On July 2, in the lead up to U.S. Independence Day on July 4, Facebook removed a post containing a section of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, believing it to be hate speech. The company apologized and reinstated the post the next day.

The post deemed offensive was part of a series run by The Vindicator, a local news site covering Liberty County, Texas. In advance of Fourth of July, the site issued a challenge to its Facebook followers, asking them to read the Declaration of Independence in full before Independence Day. As part of the challenge, The Vindicator broke the document into 12 parts and serially posted it to their Facebook page.

An 1823 facsimile of the original U.S. Declaration of Independence.The post contained paragraphs 27-31 of the document, written by U.S. founding father Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Text in paragraph 31 — which contains the phrase “merciless Indian savages” — likely triggered the algorithm to remove the post. The full text of the post, which refers to the British government believed by colonial Americans to be tyrannical, read:

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

“Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as ‘Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development’ that would have been better,” said Casey Stinnett, managing editor of The Vindicator, in a July 2 editorial. “Unfortunately, Jefferson, like most British colonists of his day, did not hold an entirely friendly view of Native Americans."

“Although, to be honest, there is a good deal in that passage that could be thought hateful,” he also said.

While content-blocking algorithms are gradually improving as far as accuracy and context, they routinely block or remove innocent content. The removal of the Declaration of Independence post was due to misunderstood historical context, but algorithms also struggle when a string of characters deemed offensive is detected within a harmless word — a phenomenon known as the Scunthorpe problem.

A notable example of this occurred in February when Google blocked search terms like “glue gun” and “Burgundy” during a crackdown on illegal weapons-related searching.