Asklemmy

It's the problem with letting for-profit corporations run our social networks.

It's almost like the censorship was in the hands of corporations all along. Yes, obviously, making the "town square" a corporate hell scape was a bad idea.

There has been prohibited language for as long as humans have talked, and the result of it is nearly always a proliferation of euphemism. People who want to talk about something on the naughty list will simply coin different phrases, and sometimes, those neologisms will actually have more nuance and variety than the old banned words. You cite one prime example of this in your post.

That's the thing about ideas: they transcend language, and thus language shifts around them. The ideas themselves are much harder to suppress than the mere words used to express them.

Updating your language is doubleplusgood.

Yes. Basically the advertisers are trying to model us, and so the loop is complete in that it’s “our” standards being implemented into language via this mechanism.

However, described statistically one might say it’s reducing the variance in the distribution of language. It’s smoothing things out and removing the edge cases of language.

And one of my favorite psychology professors always likes to say that discussing anything important basically is going to offend people. So if you remove the ability to offend people, you remove the ability to discuss important topics.

The image in my mind is of a smooth ball with little jagged twig things coming off it. Filtering out offensive content is like sanding the ball and removing all the protrusions. The thing is, those protrusions are valuable because they expand the diameter of the ball.

I know that imagery is really abstract but that’s what I see in my mind as the effect of filtering out “only the offensive stuff”.

Yes. Changing language arguably changes how and what we think. At least that's one of the main points of the woke people, of the people who want you to say indigenous people instead of something else, and it has also been explored in novels like 1984 where it (changing language) gets a political spin. I'd say there is truth to it.

Non-friendly topics are even worse. People like to hate on other nations for censoring information on the internet. We let good ol' capitalism do the job. We don't censor explicitly. Just nudge creators to say what we seem appropriate. Take away money and visibility once they stick out, pushing them around and into submission.

And it's not democratic. It's just to accommodate the rich companies that pay for the ads / the income for the video platform.

I am not too worried about words and language. Sure it is possibility it could have a some affect but personally I think we have mostly already solved this issue buy using different words for things. You already linked an example. Instead of saying suicide you say unaliving oneself. It is a bit more of a mouth full but it signifies the same thing. As far as the younger generation is concerned "Old" people will use suicide and young people will using "unaliving" or whatever else they come up with.

Now topics themselves I do think we have an issues because some topics are basically off limits if you want to actually make money off advertisers. I don't really have a good solution besides funding the creators directly like Patron for example.

I think it'll be difficult to openly discuss stuff like this on YouTube, especially with how they are now using OCR to read on-screen text in videos rather than relying on just the auto captions.

So not only will channels need to bleep as usual, they may also need to blur on-screen text too. I think naturally people will use new words to replace older "less fashionable" terminology, but it's being forced on us at the moment by advertisers IMO.

Given how videos form the basis of a lot of popular culture nowadays, I think advertiser censorship will, and kind of has already affected society