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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
>> 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’?
This never ending chase for a kinder, gentler way to use language is a fools errand. Every time we come up with another term for something, eventually it gets into the lexicon as a nasty term because unkind people will always find ways to use it disparagingly
People came up with "unalived" to get around censorship built by idiots who think they can trivially police language like this, now unalive is being used viciously by unkind people
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> The response is simple: For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean.
Sorry, I don't think this is how you're going to kill "unalive". There are already loads of people who ignore the algorithm's dictates here; you just don't see them, because of the algorithm. Sure if all the internet banded together and stopped using words like "unalive", maybe the platforms would have to change. But (prediction here) they're not going to, for two reasons.
First, the right to say "kill" rather than "unalive" isn't the hill they're going to die on. Ms Rachel and Macklemore are willing to risk their careers for Gaza's children; but most people aren't willing to risk their audience just so people can say "kill".
Secondly, people probably largely agree with what the policy is trying to do. Saying "unalive" is different than saying "kill". Violent speech on social platforms is a massive problem. The people who are most likely to act on violent speech are exactly the same people who are most likely to say "kill" rather than "unalive". Sure, there are hateful people who will say the same thing but just use "unalive" instead; but those people have demonstrated that they're aware of consequences and willing to change their behavior as a result. Such a person is far less likely to actually murder someone than someone who just uses the word "kill".
So the entire internet community switching to euphemisms is likely to make the algorithm more effective at identifying actually dangerous content. Most people are sympathetic to those goals.
I actually don't think this is so deep- you couldn't curse on broadcast TV and basically because Instagram is an ad platform you aren't supposed to say "bad" things on there either.
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.
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.
I can still see a lot of linguistic harmony in "unalive oneself" since it follows a familiar reflexive form. What I find weird in "commit suicide" is more the awkwardness of the collocative use of "commit", which is a word that otherwise feels strange outside certain contexts like criminal charges in a courtroom.
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.
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.
There's a lot of that sure, but for people (kids) that don't know other ways to communicate, irl or online, this might be their way of communicating, so it's either appease the algorithm or have no one listen to you.
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.
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.
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.
It's not even busybodies in that sense. It is mostly advertisers mandating that their ads not be placed next to anything that could be construed as a reputation risk.
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:
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.
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.
Some good points here, and I definitely hate the "unalive" movement but like someone else said, it has gone beyond self-censorship to in-group signaling. But as a graybeard it is hard to not chafe at the "ungood thought-crime" vibe of the whole thing.
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.
> Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards.
No no no, it's very wrong, you are doing it wrong. Agree with the general sentiment though.
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.
I've seen more subtle and much funnier phrases, which because they are phrases seem to allow double or triple meanings with plausable deniability. It's very soviet russia humour, and many people (and so LLMs) will not get it which is part of the fun.
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.
meh, people, even kids, are choosing to use that word, they choose it themselves, either out of inertia, or to appease the algorithm gods. They choose to communicate in these mediums and be subject to the unwritten rules of the algorithm, usually to maximize exposure and likes. It's not great and I would never use that language or participate in circles like that, but they have a choice and they choose to talk like that.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Incorrect
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.
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.
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.
But what are those censorship-resistant alternatives? From the top of my head I can only think of:
- 4chan
- Kiwi Farms
- Maybe modern Twitter? (I don't believe this, but that's the current narrative anyway)
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.
New Twitter seems pretty good about this. Nobody is saying stuff like "unalive" or "regarded" there.
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.
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).
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.
All these are centralized platforms where owners have free reign to block and suppress anyone.
And every decentralised platform is full of kiddy porn.
mastodon?
Agree overall with the first part, but this:
> 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.
The average person is not the terminally online people writing “seggs”.
Are you on Instagram or Tiktok? Even celebrities, comedians etc use "seggs" now.
>> 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’?
'committed suicide' is leftover from a time when suicide was considered a crime. 'Dying by suicide' is more accurate and more empathetic.
I guess I shouldnt commit my git changes either then
This never ending chase for a kinder, gentler way to use language is a fools errand. Every time we come up with another term for something, eventually it gets into the lexicon as a nasty term because unkind people will always find ways to use it disparagingly
People came up with "unalived" to get around censorship built by idiots who think they can trivially police language like this, now unalive is being used viciously by unkind people
Probably to make the point that suicide is usually caused by something, not merely a self-inflicted choice or an act of violence.
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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/1p2t06d/new_r...
Doesn't work for all the stuff Reddit as a platform bans or at least hides. You might really get in trouble even talking about the example they gave.
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.
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?
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.
This comment reminds me of people who think codes of conduct are more important than working software.
At this stage it seems more like slang/ a signifier of being part of the group than actual need to evade censorship so don’t think it’s going anywhere
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.
We still say "cool" roughly 50 years later. Though "swell" is basically gone.
That's because "cool" is cool. "Swell" is only groovy.
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.
> The response is simple: For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean.
Sorry, I don't think this is how you're going to kill "unalive". There are already loads of people who ignore the algorithm's dictates here; you just don't see them, because of the algorithm. Sure if all the internet banded together and stopped using words like "unalive", maybe the platforms would have to change. But (prediction here) they're not going to, for two reasons.
First, the right to say "kill" rather than "unalive" isn't the hill they're going to die on. Ms Rachel and Macklemore are willing to risk their careers for Gaza's children; but most people aren't willing to risk their audience just so people can say "kill".
Secondly, people probably largely agree with what the policy is trying to do. Saying "unalive" is different than saying "kill". Violent speech on social platforms is a massive problem. The people who are most likely to act on violent speech are exactly the same people who are most likely to say "kill" rather than "unalive". Sure, there are hateful people who will say the same thing but just use "unalive" instead; but those people have demonstrated that they're aware of consequences and willing to change their behavior as a result. Such a person is far less likely to actually murder someone than someone who just uses the word "kill".
So the entire internet community switching to euphemisms is likely to make the algorithm more effective at identifying actually dangerous content. Most people are sympathetic to those goals.
I actually don't think this is so deep- you couldn't curse on broadcast TV and basically because Instagram is an ad platform you aren't supposed to say "bad" things on there either.
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.
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.
You're misunderstanding it, then.
"Commit suicide" in TikTok NewSpeak isn't a single word. It's still two: "unalived themselves". "Unalive" means "kill".
I can still see a lot of linguistic harmony in "unalive oneself" since it follows a familiar reflexive form. What I find weird in "commit suicide" is more the awkwardness of the collocative use of "commit", which is a word that otherwise feels strange outside certain contexts like criminal charges in a courtroom.
Well there's also sudoku, but that might be more early gen z
Which is just an alternative work for seppuku, so it's not like we were lacking in words there :-)
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.
All that said, I agree, it is worth a read.
Is "breast" a profane word?
Funnily, "breast" is already a euphemism. Originally it was "teat". And now the euphemism treadmill is moving towards "chest".
Depends. Uncovered human or chicken?
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.
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.
Some may find this worth a read (I found it interesting that "unalive" was first around in 2015!)
Algospeak / Slang Replacement
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/algospeak-slang-replacement
2015 "unalive" usage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563729
I don't think people trying to please the algorithm are interested in freedom of expression instead of just money/"fame"
There's a lot of that sure, but for people (kids) that don't know other ways to communicate, irl or online, this might be their way of communicating, so it's either appease the algorithm or have no one listen to you.
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.
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.
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.
It's not even busybodies in that sense. It is mostly advertisers mandating that their ads not be placed next to anything that could be construed as a reputation risk.
Quite often these advertisers are also doing this primarily to appease, or at least are triggered into action by pressure groups.
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:
https://youtube.com/shorts/gbPiRqpEMKk?si=6VH9qO-T5_4wbnsz
George Carlin’s bit on soft language came to mind, so I went on YouTube to rewatch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
The top comment, as I opened the link:
> He would have hated the word "unalive".
I recall there was a short by etymology_nerd as well
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.
Google started it all 2 decades ago.
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.
Some good points here, and I definitely hate the "unalive" movement but like someone else said, it has gone beyond self-censorship to in-group signaling. But as a graybeard it is hard to not chafe at the "ungood thought-crime" vibe of the whole thing.
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.
> Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards.
No no no, it's very wrong, you are doing it wrong. Agree with the general sentiment though.
Uncommonly unintuitive unpleasantness’ ("unalive") untimely undoing's unduly unnecessary.
"Unalive": unwanted? Undoubtedly.
Uninspiring? Unsure (unlike uncontroversial "undead").
Unwittingly, "unalive"'s unacceptance's unconstructive.
Unfortunately, "unalive"'ll unseat uncomplicated, unproblematic unequals.
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.
I've seen more subtle and much funnier phrases, which because they are phrases seem to allow double or triple meanings with plausable deniability. It's very soviet russia humour, and many people (and so LLMs) will not get it which is part of the fun.
The snake of political correctness is eating itself.
It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "political correctness". Nobody is making moral arguments that these words should not be used.
LOL, this is just corporate defensiveness.
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.
How about we just GTFO off these platforms. Ironically that's something that might actually make the difference.
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.
meh, people, even kids, are choosing to use that word, they choose it themselves, either out of inertia, or to appease the algorithm gods. They choose to communicate in these mediums and be subject to the unwritten rules of the algorithm, usually to maximize exposure and likes. It's not great and I would never use that language or participate in circles like that, but they have a choice and they choose to talk like that.
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.
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> 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.
I take it you're talking about Gaza.
I mean, sure, people misuse terms, but what does that have to do with self-imposed censorship to please algorithmic feeds?