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Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, whose malevolent schemes can nevertheless be foiled
by avalys 29d ago
Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, whose malevolent schemes can nevertheless be foiled by simple character substitutions.
My favorite example of this is people self-censoring “shooter” as “sh**ter”, which I can’t help myself from always parsing as “shitter”.
“The shitter in Virginia has been apprehended”, etc.
- lazide 29d agoTo be fair, YouTube (and probably other platforms) used to literally block stuff like that, and the substitutions did get by it.
- ASalazarMX 29d agoFacebook does this heavily. People discussing the strategy to beat a Fallout boss get sent to Facebook jail for writing "gun", "shot","kill", etc., so the self-censoring is now in the rules of most Fallout gaming groups.
- Cpoll 29d agoI assume it's just people mimicking/cargo culting content creators, who are indeed being oppressed by the dark forces of the algorithm and the de-mometizer.
- antonvs 29d ago> Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, What a ridiculous take. Many platforms and games actually prevent you from posting certain words, or flag or otherwise penalize posts if you include them. In some cases, this is completely explicit, i.e. you'll get a message saying "cant' post that." Instead of playing a guessing game of which platform censors what, it's common just to avoid such words by censoring, euphemisms, or synonyms.
- ryandrake 29d agoHow did "kosher" become one of those words?
- ASalazarMX 29d agoIMO this boils down to big platforms being pressured to moderate, because some horrible things are shared there, and the cheapest moderation is blindly flagging words. People discussing things like games get warned/banned/shadowbanned by machines for using banned words, and everyone is getting used to self-censor because the appeal is as useful as a second navel. TL;DR: self-censorship is so prevalent because it saves online platforms money.