this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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I know this is probably a repost but the self-censorship is super annoying and has entered the lexicon in ways that can permanently damage human communication as a whole.
Yeah sure censor stuff from kid shows but we're at the point where "unalive" and "pdf file" are being used as code words. Everyone knows what they mean, even the censors.
100% agree, we live in a 1984 age.
Also, using stupid words such as unalive doesn't make any sense because the algorithm of social media companies knows exactly what it means.
Its coming from Tiktok. Bytedance has heavy word censorship and if one of your comments or videos was flagged as inappropriate and had one of those words your account would be automatically suspended for review.
So a lot of normal westerm words got flagged. Kill. Dead. Any word related to sex. Hole. (Lol) basically every curse word.
Then there are gray words like Pedophile where people think it changes the algorithm to show your videos less if they contain them, but no one has any proof from what I can tell.
I use things like "he has chosen to meet his ancestors right then and there"
It's annoying that its driven by ad revenues, and made more dumb by the fact that if everyone can decode it, then they're still advertising over sex and violence. So the whole endeavor is pointless.
But I don't think it will cause any harm. Humans have been using slang, code, and memetic language to obscure meaning from others and identify their in-crowds since the dawn of human language. Some of it is dumber than others, but it won't cause any harm.
It's also extremely weird because people often just default to the "hidden meaning" completely ignoring context. There were so many instances where I was being shouted at for writing "CP" on the Cyberpunk subreddit, it was just weird...
There is absolutely no chance that this idiotic self censorship can permanently damage human communication.