by Thoul » Thu Sep 9, '10, 9:44 am
Free speech, as a law in the US, only applies to restrictions placed by the government. A private entity, like Microsoft or a website, can legally place any restrictions on allowed speech they want. Some customers may not always like it, but that's the private entity's legal right. Often, those restrictions must be imposed to attempt to avoid alienating an even larger group of customers.
Sadly, there will always be innocent word usage that triggers filters, especially with words that have more than one meaning or appear in names. This is one of those unfortunate cases. The representatives of Microsoft should have researched the name after the first complaint and cleared it up by unbanning the guy, but someone dropped the ball on that.