Hacker News Reader

Comment by vsnf | Hacker News Reader

Something related I’ve been wondering about is the change in language catalyzed by social media companies and their morality / fear of advertisers.

You see it especially in TikTok videos. When people aren’t straight up censoring themselves with bleeps, dead audio, or cuts, they use euphemisms instead: kill -> unalive, rape -> grape, sex -> seggs.

Even more concerning is that what is considered in need of censoring is expanding. I saw a video where the creator censored “white” when referring to Caucasians.

View on HN

Part of it is feared censoring / demotion in the algorithms; part is hypersensitivity / hyperconsiderate, because some people have indicated they are triggered by certain words, and I'm guessing another part is maximising reach. That is, if you use explicit language, your content may be marked as 12, 16, 18+ content, and half your engagement may drop because people in comment sections seriously underestimate how much "engagement" a teenager with a phone and infinite time generates.

Yes, those are the the proximate causes. I'm worried about the effect these causes will induce going forward. With enough time, this expanded hypersensitivity will move out of TikTok and into wider culture permanently.

You see that on Youtube as well. Creators will also censor su*cide, both in audio and video, because Google / advertisers don't like sensitive content and the video will make a lot less money if Google thinks it's about mental illness or suicide.

Google will straight up take down your videos if you mention suicide or death now.

Two creators I follow had to re-upload censored versions of their videos after the youtube audio filter decided that "dead" was too spicy.

"advertisers" along with "shareholders" are the hyper-aggressive cancer that is destroying the commons.

Not to drag Orwell out of his grave for a commiseratory drink, but this is double ungood.

There's an anime/manga/light novel that's set in this future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimoneta

Basically everyone wears a combination bracelet and choker that works as a futuristic smartphone, but doubles as a "sexually explicit language" censorship device - say the wrong word and you're arrested. Offhand, substitutions I remember from that series include "hose" in place of "penis" and "docking" in place of "sex".

It's mostly a comedy but gets pretty NSFW. Anime has both a censored and uncensored version.

Popular words are easy sacrificial signals so that people can provide an example of social intent by avoidance if questioned.

It’s annoying right now that we have a doubled dictionary to signal intention, but it is also concerning looking forward… Because at some point the social standard could expect technology to target the concept instead of the word to prove a good faith attempt to avoid interaction with non neutral ideas.

There's a lot of this to be found everywhere on the Internet. People have recently taken to spelling offensive and/or censored words backwards, and there's a lot of bigotry and racism on social media that gets through automated detection this way.

Even on the screenshots on instagram in this very post the word "sexual" is censored. It's ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com