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by hnaccount141
1529 days ago
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> Working around this with creative misspellings or euphemisms makes me feel like a kid trying to swear on Club Penguin or something. It's been bizarre watching the increasing prevalence of these types of behaviors the last few years. There was a period of time when I remember seeing a number of consumer tech youtubers discussing supply chain issues but having to avoid using the words "COVID" or "pandemic" for fear of demonetization or being buried by the algorithm. You see similar behaviors everywhere on TikTok, where a whole new vocabulary has sprung up to talk about taboo topics. "Unalive" instead of "kill", "seggs" instead of "sex", and so on. My understanding is that some of the TikTok vocabulary originated among kids communicating over school-monitored channels. The most unsettling part is that it seems like in many of these cases nobody can point to concrete evidence that a word is actively being punished by the algorithm. The simple existence of these black-box moderation tools has a panopticon-esque effect where people will preemptively alter their behavior just in case. |
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Deadpool's circumlocution around killing and death is a parody of similar linguistic gymnastics from 1980s cartoons, which were considered "for children" and so addressing death directly was forbidden. And given that Deadpool's mental illness makes him genre-savvy, it was probably deliberate in-universe and out. The writers then paired that with Spidey using "kill" directly in an animated kids' block show, to show how ridiculous such censorship was.
The sheer irony is that we're now self-censoring to 1980s cartoon levels to avoid robotic censors we can't even argue with.