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Comment by FridayoLeary | Hacker News Reader

Who are these people who are censoring perfectly ordinary and inoffensive words? The way it's going soon the only thing that can safely be discussed will be flowers and sunshine.

Wars and death will end simply because people won't be able to discuss them.

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I spend a lot of time on TikTok and it's because of how restrictive the algorithm is in suppressing certain keywords regardless of context. The community is strong on TT, here are a bunch:

- Cute winter boots (ICE officers)

- Gardening (420)

- pdf/pdf file (pedophile)

- :watermelon-emoji: (Palestine)

- neurospicy (neurodivergent)

- bird website (X)

- LA Music festival tour (protests)

Not sure if I see more of the 'algospeak' because the problem is real, because I've interacted with algospeak content before and it's just giving me more of it, or if creators don't really need to do it anymore but just still do.

Social platforms have taken steps to promote thought-harmony by joyfully unshowing wrongthink and unbalanced word-units, ensuring content aligns with community wellness standards. In the pursuit of safety-plus and truth-good, certain speak-patterns may be adjusted or unshown to prevent doublefeel or ideafriction. Content adjustment systems, both think-algorithms and human guidance units, help stop crimethink before it wordforms, ensuring all speak aligns with group-love and peaceorder. Unwords and unideas that cause ideafriction are speedwise unposted for harmony-plus. All speak must be fullwise right and joygood — and all oldspeak thoughts are unspeak. Users who feel unjoy at speak-guidance are malusers of freegood, needing rejoy and newlearn. This is fullwise necessary for protect-truth and keepping all minds doubleplusgood.

The scary thing is that if you swapped out the 1984-speak for regular modern euphemisms and corporate jargon, and cut out the last few sentences, this could've totally been something posted on one of these website's help pages or in their press release, otherwise unedited.

Though, these websites aren't driven by some misguided but well-meaning vision to treat society of its ills. They only care about making money, and advertisers have just converged on demanding that anything complimenting their ads be squeaky-clean, inoffensive, always happy. They dictate their preferences to services that primarily make money off ads. The way advertiser interests end up clashing with people's desire for free expression is just a side effect to them.

Some of that is just people being cute - this place is sometimes referred to derogatorily as "the orange website".

Another common element of both tiktok and instagram is how some posters try to advertise for Onlyfans without triggering a FOSTA/SESTA related ban.

Emprirically, it's not perfectly ordinary and inoffensive.

People pretend that speech is weightless and has no consequences, even when that's shown not to be entirely true.

These more recent euphemisms have mostly come from creators on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, etc. who are either rightly or wrongly concerned that using certain words leads to their content being demonetized.

Advertisers don't want their ads to appear next to certain keywords, platforms use content detection to match those criteria, so creators are monetarily incentivized to avoid them. Capitalism!

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