1mo ago

What is going on with an apparent rise of word censorship?

I have noticed posts and comments mocking posts which have a mild curse word crossed out or ‘censored’ in some way. Yes, it was here before, but now I feel it increased. This post was my final straw: https://lemmy.world/post/34998482

I am noticing similar instances on the rise, has something happened? A law was passed somewhere?

4 comments

Basically comes down to being "advertiser friendly".
Because of that:
Platforms like YouTube and TikTok downrank you through the algorithm because they can't put ads on your video to monetize it
People probably want to upload talks to YouTube, so it's taken into account even if there's nothing preventing you at the actual conference.
People don't want to be censored on those platforms, so other terms are reused to avoid angering the algorithm (so we got, unalive, PDF files, and all that stuff)
It bleeds into the common language.
That's not new: there's a reason there's a million way to talk about taking a shit. Everytime it becomes too popular/"gross", a new one is born that's supposedly more classy. Same thing happened with toilets/bathrooms/restrooms/water rooms. I don't know why we still try to pretend we don't all take a shit every now and then.
- I would certainly hope daily.
- I agree that it was here at least since modern broadcast media, afaik. But now it feels driven more by something else. Maybe I am just getting old and cynical. Or paranoid as the other commenter suggested. Anyway, thanks for the rundown
Paranoid (?) but probably not entirely wrong take: "the limits of one's language are the limits to one's world", the powers that be feel the need to more strongly control the acceptable narratives (TikTok got a huge amount of Westerners to root against "their team" for once concerning the Israeli occupation, for instance), and getting folks accustomed to censorship for the sake of censorship is step towards that direction.