Facebook's "Mandingo President." Ugh!

There's random and then there's "random."

While posting a status update on Facebook, I was asked to prove that I'm not a spambot by completing one of those captcha text boxes. Usually they're a random combination of letters and numbers, although lately I've noticed that a combination of actual words are appearing more often. Usually the words are bland and common, but today I came across this:

What the hell is this crap?! There's no way this is random. Some techie working for Facebook or the captcha system programmed this in. People, get a grip. Barack Obama is the president for at least the next 3 years. Programming your racism into the internet will not change that.

And you, Facebook, do you have any internal codes of conduct regarding employee actions like this?

Comments

[Jud]

Really? There's no way it's random? How do you figure that? Because there's no way the universe would allow two words to be chosen at random to be offensive to you? Instead of posting this ignorant reactionary material, why not take the time to learn how CAPTCHA systems work? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA By using these CAPTCHA systems, you are actually helping to digitize scanned text from the NY times.

[Kerry]

it's interesting that president is capitalized--unless it's used as a title (which it could be, if used in context in the NYT), there's really no reason to do so. and mandingo is actually the word that should be capitalized, as it refers to a specific ethnic group.

especially given the capitalization thing, it does seem a little sketchy.

[Jud]

I don't know if this appeared in print, but here is a page from the NY Times website that has the word "mandingo" in lower-case. http://www.times.com/books/first/k/krist-chaos.html "President" could also have been at the start of a sentence, which I'm guessing has been done more than a few times in the Times. You can't possibly believe that there is some great racist conspiracy at Facebook. This is just making controversy where there isn't any.

[Can-Can]

Wow! It's truly possible it wasn't random. If it was random - Wow. It it wasn't - double Wow! Things that make you go hmmmmm.