Algospeak, a new problem for the community#
Many of you have seen common words such as “death”, “drugs”, “hell” and other words being censored without a reason which is weird indeed since they are not offensive, so, how did this ridiculous issue appeared? everything starts from back in 2017 when This term wasn’t present, major brends like Disney, Coca Cola and others pulled their ads from youtube after their commercials appeared next to extremist content, as a result youtube’s administration panicked and deployed aggressive automated filters, after this reckless decision, creators talking about sensitive social issues, mental health, or even complex war history found their videos demonetized, after this scandal, content creators had to be more creative in order to avoid issues and that’s how Algospeak was born. 3 years later, when Tik Tok became one of the most popular platforms, it included even more aggressive AI moderation, it’s bots are notoriously awful at distinguishing between news about a tragedy and promotion of self harm, because of that, users realized that if they typed “Death,” the post might be hidden. So, “unalive” was born. It went viral, and people started using it even when they didn’t need to. Soon platforms like Facebook and Instagram followed the same path as well, they wouldn’t tell you if you were being censored, they would just stop showing your posts to people, result was a mix of madness and paranoia, people started censoring everything, even harmless words like “life”, “job”, “pandemic” and etc. The term “Algospeak” was born in 2022 thanks to author Taylor Lorenz to describe the altering of language. Don’t let a bot become your editor, when we censor words like “life” and “death,” we sanitize the truth and disrespect the subjects of our stories. our advice is simple: Be brave enough to use the dictionary. If your platform can’t handle the truth, find a better platform.