European Parliament blocks emails containing the word ”gender” on International Women’s Day

I said yesterday in my blog post that I would be sending a letter today to the President of the European Parliament, protesting about the blocking of certain emails from citizens to their elected representatives.

I would have hoped to have sent this letter in the morning today, and I am still working on getting it sent today, but since I am working from home in Stockholm, I have run into a problem:



The European Parliament blocks the certain emails that I am trying to send from christian.engstrom@piratpartiet.se to my own office address christian.engstroem@europarl.europa.eu or to colleagues inside the parliament.



Not all emails get blocked, but all my attempts to send my draft letter to the President to my office address have been silently blocked by the filter. I suspect the reason is that in the draft, I mention the name of the report — ”eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”.

My guess, without knowing any details about the parliament’s filtering system, but understanding the basic principle behind Bayesian spam filtering, is that the word ”gender” (which is quite distinct in this case) probably triggers the filter on all or most occasions. This is of course only a guess, but still:

It appears that today, on International Women’s Day, the European Parliament is silently blocking all or most emails that contain the word ”gender”.



Welcome to the wonderful world of internet blocking in the EU. And to yet another demonstration of what censorship means in practice.