THE WORDS WE DON’T WRITE ANYMORE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
On social media it is not only platforms that filter, we are the ones who change our language because we are afraid of the algorithm. Stay with me until the end because I will walk you through the words many of us avoid, and then I want to know which ones you think really scare the systems behind social platforms.
More and more often we see “unalived” instead of saying that a person’s life has been taken in a violent way, “seggs” to indicate intimate relations between consenting adults, “pew pew” instead of objects that fire bullets. It looks like a game, but it is actually a form of self-censorship: we change the words so that the video is not hidden, penalised or demonetised. Or we write words with numbers instead of some letters, or with asterisks. This happens even when the words are only written inside images.
Creators see this every day. Comedian Alex Pearlman says that on TikTok he avoids even mentioning competing platforms, because when he invites people to go to another service, his views collapse. When he talked about a famous financier at the centre of abuse scandals linked to a well known private island, several of his videos disappeared only from that platform, with penalties on his account, while they stayed up on other social networks. The result: he started using nicknames, hints, coded language.
Companies deny having secret lists of banned words, but we know that in the past platforms like TikTok and Meta have changed the visibility of “sensitive” content, and that internal tools exist to manually push some videos. Here in the United States this has even more impact, because for a huge share of the population social media are already one of the main sources of news. If we believe that certain words cannot be used, we start to avoid entire topics: political violence, rights, mental health, emotional and intimate life. Families see a domesticated public debate, where the most delicate issues appear only disguised as jokes in code.
For us the point is simple: platforms think in terms of advertising and the risk of ending up in front of regulators, not in terms of the quality of public conversation. If we accept without thinking that we must always speak using “unalived”, “seggs” and “pew pew”, we are doing the job for them.
Now tell me: which words do you consider “negative” for the algorithms today, the ones you avoid because you are afraid your content will disappear from the feed?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #AI