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.
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).
> There's a popular desire to move to something better
I have to put a big "citation needed" on. The average person really does not care about any of this, they'll happily write "seggs" and not think any deeper about why they are writing it.
Personally my own annoyance with social media really has not much to do with censorship, but more to do with engagement farming. That problem is much less straightforward to fix, though I can pretty clearly see that X's "pay for engagement" incentive structure makes things demonstrably worse than on other places, where "link in bio" is a pretty reliable indicator of an engagement farmer.
There's been endless debates here about moderation vs. censorship- on the spectrum of Hackernews to 4chan. Calling the Hackernews moderation rules "censorship" would also not be reasonable- nor do people want to visit 4chan because it's "free speech".
I think it's actually a really nice workaround that human language and english is flexible enough that we can still say exactly what we mean in a different way and everyone knows what we are talking about.
I fundamentally don't think the platforms want to get rid of the engagement these topics bring, (the last round of criticism being that they want divisive topics on the platform) and if and when they do it won't look like changing "kill" to "unalive"- the algorithm will simply be directed to silence the topic. Many such examples in China. We should be angry about the censorship we don't see and can't detect as easily instead.
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’?
> 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...
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.
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.
Imagine what a shitty place to be being a teen, writing or speaking out, and having 5 views and 0 likes.
Just because they are made consenting accomplices in the system doesn't mean they are not victims.
"Commit suicide" in TikTok NewSpeak isn't a single word. It's still two: "unalived themselves". "Unalive" means "kill".
Algospeak / Slang Replacement
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.
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.
All that said, I agree, it is worth a read.
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.
Mostly, I disagree vehemently with the idea that over-weighing and banning words is an effective way to change behavior positively. People that follow along happily were never the problem and changing words does nothing but move the stink of a word to the new word. It is shitty cultural rebranding and I hate that culture has been co-opted by marketers. "Unhoused" is the new homeless - ok, did we solve something? Does saying "Bob unalived himself" no longer trigger someone who lost a family member to suicide? The more we mask concepts the less clear and honest we are. Giving words an oversized signal only removes nuance and clarity and leads to less curiosity or tolerance. We judge people on the words they use, not their meaning. Talk to an 80-year-old and they will use a banned word eventually, whether or not their beliefs reflect what the word now implies. Sometimes, old people are just running old software.
I miss tolerance - it was a great concept that served America for hundreds of years. We went from a melting pot where the ask wasn't to celebrate diversity but to tolerate it. If you hate a group of people (Trumpers, Palestinians, whoever) try tolerating them first. Learn how to stand in a checkout line behind someone with a red hat without saying something about it. Until we can meet that low bar, let's stop policing words or celebrating people for using the right ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
The top comment, as I opened the link:
> He would have hated the word "unalive".
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.
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:
No no no, it's very wrong, you are doing it wrong. Agree with the general sentiment though.
"Le dollar beans" for "lesbians" via "le$bians". I'd laugh if it wasn't all so fucking sad and stupid.
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.
The response is simple
[7-part plot to convince social media that authenticity matters more than money]
How about we just GTFO off these platforms. Ironically that's something that might actually make the difference.
It's also not the first generation to rotate language superficially until the new term has the same connotations of the old term, because the meaning has not changed.
And as for the cause of that language shift, I always understood that it was out of a cabalistic following of superstitions that may be correlated to greater reach due to a better marketability with advertisers, so the teenagers appease the algorithm because they understand how the system works.
Sometimes using the new term means subscribing to a new set of rules around the term, saying heck instead of hell or gosh means acknowledging that those are sacred words, using black instead of pejorative alternatives implies being somewhat up to speed with the history and sensitivity around the subject.
And in this case, it's a mix of subversivion and rule following, that kids use euphemisms to talk about a rape case, on the one hand they acknowledge that talking about such subjects online requires care and may be subject to censoring, on the other, they evade an automated filter and talk about it anyway.
That said, I recall the author being a sort of Spolsky successor from StackOverflow, but what are they up to now in the context of this article? Is he working on some sort of next gen social media? Or is it just advisory stuff.
What a fucking awful hellscape you guys have built for your children.
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.