hide themselves.

Kev F Sutherland, October 2023

My Books and where to get them:

Richard The Third - Amazon - Etsy - Barnes & Noble - Waterstones

Findlay Macbeth - Amazon  - Etsy 
Prince Of Denmark Street - Amazon - Etsy - Kindle
Midsummer Nights Dream Team  - Amazon - Etsy 

Shakespeare Omnibus Collection (all 3 books) - Amazon

Tales From The Bible - Amazon -  Etsy - Webtoons

The Book Of Esther - Lulu  - Amazon - Webtoons

Captain Clevedon - Amazon

Tales Of Nambygate - Amazon  

Punk Colouring Book

Eurovision Colouring Book Vol 1

Eurovision Colouring Book Vol 2

Eurovision Best Of British & Irish

1960s Colouring Book

Scottish Pop Colouring Book

1980s Colouring Book

Bowie Colouring Book

Doctors Who Colouring Book