If you wanted to imagine a topsy-turvy world where straight 19-year-old jock-nerds ran the media, just visit Digg. The site is so laden with antigay epithets that it automatically censors the word "homo" from headlines.

A story about Homo erectus, the evolutionary predecessor to modern man, crossing the open ocean, had the word "homo" — rather necessary to understanding the story — replaced by a series of asterisks. Here's a screenshot from Digg's RSS feed:

Understandable on Digg's part: Their audience probably has commenters who use "homo erectus" in the Urbandictionary.com sense. The site's human editors — wait, I thought they weren't supposed to have those! — have restored the word to the site manually. Too bad their algorithm has to be on guard for its use as an epithet.

(Photo of L'Homo Erectus via Belgiumgayclubs.com)

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