Worth a read, it makes some really good points.
But there's nothing new under the sun - I did laugh and felt old at reading "This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok"... the author wasn't even conceived when Compuserve/AOL users had to avoid using "breast cancer" and "scunthorpe".
> the author wasn't even conceived when Compuserve/AOL users had to avoid using "breast cancer" and "scunthorpe".
Anil Dash is 51, two years younger than me but I'm old af.
He has written extensively of his time using AOL.
IMO there's a substantive difference between avoiding overzealous and clumsy early profanity filters, and the "unalive" phenomenon where people are being programmed to not use entirely non-profane words like "suicide" on many platforms.
I think they are referring to early admin-controlled bl@cklist. Admins could define their own list of forbidden words, so a message could be censored or deleted if it contained that word. So if a chatroom admin wants to avoid sexual talk, they might conjure a list of words including boobs and breasts. Talk about breast cancer would be a false positive side effect.
Breast used to be (and to some extent still is) gender neutral, think of breast plate armor etc. Similar shifts also happened in other languages where the word for the upper front torso area is euphemistically substituted to mean specifically the female breast anatomy on top of said area.
But this shift already happened in the 18th century, so today's intuition is also different.
Yeah, depending on context, it can still mean the "entire frontal upper torso chestal area" (like a chicken breast for example is not "chicken boobs"). In medical parlance though it generally refers to milk-producing female mammaries. "Teat" mentioned earlier is usually the same thing in non-human animals/veterinary context.
At least for me, it depends on whether the word is plural. "Breasts" are boobs and "the breast" is gender neutral front torso. "Breast" singular with no modifier could be anything depending on what pops into mind first (like "chicken breast").
It’s bizarre to see this happening in real time. When I was a kid, things were always loosening, and the adults were scrambling to keep us contained. Now it’s going in reverse.
The breast cancer example is interesting. It isn't immediately obvious how it is materially different from algo filters, the biggest difference is the sophistication, this has been going on longer than llms, but now it's very trivial to distinguish between cunt and scunthorpe, or even kill as in "I would kill for a good job" vs " I would kill [a specific person]"
One material difference I can think of is that what is being filtered here is not necessarily a side effect, it's not like the platform wants to ban just rape threats and end up banning discussion about rape cases and rape experiences, it might be that the platforms simply benefit from discouraging all talk about negative experiences and they might benefit from associating their brand only with positive experiences which sell more ads and avoid associating brands with negative experiences.
> they might benefit from associating their brand only with positive experiences which sell more ads and avoid associating brands with negative experiences.
Advertising is surely a big part of this situation.
I'm not a "content creator" but as I understand it, nobody is afraid they will get banned from these platforms for using these trigger words, they avoid using the words because they are afraid their content will be demonetized to delink it from advertisements.
I agree with the overall point, but I think a large fraction of the usage of these terms is about in-group signaling rather than conscious efforts to appease the algorithm.
What I mean is that a few people did figure out that appeasing the algorithm generates more views, and these are the people that get many followers. The followers themselves probably don't think that deeply about it; they just want to be like the accounts they follow (because they think everyone else in their social circles want to), and copy their use of language.
It's probably similar to how I started using semicolons more after reading Mary Shelley, except more gross.
This is probably the biggest component. It's slang. It started as a euphemism that turned into an in-group signifier. Same thing with other euphemism fashions. E.g. if you're up to date on the latest politically correct phrases, or the latest brainrot like "six-seven" or the latest prison slang, or the latest whatnot, it signifies where you spend your time, who you listen to, what social circle and status you belong to etc.
That said, the existence of taboos are a social universal. Some things are better discussed in some contexts than others, more intimately or more publicly etc. However, the 20th century zeitgeist has decided that subverting all taboos will be liberating, the personal should be political and vice versa, everything should stripped of context and dusty old rules, so now that we have the tech, let's just have short videos floating out there and sliding into people's feeds, talking about the heaviest subjects etc.
But then if tiktok suddenly pushed suicide content, and then someone actually committed suicide, and the two could be juxtaposed into a story, it would be a big PR issue. There is a reason companies don't want to go near these topics. Because then they have to police it by content valence. You can talk about heavy topic X from such and such angles, but you must list such and such caveats but also you are free to express your experiences with your own unique voice, lest those get "erased" or whatnot. We will need superintelligent AI to be able to satisfy all the contradictory expectations. Until then, someone will always grumble.
Maybe or maybe not. My YT account is marked with a scarlet letter such that I can't use certain keywords or discuss concepts as freely as others, or my comments get shadowbanned/shadowdropped. My workarounds are to use euphemisms or alternate Unicode spellings. I'd like to be able to talk normally as others but some platforms do discriminate inconsistently and somewhat seemingly arbitrarily.
People without power or influence use language creatively to evade censorship, typically as lowly users of social media like reddit, etc.. Content creators, influencers, etc. then pick up that new language and use it, but the typical Tiktok influencer originates nothing. They merely reflect.
The nameless people who actually set language trends can go back to using censored words, but they will simply be banned, shadow banned, etc.. They can try to appeal to the moderators, but they will be ignored. Their fellow users probably won't even notice they're gone. They might just make a new account and start posting again. Or... they might just fall silent.
The real solution isn't to play a peg in the game of censorship whack-a-mole. It's to build and switch to social media platforms that are more open in their moderation and resistant to censorship. American social media is abominable and getting worse. There's a popular desire to move to something better, but the alternatives aren't there. When you're doing being whacked on the head, go build those alternatives.
Mastodon is at least moderately censorship resistant, in the sense that you can stand up an instance where you can say what you want. There's no particular requirement anyone else will listen to you, of course (objectionable speech tends to cause other servers to defederate from your instance), but that's federation working as intended.
4chan and Kiwifarms are "centralised" in the sense that they're both a central site, but the underlying imageboard or forum are beyond easy to set up and are usable from about ten active users upward.
The problem is most people (who may say they want censorship-free social media) do not really want it to be censorship-free. They want it to be censorship-free for the opinions and views they hold, not for those they oppose.
I think X arguably comes closest, and at least it costs bots money to post with a checkmark (unlike Reddit, which is a bot free-for-all - since its very origins actually). Plus, the feed & community notes algorithms are actually open source (whether or not that's also the deployed version, I can only speculate).
If you have a bar and you let Nazi's speak openly of Nazi things, they'll come from miles around and drive away anyone who isn't a Nazi. A bar that permits Nazi's is a Nazi bar. I admit that I don't want censorship-free social media. I want some censorship. Defining where the line is between what is allowed and what isn't can be tricky, but it's a struggle worth engaging with.
At present, U.S. social media tends to create echo chambers where moderators have absolute power to push whatever agenda they want. That's too much censorship power in the hands of people who are completely anonymous. I'd like to dial it back a bit, at least to the point where reasonable people of different political persuasions can live in a shared reality. We need to stop treating political affiliations like Abrahamic religions.
X's censors are, at least, following the wishes of someone who is anything but anonymous. Don't pretend there isn't a slant there though.
If people are not allowed to speak openly about their Nazi opinions, they will simply do it silently between each other, creating an echo chamber.
Imagine that you're having a nice life until a black family moves in next door and turns whole area into a ghetto. Everyone around you tells you to suck it up and stop being racist. Online platforms ban you for racism. Until one day you stumble upon secret underground community of people in similar situations. Sure, some of their claims might be a little extreme, but at least they're the only ones willing to listen to your problems without telling you to shut the fuck up.
Yes, I agree. Nazi's will go find/make a Nazi bar. I'm not going to hang out in a Nazi bar myself though.
Some people are just too extreme to be happy in a space with standards. They're the police's problem, quite frankly. Unhappy Nazi's are a sign of a healthy society.
Yes, I agree. Feminists will go find/make a Feminist bar. I'm not going to hang out in a Feminist bar myself though.
Some people are just too extreme to be happy in a space with standards. They're the police's problem, quite frankly. Unhappy Feminist's are a sign of a healthy society.
Fediverse in general, though the Masto side seems rather fond of censorship themselves. I recommend finding a small Pleroma/Akkoma instance or hosting your own. Also as a tip you can use an instance's search without an account to check if they block posts from certain other instances before you sign up.
I think there is an analogy here to loud, dark, dirty, smelly bars with questionable characters moving around setting coolness trends (Or even prison slang influencing mainstream slang). You won't be able to set such trends in some slick, squeaky clean, family friendly matinee.
Similarly, you have to be very off-putting to the mainstream to prevent the gentrification of such a censorship-resistant platform. It's like a costly signal. That's precisely why you feel they are off-putting. It works as intended and keeps out people who'd try to turn it into the way everything else is. Like when rich hip college kids gentrify an area and turn it into a sanitized thing that is the same as everywhere else. The offensiveness is a protective barrier.
I disagree. I think it were the content creators and influencers who started it to avoid demonetizing and soft-censorship (the content not being promoted instead of being banned) and then regular people displayed sheep behaviour and started monkeying it. Tiktok influencers are perfectly capable of originating something when their bottom line is concerned.
For what it's worth, the Prequel Memes subreddit has a similar take [1] on the issue:
> New rule, no algo-speak or self-censoring. This isn't tik tok and the target audience here does not have a median age of 11. You can say murder on the subreddit about the movies where little kids are slaughtered.
Not for discussing the movie but saying something that can be taken out of context (by 99% automated filters) to sound like a real-life threat or offensive thing. But yeah. Don't use Reddit.
You're right that it's in-group signaling, but that's actually why it's going to basically disappear within a few years. This sort of youth slang rotates out regularly.
A lot of it has to do with religious fundamentalism too, though. There are religious groups whose members believe they are participating in sin if they read words describing that sin.
Alas, this is not an easy problem to just hand wave away as youth slang. There will always be an older person policing youth speech. That is the nature of religion, governments and social policy as a whole - to ensure the youthful generations don't upset the bucket in which the old sit.
For as long as the Internet has been online there have been curmudgeons willfully applying their personal doctrine to strangers.
Say what? How can they know what the sins are, unless someone tells them? And how are they going to tell them without using words that describe the sin?
I mean, look, I can say that sex outside of marriage is a sin without a pornographic description. But I can't say it without "sex", or a euphemism for sex.
I'm not trying to rationalize this, but have you really never encountered someone who is inconsolable when they hear someone cuss?
The reason a lot of social network sites censor swear words and other words describing violence, is because they get inundated with complaints from fundamentalists who get offended by language, as if there is some spell being cast on them from afar.
And what I mean to say is, this is the motivation behind the censorship - because fruitcake butterflies think language is going to hurt them.
I'm middle aged and I still remember much of my peer groups' slang from the teen years, I might use it with nostalgia with those people when we cross paths, but I guess this generation has more of the internet to centralize the slang. My group was already chronically on the internet but that was pretty nerdy back then and so were we. My recollection is that the women coined most of the slang.
What is very frustrating is that there is a lot of preemptive compliance. The vast majority of the time there is absolutely no consequence in saying “fuck” or “kill”. Yet we see ridiculous euphemisms and asterisks everywhere. It is maddening to see IRL people re-acting 1984 without realising it.
I don’t think the algorithm even does care, I think it’s just a mass-hallucination.
I’ve seen these kinds of beliefs appear in organisations too. People will start doing ridiculous things just because the people around them are doing it, until suddenly entire teams are behaving completely wrong and not following proper procedure.
I think the algorithm doesn't care about violence but for sex education I'm not as sure. It would make sense for social media to err on the side of caution against pornographic content, leading to censorship of sex education as well. Which is very unfortunate of course. But it's all about the advertisers and credit card companies in the end.
Yeah, like what would it take, at this point, for Tiktok to just add "unalive" to the naughty word list? Two clicks? If they are not doing it, then why? Are they just unaware, despite all the memes and articles in the mainstream press for all these years?
This shit is infecting media everywhere. One of my guilty voyeuristic pleasures is watching the reality TV series Border Security, where you get to watch ingenious smuggling attempts notionally foiled by clever Australian border cops, although mostly just by stupid smugglers too incompetent to come up with a remotely plausible cover story for why they've just flown from Colombia to Melbourne for three days, don't know anybody, have no idea what they're going to do, and have a travel budget of $3.50 and a Taco Bell coupon.
As you'd expect, drugs feature a lot, only they've had to resort to using "dr*gs", "co****e" and "na*****s" (yup, 5 asterisks!) in titles/captions, splicing the naughty words out of the sound tracks, and even blurring words on the screens of drug screening devices so as not to offend The Algorithm. Typical example preformatted for Tiktok:
I'm actually just tired of the internet as a whole, which is disheartening after it being the cornerstone of my career for the last several decades.
Corporate censorship has me tired. Government censorship has me tired. Self censorship has me tired. The way we all hate each other has me tired. The way we all hate the situation and yet do nothing has me tired. Knowing that even doing something will change nothing has me tired.
You and me both. I'm not even sure I have the energy to eat the rich anymore, should the opportunity present itself, nor can I get worked up over the fact that this means they probably won. It's all so fucking stupid.
It used to be that western governments and powerful people based in the west had a reason to promote our society as somehow good. That reason was that they were terrified the masses would turn to communism. This is obviously not to say Marxist-Leninism is something to aspire to, but it certainly created an incentive. Now that threat has been defeated, our own powerful people are free to tighten the screws without fear of an organised response.
They were terrified of what Lenin incorrectly called 'leftcommunism' more than Marxist-leninism. Council communism, syndicalism, platformism and those kinds of stateless communism. State communism will always ultimately turn into Cuba, Vietnam or China, basically undemocratic state capitalism.
This is an inversion of what really happened. If they were so scared of leftcoms, why did the FBI/CIA use left-communism as a vehicle to disrupt socialist organizing within the US during COINTELPRO, operation CHAOS, etc? Why did they partially bankroll the Frankfurt school through the CCF? (Because it was nonthreatening, and a great tool to split the left.)
Compatibism (between leftcoms and neoliberal imperialists) as a strategy is well-known. Here’s a few resources for you:
I guess it's the people themselves you're tired of in general. Because many of them want to say things you don't want to hear, but you didn't expect it to be so. You expected that everyone is like you and agrees with you and has the same communication preferences.
I disagree completely. I recommend you to read "In the Swarm" by Byung-Chul Han as a primer.
People on the internet are tiring because how they interact is shaped to turn everything into a binary, the platforms where people spout their opinions don't foster any kind of actual human communication, it's just a farce of it with a never-ending shit-flinging-fest. If that's what you incentivise for you will only get the worst of people's outbursts.
If your brain hasn't been completely rotted by internet discourse then you will find that having hard conversations in the real world is still possible, that disagreeing while being curious and courteous about someone else's worldview is possible. It doesn't happen when people are so far down the internet rabbit hole that their real life persona is just a shadow of what their internet persona is, otherwise you will find that people offline can be much more reasonable, that you can have a discussion without resorting to shit-flinging from the binary "you are transgressive vs we are in-agreement".
You should try, it's very refreshing to realise that the real world is still not the internet, as much as social media companies are trying to make it.
Thanks for the book suggestion; adding this to my queue. I considered his more popular "Burnout Society" and it seemed too obvious of a thesis to warrant even the light effort. Maybe that's true here too, but I've lately been thinking that this mechanism is so powerful, it kinda can't be ignored.
It's not just that the internet discussion is rotten, but the discursive rot has definitely made the leap into the real world too. It's almost inescapable. What was once normal has become the exception.
We're on the same boat, after decades on the internet it's really sad to realise that the thing which gave me knowledge, a career, friends, hobbies, and connections to people and things I'd never have discovered otherwise has rotted, and it's rotting societies with it.
I found solace on the offline world though, going back to being a "local", participating in activities where the internet is far away. It's a cliché but being present in the real world is actually what solved my mourning of what the internet was.
Self censorship is so insidious. If you are not aware enough, it slowly creeps into your life without you realizing. That was the reason that I loved chans, because people were excruciatingly open there, without any filters. It was kind of funny to discuss with racists, because they were not trying to censor their points. But it got sad when the whole internet became a chan.
> But it got sad when the whole internet became a chan
I honestly do not see how you could go from talking about self censorship in the context of institutional censorship and then go on to say the whole internet has become a 'chan', it absolutely has not even if the current zeitgeist doesn't fully align with your particular ideals.
Yeah, it's pretty extreme. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that chan culture is so much worse across that and many other dimensions
I guess I'm old, I had no idea what "unalive" meant. I mean, I, of course, realised it meant killing, but I assumed it was ironic and part of youth culture similar to things like "1337". I had no idea it was part of self-censorship.
What a fucking awful hellscape you guys have built for your children.
No comment on the central message, but I actually like "unalive" as a word: it feels vaguely Old English. "Commit suicide" always felt a little stilted as a two word phrase.
"Commit suicide" exists because it sounds crime-y, and in fact suicide was a crime in many many jurisdictions for a long time (and that may be the case in some places today).
The author uses "dying by suicide", which is better semantically, but still a bit wordy. Another option might be to verbify "suicide".
Nobody is getting "muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms"!
They are getting muted or silenced by busybodies who try to control language, and are either in a position to install these algorithms, or are part of pressure mobs that aim to influence the former.
> If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms
Boo fucking hoo. I was with you right up until this point. The thing is, for Gen Z words and meanings do not matter any more.
Words have clearly defined (legal) meanings and no, not everything that Gen Z deems to be a genocide is a genocide or has any chance in hell to be labeled one in the future.
If you're talking about Gaza, basically all major human rights organizations deem it a genocide. This include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, UN Human Rights Office, and even Btselem which is an Israeli organization.
>> I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.
I also grew up in the previous century and it is equally strange to hear ‘dying by suicide’ when it used to be more common to say ‘committed suicide’ or just ‘killed himself/herself’. The author does a reasonable job of explaining why people might use ‘unalive’ and why he thinks that is a bad idea, but what was the reason a person started ‘dying by suicide’ instead of ‘killing himself/hersself/themselves’?
"Committing suicide" used to be a crime in many jurisdictions, and "commit" often has crime connotations, so "dying by suicide" is considered a kinder and more accurate term these days. (I still say the former sometimes, though, as that's what I'm used to.)
I do somewhat agree with you, as it feels off, but I don't think it's in the same category as "unalive". "Dying by suicide" is as clinical and non-euphemistic as you can get, really. "Killed himself/herself/themselves" is a bit more direct, I suppose.
> "Committing suicide" used to be a crime in many jurisdictions, and "commit" often has crime connotations ...
In many religions it's also considered a sin, so the use of the phrase "committing suicide" is fitting in that context as well, because "commiting a sin" is a frequently used phrase in religious circles. As far as a "softer" phrase goes, I generally use "killed themselves" or "ended their own life" depending on conversational context.
It also seems so pointless, as any cheap-ish LLM will probably be able to catch on to any new algospeak within days. Remember back in the GPT-3.5 days, when it could already turn any movie premise into three-four emoji?
"Le dollar beans" for "lesbians" via "le$bians". I'd laugh if it wasn't all so fucking sad and stupid.
Remember the online commentary during covid... So many terms you couldn't use. And then commentators coming up with some alternative to anyway bypass the filtering. In the end whole thing is pointless. If someone wants to say something they will figure out way to bypass filters.
Well, maybe with AI the net can get wide enough to catch everything. Might be lot of bycatch but I think platforms are willing to accept that.
Yes, people who really really want to say it, might find a way. But most people aren't absolutely determined to say something on that specific platform. They are just banned or shadowbanned and simply don't come back or adjust their posting habits. Censorship does work, even if it's not 100% effective. It brings friction.
Lowering PAGERANK of pages that contained those words (there was a secret naughty word list(fun fact that word list was initially copied from the tv censor word list)). So websites removed those words for seo.
And that’s how we got here.
Bonus fun fact: everything google penalised has been removed. Including my favorite of huge curated directory lists of links. If you had more links on your page it “bled” more pagerank which reduced your sites score. So sites stopped linking to each other so much. “Hacks” like stumbleupon appeared but faded. That’s why you can’t find cool websites anymore and you just rotate the same 5 mind numbing boring sites over and over.
Brilliant! Literally LOL. George Carlin is definitely my favourite American comedian. And now I know what the obtuse term “occasional irregularity” means. :)
134 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadAnil Dash is 51, two years younger than me but I'm old af.
He has written extensively of his time using AOL.
IMO there's a substantive difference between avoiding overzealous and clumsy early profanity filters, and the "unalive" phenomenon where people are being programmed to not use entirely non-profane words like "suicide" on many platforms.
All that said, I agree, it is worth a read.
But this shift already happened in the 18th century, so today's intuition is also different.
I must admit I never really expected this!
One material difference I can think of is that what is being filtered here is not necessarily a side effect, it's not like the platform wants to ban just rape threats and end up banning discussion about rape cases and rape experiences, it might be that the platforms simply benefit from discouraging all talk about negative experiences and they might benefit from associating their brand only with positive experiences which sell more ads and avoid associating brands with negative experiences.
Advertising is surely a big part of this situation.
I'm not a "content creator" but as I understand it, nobody is afraid they will get banned from these platforms for using these trigger words, they avoid using the words because they are afraid their content will be demonetized to delink it from advertisements.
What I mean is that a few people did figure out that appeasing the algorithm generates more views, and these are the people that get many followers. The followers themselves probably don't think that deeply about it; they just want to be like the accounts they follow (because they think everyone else in their social circles want to), and copy their use of language.
It's probably similar to how I started using semicolons more after reading Mary Shelley, except more gross.
That said, the existence of taboos are a social universal. Some things are better discussed in some contexts than others, more intimately or more publicly etc. However, the 20th century zeitgeist has decided that subverting all taboos will be liberating, the personal should be political and vice versa, everything should stripped of context and dusty old rules, so now that we have the tech, let's just have short videos floating out there and sliding into people's feeds, talking about the heaviest subjects etc.
But then if tiktok suddenly pushed suicide content, and then someone actually committed suicide, and the two could be juxtaposed into a story, it would be a big PR issue. There is a reason companies don't want to go near these topics. Because then they have to police it by content valence. You can talk about heavy topic X from such and such angles, but you must list such and such caveats but also you are free to express your experiences with your own unique voice, lest those get "erased" or whatnot. We will need superintelligent AI to be able to satisfy all the contradictory expectations. Until then, someone will always grumble.
The nameless people who actually set language trends can go back to using censored words, but they will simply be banned, shadow banned, etc.. They can try to appeal to the moderators, but they will be ignored. Their fellow users probably won't even notice they're gone. They might just make a new account and start posting again. Or... they might just fall silent.
The real solution isn't to play a peg in the game of censorship whack-a-mole. It's to build and switch to social media platforms that are more open in their moderation and resistant to censorship. American social media is abominable and getting worse. There's a popular desire to move to something better, but the alternatives aren't there. When you're doing being whacked on the head, go build those alternatives.
- 4chan
- Kiwi Farms
- Maybe modern Twitter? (I don't believe this, but that's the current narrative anyway)
I think X arguably comes closest, and at least it costs bots money to post with a checkmark (unlike Reddit, which is a bot free-for-all - since its very origins actually). Plus, the feed & community notes algorithms are actually open source (whether or not that's also the deployed version, I can only speculate).
At present, U.S. social media tends to create echo chambers where moderators have absolute power to push whatever agenda they want. That's too much censorship power in the hands of people who are completely anonymous. I'd like to dial it back a bit, at least to the point where reasonable people of different political persuasions can live in a shared reality. We need to stop treating political affiliations like Abrahamic religions.
X's censors are, at least, following the wishes of someone who is anything but anonymous. Don't pretend there isn't a slant there though.
Imagine that you're having a nice life until a black family moves in next door and turns whole area into a ghetto. Everyone around you tells you to suck it up and stop being racist. Online platforms ban you for racism. Until one day you stumble upon secret underground community of people in similar situations. Sure, some of their claims might be a little extreme, but at least they're the only ones willing to listen to your problems without telling you to shut the fuck up.
Some people are just too extreme to be happy in a space with standards. They're the police's problem, quite frankly. Unhappy Nazi's are a sign of a healthy society.
Some people are just too extreme to be happy in a space with standards. They're the police's problem, quite frankly. Unhappy Feminist's are a sign of a healthy society.
-----------
The last sentence is a fucking bomber kek
Good example of the kind of racism we shouldn’t really accept.
Why did you choose that example instead of, say, “a poor white family moves in next door and turns the whole area into a trailer park”?
Similarly, you have to be very off-putting to the mainstream to prevent the gentrification of such a censorship-resistant platform. It's like a costly signal. That's precisely why you feel they are off-putting. It works as intended and keeps out people who'd try to turn it into the way everything else is. Like when rich hip college kids gentrify an area and turn it into a sanitized thing that is the same as everywhere else. The offensiveness is a protective barrier.
> New rule, no algo-speak or self-censoring. This isn't tik tok and the target audience here does not have a median age of 11. You can say murder on the subreddit about the movies where little kids are slaughtered.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/1p2t06d/new_r...
This is a really, really stupid world.
Alas, this is not an easy problem to just hand wave away as youth slang. There will always be an older person policing youth speech. That is the nature of religion, governments and social policy as a whole - to ensure the youthful generations don't upset the bucket in which the old sit.
For as long as the Internet has been online there have been curmudgeons willfully applying their personal doctrine to strangers.
I mean, look, I can say that sex outside of marriage is a sin without a pornographic description. But I can't say it without "sex", or a euphemism for sex.
In practice, how can they make that work?
The reason a lot of social network sites censor swear words and other words describing violence, is because they get inundated with complaints from fundamentalists who get offended by language, as if there is some spell being cast on them from afar.
And what I mean to say is, this is the motivation behind the censorship - because fruitcake butterflies think language is going to hurt them.
https://youtu.be/-YQB2tE6-8U?is=xR2aOq1w5p6cj1XT
I’ve seen these kinds of beliefs appear in organisations too. People will start doing ridiculous things just because the people around them are doing it, until suddenly entire teams are behaving completely wrong and not following proper procedure.
As you'd expect, drugs feature a lot, only they've had to resort to using "dr*gs", "co****e" and "na*****s" (yup, 5 asterisks!) in titles/captions, splicing the naughty words out of the sound tracks, and even blurring words on the screens of drug screening devices so as not to offend The Algorithm. Typical example preformatted for Tiktok:
https://youtube.com/shorts/gbPiRqpEMKk?si=6VH9qO-T5_4wbnsz
Corporate censorship has me tired. Government censorship has me tired. Self censorship has me tired. The way we all hate each other has me tired. The way we all hate the situation and yet do nothing has me tired. Knowing that even doing something will change nothing has me tired.
Compatibism (between leftcoms and neoliberal imperialists) as a strategy is well-known. Here’s a few resources for you:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/15/why-the-cia-cares-ab...
https://intellectualhistory.site.ox.ac.uk/article/a-conversa...
https://www.academia.edu/34758095/Cold_War_Comrades_Left_Lib...
When the leftcoms get too old they just repackage them as neoconservatives: https://gwydionwilliams.com/history-and-philosophy/10-1-more...
People on the internet are tiring because how they interact is shaped to turn everything into a binary, the platforms where people spout their opinions don't foster any kind of actual human communication, it's just a farce of it with a never-ending shit-flinging-fest. If that's what you incentivise for you will only get the worst of people's outbursts.
If your brain hasn't been completely rotted by internet discourse then you will find that having hard conversations in the real world is still possible, that disagreeing while being curious and courteous about someone else's worldview is possible. It doesn't happen when people are so far down the internet rabbit hole that their real life persona is just a shadow of what their internet persona is, otherwise you will find that people offline can be much more reasonable, that you can have a discussion without resorting to shit-flinging from the binary "you are transgressive vs we are in-agreement".
You should try, it's very refreshing to realise that the real world is still not the internet, as much as social media companies are trying to make it.
It's actually still possible online too but I won't advertise where.
It's not just that the internet discussion is rotten, but the discursive rot has definitely made the leap into the real world too. It's almost inescapable. What was once normal has become the exception.
I found solace on the offline world though, going back to being a "local", participating in activities where the internet is far away. It's a cliché but being present in the real world is actually what solved my mourning of what the internet was.
I honestly do not see how you could go from talking about self censorship in the context of institutional censorship and then go on to say the whole internet has become a 'chan', it absolutely has not even if the current zeitgeist doesn't fully align with your particular ideals.
And if they weren't brown, they had some disability or even different sexuality.
I'm not racist, but I am brown.
What a fucking awful hellscape you guys have built for your children.
The author uses "dying by suicide", which is better semantically, but still a bit wordy. Another option might be to verbify "suicide".
The Old English verb form would more likely be "dealive", with "unalive" being an adjective.
Coca Cola doesn't want ads next/before/during/after social media posts talking about people killing themselves.
But people are problem solving machines so we end up here.
They are getting muted or silenced by busybodies who try to control language, and are either in a position to install these algorithms, or are part of pressure mobs that aim to influence the former.
Boo fucking hoo. I was with you right up until this point. The thing is, for Gen Z words and meanings do not matter any more.
Words have clearly defined (legal) meanings and no, not everything that Gen Z deems to be a genocide is a genocide or has any chance in hell to be labeled one in the future.
I also grew up in the previous century and it is equally strange to hear ‘dying by suicide’ when it used to be more common to say ‘committed suicide’ or just ‘killed himself/herself’. The author does a reasonable job of explaining why people might use ‘unalive’ and why he thinks that is a bad idea, but what was the reason a person started ‘dying by suicide’ instead of ‘killing himself/hersself/themselves’?
I do somewhat agree with you, as it feels off, but I don't think it's in the same category as "unalive". "Dying by suicide" is as clinical and non-euphemistic as you can get, really. "Killed himself/herself/themselves" is a bit more direct, I suppose.
In many religions it's also considered a sin, so the use of the phrase "committing suicide" is fitting in that context as well, because "commiting a sin" is a frequently used phrase in religious circles. As far as a "softer" phrase goes, I generally use "killed themselves" or "ended their own life" depending on conversational context.
How about we just GTFO off these platforms. Ironically that's something that might actually make the difference.
"Le dollar beans" for "lesbians" via "le$bians". I'd laugh if it wasn't all so fucking sad and stupid.
Well, maybe with AI the net can get wide enough to catch everything. Might be lot of bycatch but I think platforms are willing to accept that.
Algospeak / Slang Replacement
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/algospeak-slang-replacement
Lowering PAGERANK of pages that contained those words (there was a secret naughty word list(fun fact that word list was initially copied from the tv censor word list)). So websites removed those words for seo.
And that’s how we got here.
Bonus fun fact: everything google penalised has been removed. Including my favorite of huge curated directory lists of links. If you had more links on your page it “bled” more pagerank which reduced your sites score. So sites stopped linking to each other so much. “Hacks” like stumbleupon appeared but faded. That’s why you can’t find cool websites anymore and you just rotate the same 5 mind numbing boring sites over and over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
The top comment, as I opened the link:
> He would have hated the word "unalive".