I've started seeing spoken language in Gen Z and Gen Alpha adapt to avoiding algorithmic social media censorship in videos and comments, and it is... really something.
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I've started seeing spoken language in Gen Z and Gen Alpha adapt to avoiding algorithmic social media censorship in videos and comments, and it is... really something.
Like people are now saying "unalive", unironically, in complete sentences.
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Fi, infosec-aspected 🏳️⚧️replied to Lesley Carhart :unverified: last edited by
it's code switching, effectively. I had to do the same shit as a kid.
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Lesley Carhart :unverified:replied to Fi last edited by
@munin Yes, but there is the added irony of social media using algorithms to blanket ban words and phrases, then the entire English-speaking internet creating new phrases to replace those words that computers don't catch, then those becoming the common words for those sometimes actually harmful things.
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Fi, infosec-aspected 🏳️⚧️replied to Lesley Carhart :unverified: last edited by
I mean, people gotta talk about the topics in question - so they'll find a way to do so, regardless of official interference into the plain and ordinary language that would otherwise be used.
There's a lot of common words today that started as euphemisms and gradually became the accepted words.
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Fi, infosec-aspected 🏳️⚧️replied to Fi last edited by
Irritating and twee as today's euphemistic substitions may sound, in a dozen generations nobody'll be questioning why "paintbrush" and "vase" are the terms for standard-issue genitalia.
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Dana Friedreplied to Lesley Carhart :unverified: last edited by
@hacks4pancakes @munin the same happened in an ancestor of English; people feared bears and believed saying the word for "bear" would summon the animal. So they started referring to bears as "the brown one" - and now in all Germanic languages the word for "bear" is cognate with "brown" and not the original root that produced Latin "ursus" and Greek "arktos".
I suspect that in most cases, people's fear of The Algorithm is just as well-founded as the taboo on saying "bear"... but here we are ️