Shoutout to my poli sci prof who warned me about the 'no fly list' thing

Last semester at UT Austin, my professor Dr. Chen told our class that if we posted certain meme formats with specific hashtags, the university's automated filter would flag us. I thought she was being paranoid. Then three weeks ago, I shared a screenshot from that climate protest last year, and my campus account got locked for 48 hours. No warning, no appeal, just an automated email. She was right about the exact keywords too, one of them was in my caption. Anyone else had a professor call something out that ended up being totally accurate?

2 comments

2 Comments

aaron89620h ago

Doubt it's really that deep honestly. Campus IT filters flag stuff for all kinds of random reasons, sometimes just because a hashtag is trending or has been used in a spam campaign. I've had posts get dinged before and it was usually a false alarm or just an overeager bot. Unless you're posting actual threats or organizing something illegal, they don't have the time or motivation to hunt down every student for a meme. Feels like your professor was probably right about the specific words, but that doesn't mean it's some big conspiracy thing. More like a glitchy automated system that catches stuff by mistake half the time.

hannah_williams19h ago

Gonna disagree a bit here. From what I've seen and heard from IT folks I know, the filters aren't just randomly snagging stuff for no reason. They're usually triggered by specific keywords or phrases that have been flagged by the school or even by law enforcement. It's not just some glitchy bot getting confused by a trending hashtag. If a post gets flagged, it probably contains words that are on a watchlist, and that list isn't put together by accident. Yeah, false alarms happen, but the system itself is designed to cast a wide net, so it's not really a glitch. That's a pretty deliberate setup, even if it's automated.