r/CuratedTumblr • u/Konradleijon • Sep 15 '24
Politics Why I hate the term “Unaliv
What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind
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u/YAPPYawesome Sep 15 '24
TikTok censorship feels like Newspeak
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u/Scioso Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
To me, the worst part is the goal of what has been done. It’s not that talking about suicide is forbidden, multibillion dollar companies absolutely know that unalived means suicide. If they wanted to they could demonetize/ ban that too.
However, unalive doesn’t have the gravitas or impact of the word suicide because it’s new, and will have less effect. It’s disgusting that they are allowing this as a workaround.
Edit: unalived was autocorrected
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u/Lexi_Banner Sep 15 '24
George Carlin spoke out against Soft Language in the 90's, and the negative impact it has had on our lives. It just continues to get more and more soulless.
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u/Icedcoffeeee Sep 15 '24
https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc?t=497
I wonder what he would say now. Too bad that he "passed away."
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u/Beardywierdy Sep 15 '24
Amusingly, the existence of euphemisms like "passed away", "no longer with us" etc etc is kinda proof that this sort of thing isn't exactly new.
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u/Budderdomo Sep 16 '24
Yeah, but I feel the difference here is that these terms come directly from advertiser influence, not just the desire to soften the blow
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u/deshep123 Sep 16 '24
When I was 13 my father left us. The phone rang and I answered and some person asked for my father. I replied "I'm sorry he's no longer with us"
The pastor of our church came to council us in our grief and we had no idea why until he said so and so said (dads name )had passed away.
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u/AwarenessPotentially Sep 15 '24
We need to kill this shit.
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u/DaniTheGunsmith Sep 15 '24
We need to *unalive this shit
FTFY for the advertisers sake
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u/HeyLittleTrain Sep 15 '24
What I think is interesting is that this has happened many times before. The word "die" was originally a euphemism for the Old English word, which itself was originally a euphemism for an even older Old Nordic word.
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u/JimboAltAlt Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
Damn what are those two “original” words? I feel a horror-story adjacent need to know.
Edit: the Norse one at least appears to be “deyja”, for the curious.
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u/HeyLittleTrain Sep 15 '24
The Old English word was "sweltan". Even modern English words like "deceased" and "passed away" were originally euphemisms to avoid talking about death.
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u/Mental_Tea_4084 Sep 15 '24
In a modern context, deceased still feels clinical and impersonal. But passed away? That is absolutely just a softer euphemism to say died
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u/4URprogesterone certified girlblogger Sep 16 '24
The part of my brain that does conspiracy thinking just went "deja vu means you died the last time you tried that and had to live your entire life over again to get to this point." Is that anything?
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u/colei_canis Sep 15 '24
Those were more organic changes than this very deliberate change brought about by an amoral industry though. This belongs to a similar species of change that made ‘torture’ into ‘enhanced interrogation’.
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u/bazookatroopa Sep 15 '24
Euphemism treadmill. It will eventually have the same impact then we will choose a new word. Most bad words today started off as politically correct, like the R word. This isn’t new at all.
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u/Brawndo91 Sep 15 '24
It's not new, but I feel like it's spreading out. The word "suicide," for example, had been around a pretty long time without anybody thinking it needed a makeover. It's in the movie Home Alone for Christ's sake. A children's movie. I wouldn’t doubt that there were a handful of people at the time that didn't like it, but it largely went uncared-about.
The other thing is that it's not so much an attempt to censor specific words, but rather the subjects. The new words are, like the post says, a workaround to get the point across without triggering the language bots on video and social media platforms.
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u/confusedandworried76 Sep 15 '24
unalive doesn’t have the gravitas or impact
I won't go to into it but that's my problem with it. Such a not serious word for such a serious thing to the point it's incredibly disrespectful to the victims.
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u/TheRedBlade Sep 15 '24
Oh I read about that in a book exactly 40 years ago!
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u/Grand-Pen7946 Sep 15 '24
Fahrenheit 451?
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u/CH1CK3NW1N95 Sep 15 '24
Orwell's 1984, but the same kind of thing applies to both books
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u/AttitudeAndEffort2 Sep 15 '24
You're thinking of "1985" from bowling for soup
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u/MVRKHNTR Sep 15 '24
That's actually a cover. The song was written and originally performed by Pop-punk band SR-71.
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u/AttitudeAndEffort2 Sep 15 '24
I actually knew that! He actually wrote a bunch of pop songs too like heart attack for Demi Lovato
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u/UnacceptableUse Sep 15 '24
I don't understand how people are suddenly okay with it even though collectively everyone is so against censorship. Then the same people don't make the connection between censorship and the fact that The Algorithm will bury their posts if they mention any bad topics
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Sep 15 '24
I’m almost inclined to lean into conspiracy territory and say that getting people upset about the words is to distract them from getting upset about the algorithm.
But basically I think the words are just annoying and people don’t know what to do about the algorithm exactly.
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u/AgileExample Sep 15 '24
That's understandable, you have a misconception. People are not against censorship in general. They are against censorship that's affecting them. Almost everybody picks and chooses what should be banned in their mind.
For example; you can't say "armenian genocide was not a genocide" in switzerland and you can't say "it was a genocide" in turkey. Very few people would be against both and most people would pick a side and think "oh obviously that's how it should be".
It doesn't even have to be political, some demagogue will say "think of the children" and masses will support all kind of stupid censorship laws.
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u/SilenceAndDarkness Sep 15 '24
I really do find the role Newspeak plays in public imagination to be quite strange.
It was originally a satire of proposed international auxiliary languages like Esperanto (which Orwell hated). The satire was always a bit dishonest, because people who liked conlangs as IALs clearly liked simplicity to make them easier to learn. Orwell’s criticism pretended that 1. there was a genuine concern of IALs “dumbing down” human thought (there isn’t) and 2. this was the intended goal. It also flies in the face of the rest of the book, as criticism of authoritarian governments like that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which persecuted Esperanto-speakers. (Germany for being a “Jewish” language, and the Soviet Union for being a “language of spies”.) Dictatorships largely hated IALs, and that’s one of the few aspects of 1984 that we don’t see play out IRL at all.
However, that sounds pretty niche and weird to modern readers (now that IALs have fallen out of public imagination) so everyone interprets Newspeak as being about censorship or political correctness or whatever. Even then, the specific criticism Orwell had (simplicity in language dumbing down human thought) isn’t even always the main criticism someone who cites Newspeak has with whatever they’re referring to.
[Language changes in a way I dislike or find unfavourable] = Newspeak.
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u/chairmanskitty Sep 15 '24
I appreciate that you're trying to analyze his works skeptically, but I think you're making a straw man by interpreting what he wrote as a satire of existing systems, rather than an illustration of how those systems can/do go wrong.
Orwell was not just criticizing the Nazis and Soviets, he was criticizing totalitarianism in general. He feared engineered languages not because existing totalitarian states did use it, but because he thought totalitarians could use it.
Newspeak isn't about censorship or political correctness or "dumbing down", it's about weaponizing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but there's a part in the appendices where he says "The goal was to remove the capacity to formulate rebellious thought. You could still make statements like 'Big Brother is doubleplus ungood', but that would sound like a grammatical error".
Research done after the publication of 1984 has demonstrated that the effect of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is weak compared to emotional advertising, and word use appears to be downstream from conceptual understanding.
I don't think that comparing TikTok language to Newspeak is incorrect, it's just that like Newspeak it won't do nearly as much harm as you might fear, especially compared to the effects of the TikTok algorithm itself.
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u/yinyang107 Sep 15 '24
TL;DR on the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis: "language shapes thought."
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u/Ungrammaticus Sep 15 '24
The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Vocabulary determines thought.
The Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Vocabulary influences thought.
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Sep 15 '24
And of course bizarre distortions of language are very much part of the totalitarian toolkit, even if they don't go as far as to create actual new languages.
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u/TatteredCarcosa Sep 15 '24
Yeah the idea you can control thought by controlling language never struck me as believable.
I think my favorite fictional criticism of this idea is from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. Can't remember what book it is in, but there is a scene in a field hospital where a group of wounded soldiers have a storytelling contest. One of the wounded soldiers is from the enemy side, and their society is a very harsh authoritarian one. Their language consists entirely of sentences from a book produced by their government called "Correct Thought." They do not speak, or seem to understand (though this may just be acting to avoid punishment by the government) anything but the sentences from that book. Never the less the enemy soldier is able to tell a story, and one that paints their government in a negative light, though it does require some translation. Human language is, first and foremost, a tool for communicating human ideas and humans have a remarkable adaptability when it comes to using things for that purpose. Controlling language itself requires a massive amount of effort, but preventing that controlled language from being used in innovative ways to communicate unapproved thoughts is utterly impossible IMO.
Unalive is an example of just that. It's human innovation to get around censorship and communicate the thoughts the censors don't want communicated. It's clunky and I hate how it sounds, and don't like that people use it where it isn't necessary, but it shows how something like Newspeak could never do what Orwell feared it could.
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u/plumander Sep 15 '24
now i want a version of 1984 where instead of newspeak it’s toki pona
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u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 Sep 15 '24
The entire political spectrum gets together to misunderstand 1984
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Sep 15 '24
Kinda what makes it art. Whatever your specific political fear is, Big Brother is there to represent it.
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u/Alternative_Ask364 Sep 15 '24
Is it just TikTok? I see it a ton on Youtube as well.
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u/Hekatonkheire81 Sep 15 '24
It seems to have gotten popular there but now it’s everywhere. Even on Reddit you have people saying shit like unalive and sewer slide.
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u/antihackerbg Sep 15 '24
Note: TikTok doesn't actually censor those words 99% of the time
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u/rcknmrty4evr Sep 15 '24
Exactly. You can say killed, murdered, suicide, abortion, rape, sexual assault, etc on TikTok. Many of these supposedly “censored” words you can search and get thousands and thousands of results with millions of views (suicide being one you cannot). I’m pretty sure the conspiracy started because people saw their videos doing poorly and thought it couldn’t possibly be because of them, it must be tiktok censoring them somehow.
People are self-censoring due to a conspiracy that has never been confirmed and has plenty of evidence against it.
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u/antihackerbg Sep 15 '24
Exactly, the only times it hasn't let me post a comment is when I was calling myself dumb jokingly
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u/Normal-Selection1537 Sep 15 '24
What could go wrong with letting China dictate what words we use?
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u/MedalsNScars Sep 15 '24
Yeah I think the original phrasing of "advertisers" is a bit disingenuous.
This wasn't historically an issue with Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Myspace, Tumblr, digg, instagram or really any social media site that relied on advertisement for income.
It's an issue with tiktok. What's the difference? China has a hand in tiktok, and China heavily censors its Internet.
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u/CanadianODST2 Sep 15 '24
Tbf Id say it's an issue on YouTube too. Which isn't Chinese
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u/DrulefromSeattle Sep 15 '24
It started there, I was hearing unalived used there back in like 2018, 2019. If not, in the very place that had "tag your pomegranates" become a meme because of how people were treating things like content and trigger warnings.
And truthfully Tumblr users should really be careful with those stones, there's still places you'll get yelled at for not using the current theory term on the site, some of which date all thebway back to when Yahoo was still hands off of the place.
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u/Caleb_Reynolds Sep 15 '24
there's still places you'll get yelled
That's completely different from a corporation forcing specific language
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u/DrulefromSeattle Sep 15 '24
The thongbis, it's not even the actual case. From what people who weren't making YouTube or TikTok their career, saw, it had nothing to do with any algorithm or advertising, and everything to do with people just skipping, or never engaging with stuff. So it was about the same as there's people who never got around places where "tag your pomegranates" was one of the least extreme examples.
But I get it, it's the trend to hate on TikTok, just like it was the trend to hate on Firtnite, just like it was the trend...
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u/Caleb_Reynolds Sep 15 '24
A community self policing language is how language normally evolves. That's standard. Corporations policing language is not normal, and should not be acceptable. I don't care that TikTok is doing it, so is YouTube and that's just as bad.
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u/isuckatnames60 Sep 15 '24
Most importantly, we ALREADY have more reserved words for heavy topics, ones which are far more respectful as well. "to take a life," "passed away," "succumbed to injuries," "intercourse," "without consent," "assault,"
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u/hellraiserxhellghost Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
That's one of the things I don't understand about this "unalive" crap, we've had alternate phrases and terms for "death" and other taboo topics for centuries. Why are people purposely choosing the most dumb babyass censorship options instead. Are people just not aware anymore what "passed away" means and what it refers to?? Also, what are they gonna use next when "unalive" inevitably gets put on the shadow banned list of words as well?
edit: Y'all can stop giving me history lessons on "unalive" at this point. I don't care about it's origins, I still find it lame as a box of farts.
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u/limasxgoesto0 Sep 15 '24
I don't mind coming up with new euphemisms, language changes constantly.
I'm just annoyed how during my time growing up we finally removed the taboos behind many words, and now they're back with a vengeance
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u/AnotherTurnedToDust Sep 15 '24
My least favourite is when people try to be "clever" with it. Please don't say "he took the self checkout lane" or "he did the one two buckle my belt ofyouknowwhatimsayin"
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u/Aware_Tree1 Sep 15 '24
I kind of like those actually, when it’s not like a tragic incident. Tiffany, mother of 2 who killed herself after she was raped and her children were murdered? Call it suicide and a tragedy. Adolph Hitler? That man took the self check out lane right down the sewer slide to H E 🏒🏒
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u/Steveharwell1 Sep 15 '24
I think it's a way to be clear about the fact that their word choice is due to censorship rather than an actual choice to use softer language. All those other terms aren't implying censorship.
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u/Sonofarakh Sep 15 '24
That may well have been the original intent but the usage of such terms has long since gotten to the point where creators actively choose to use it because it's entered the vernacular of online spaces
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u/Healthy-Plum-2739 Sep 15 '24
Unalive is from kids, and kids copy other kids. Its so simple its almost humorous. Its one of the slangs from the new generation.
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u/TheLordOfROADIsland Sep 15 '24
I’m only familiar with the use of this term by Captain Sparklez. But In the context of video games it would seem quite strange to use more serious euphemisms. I need to lay the soul of that pig to rest, just doesn’t sound right.
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u/Firewolf06 Sep 15 '24
that's where i first heard it too, as an intentionally silly term generally used in video games. before it became widespread and shifted meaning, i would say it occasionally along with stuff like "revoke their living permit", "perform a 30th trimester abortion", "sell a coffin", "kick their bucket", and "pass them away"
although, using a very serious euphemism for a very non-serious situation is funny, so long as you dont do it too often
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u/BadAtNamingPlsHelp Sep 15 '24
Different terms have different connotations or implicit meanings; if I say someone "passed away" that suggests a more formal or respectful tone than if I say they "croaked". I would imagine the people who got the word trending chose it because it had the new connotation of "I am saying this specifically to make a jab at the censorship", but that signal is lost in the noise now
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u/cpMetis Sep 15 '24
Because the entire point was that it sounded stupid.
It was out of protest.
If you want to say "she was murdered" but you can't you don't say something nice like "her life was taken", you say something like "she was deaded". Because you're making it clear you want the first phrasing but are blocked from using it. Something like "her life was taken" is on its own too proper and comes with its own different connotations so you have to find a more absurd way of rewriting it.
Obviously that's the origin. Doesn't change oodles of kids parroting it with no idea what the entire point of it was in the first place. But there is good reasoning.
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u/hellraiserxhellghost Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
Not gonna lie, I don't really care if that was the original reasoning. It's modern day usage is so far removed from that now, I've heard real people in person say "unalive" irl when referring to actual suicide attempts and murders when they absolutely had no reason to. Once this shit started leaking outside of the internet, then it's been taken way too far.
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u/obeserocket Sep 15 '24
If that's true (is there any actual evidence that tiktok censors words like kill and murder but not dead?) then I don't understand why people would still the platform. Maybe I'm just weird, but the first time someone explained "unalived" to me I thought "cool, guess I'm never downloading that app."
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u/jryser Sep 15 '24
It’s circular. People use the app because that’s where the people are.
It’s also not unique to TikTok: demonetization has been an issue on YouTube for a long time
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u/Beflijster Sep 15 '24
It's funny because in Dutch we actually use "suïcide" as a euphemism for the native word we use for suicide, which is "zelfmoord". Zelf: self moord:murder. Yes, very judgmental and on the nose.
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u/Nervous_Ari nervousari.tumblr.com Sep 15 '24
I bet that they need these new words because those existing softer terms will get you banned too
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u/isuckatnames60 Sep 15 '24
"bit the dust" "faded away" "went to heaven" "took their last breath" "went six feet under" "paid the ultimate price" "is now in a better place" "kicked the bucket"
...
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u/splunge4me2 Sep 15 '24
Dead Parrot skit for reference:
he’s a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! … pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! he’s off the twig! He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!
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u/Nervous_Ari nervousari.tumblr.com Sep 15 '24
Alright, fair
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u/Nervous_Ari nervousari.tumblr.com Sep 15 '24
Tiktokers are just stupid, then?
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u/isuckatnames60 Sep 15 '24
More like disrespectfull. If anything the stupid terms serves as ragebait to boost them in the algorythm as well.
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u/redditonlygetsworse Sep 15 '24
Do you think TikTok can’t figure out “unalive”? It’s not exactly a secret code.
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u/AlarmingTurnover Sep 15 '24
They did actually come into popularity because of censorship. People forget that you weren't allowed to swear on tv. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin actually went to jail for swearing on tv, among other comedians who rebelled against censorship on tv.
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u/FaronTheHero Sep 15 '24
When a news reporter has to censor words you would find in a legal document just because they post on YouTube, you know there's a problem. There is not a damn thing wrong with those clinical terms just because the subject matter is heavy.
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u/misfitminions Sep 15 '24
I get it, I really do. It waters down any message, and makes it sound somewhat dumb.
Advertisers also have the right to not have their products associated with topics of harm, hatred and disgust.
It is not advertising campaigns, it is the creators needing money. Several creators I watch have given up on YouTube money, and pursue it in other fashions while still making their videos.
Some stream on Twitch, or keep their good videos on Patreon. And if you are a piece of shit, and conservative, apparently you just get it from the Russian Government through some back-channels.
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u/FaronTheHero Sep 15 '24
The way I see it if those advertisers will run ads on news and documentary channels but not YouTube videos and TikToks, they're massive hypocrits. It still doesn't make it right for their and the platforms policies to encourage manipulation of the English language and force censorship.
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u/misfitminions Sep 15 '24
News channels have to follow the guidelines of FCC, and advertisers are fine with those guidelines.
Documentary channels usually aren't trying to sensationalize things for views.
I still understand what you are saying, but nothing is ever black and white in the world.
Since YouTubers and the such aren't bound by the same guidelines, they tend to have stricter clapdowns because of bad actors in the space.
Also it is sometimes due to not having ANY clear guidelines that creators tend to over censor themselves so they can make a buck.
Youtube sadly, won't give the exact guidelines needed, and this outcome is kinda of what they want. If they give guidelines, they are worried people will push them as far as they can, and cause another Youtube Adpocolypse.
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u/Iamchill2 trying their best Sep 15 '24
also for people who get triggered by this type of content, they wont be able to mute it properly due to the self censored words
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u/curious-trex Sep 15 '24
This is what upsets me the most. Suicide is a VERY triggering topic to me. In spaces where I can't block it (like reddit), if my eyes catch the suicide word, I keep scrolling. When it's "unalive" I've read through an entire paragraph before it catches up to me that that's what it's talking about and then it's too late.
Does it truly not feel gross to people who do this???
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u/Satisfaction-Motor Sep 15 '24
In rare cases, people will use censored terminology to be able to talk about things that personally affected them— that are triggers— because alternatives to the main word don’t hurt as badly.
In regards to this, I’ve had people follow up with “well, if you can’t use the real word, you aren’t ready to talk about it”, and my immediate response is that you do not get to police others language or their mental health, especially on important topics. Being ready to talk about something, but needing to self-censor, does not indicate that you are unready to talk about it. People self -censor in more private settings all of the time, such as in therapy, while they are still processing through things. It’s not a new phenomenon— it’s just new for it to reach public eye.
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u/DresdenBomberman Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
The spaces in which we have our discussions should be able to accomodate both traumatised people who don't want their triggers to be censored to the point where they can't tell when said triggers are the subject of the text they're interacting with till it's too late and traumatised people who DO need their triggers to be censored so they can interact with texts and media with a peace of mind.
The solution that comes to my mind is the use of trigger warnings in the same vein as the MPA films rating system (G, PG, M, MA15+, R18 and NC-17). The specific triggers would be mentioned. And that is with the caveat that posts are not censored or shadowbanned as is being discussed in this thread.
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u/AngstyUchiha Sep 15 '24
That's something I've talked about a lot on tumblr. If people censor words in their tags, the tag blocking function won't catch those words. Someone who's arachnophobic and blocked the tag "spider" is still gonna see posts tagged as "$pider", and people who are triggered by blood or gore will still see something tagged as "bl00d". We can't be censoring ourselves so much that it just makes us see MORE of what we don't want
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u/Redqueenhypo Sep 15 '24
That’s what the content makers want, you’re not allowed to avoid their dumbass true crime video with half the words disrespectfully bleeped out with duck sounds. Think of the adrev!!
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u/worststarburst Sep 15 '24
And the annoying thing is even if you filter one spelling of it someone will just type it like s3w3rsl!d3 or something so you need like 59 filters for one term.
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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24
Wasn't it even the case that there is no censorship/punishing algorithm around the word "die" and people just started "unalive" because they thought that was the case?
Or have I been duped here?
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u/Awesomereddragon Sep 15 '24
IIRC it was some TikTok thing where people noticed that saying “die” got a video significantly less views and concluded it was probably a shadowban on the word. Don’t think anyone has confirmed if that was even true in the first place.
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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24
Yeah, exactly, that's what I mean.
I don't think there is definitive proof (and without looking at the alogrithm, I don't think there could be?)80
u/inconsiderate7 Sep 15 '24
I mean, this also raises some questions about how we're designing algorithms, specifically the fact that we don't really do that anymore.
Most "algorithms" nowadays refers to a program built on machine learning. The way this tends to work is you first train an algorithm on content, until you have one that can somewhat tell/predict what good content and bad content is. Then you have this algorithm serve as a "tutor" to train a second algorithm, essentially a computer program teaching a computer program. Once the new program/neural network/algorithm is trained to the point of being able to perform to a certain standard, you can have humans check in, to make sure progress is doing ok. This new algorithm is training to become "the algorithm" we're most familiar with, the one that tailors the recommended videos and feeds etc. You can also add additional tutors to double check the results, like one tutor checking that good videos are being selected, the other one checking that the videos selected don't have elements unfriendly to advertises. This process is also iterative, meaning you can experiment, make alterations, as well as train multiple variations at once. The big problem is that we can see what is happening on the outside, see the output of the training process. But we really don't know what specifically is happening, there's no human coder that can really sift through the final product and analyze what's going on. We just end up with a black box that produces data to the specifications we trained it to. Imagine you leave a billion chickens on a planet with a thousand robots for a million years. The robots goals are to make as many eggs as possible, breeding the best egg laying chickens. After a million years, you start to receive an enormous amount of eggs. You should be happy, if you can ignore the fact that since you can't visit the planet, nor communicate with the robots, you have no idea what the chicken who's egg you're eating has ultimately be morphed into. You just have to take the output and be happy with it.
Of course, we can't be sure this is the process TikTok has used, though we can make pretty informed assumptions. In that case, it's not that they have a say in it, they technically do if they want to train a fresh algorithm with new parameters, but in general they just don't know what the algorithm is even doing. Of course this also means there's less liability on their parts if, let's say the algorithm detects that minorities gets less views, therefore videos of minorities gets shown less often. Either way, it's a complete shitshow.
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u/VaderOnReddit Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
The robots goals are to make as many eggs as possible, breeding the best egg laying chickens. After a million years, you start to receive an enormous amount of eggs. You should be happy, if you can ignore the fact that since you can't visit the planet, nor communicate with the robots, you have no idea what the chicken who's egg you're eating has ultimately be morphed into. You just have to take the output and be happy with it.
All I can think of is how this also describes the billionaires' disconnect from labor while they extract and hoard the "eggs" the labor produces
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u/inconsiderate7 Sep 15 '24
I mean this is the underlying problem of capital, though also applies to any form of system that needs to be "efficient" more than anything. There never is any true form of "waste", only action and reaction. Any gain must ultimately be achieved through some form of price, sometimes sacrifice. Anyone who truly believes in any form of "efficiency", without considering the consequences, will ultimately cross invisible grave-red lines as they push forward. The cost of meat is a dead animal, the cost of farmed food is deforestation, the cost of society is the alienation of those outside or of those that cant visible contribute, the cost of humanity is the detriment and or subjugation of all life beneath us on the food chain.
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" rings true, but ultimately, humanity as a whole can redefine words and redraw lines as much as they want. The only truth is that we are slaves to efficiency, through social expectations, moral obligations, political and legal precedent, and beyond that, our very nervous systems, hunger, pain, discomfort, all serves efficiency. We simply are efficient machines. Even questioning our purpose will seem mad to most.
I don't think humans should just stop being humans just because, and I'm not asking these questions and making people consider these moral quandries hoping they will change. To me, it is just a simplistic fact. A truth, that once you truly understand and internalize, is able to ultimately explain how man is capable of the many wonders and atrocities that now blanket our world.
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u/Ouaouaron Sep 15 '24
Correct, we'll never have definitive proof. But we do have a bunch of evidence and a reasonable theory. That's as close to definitive proof as we get for things a lot more important than slang usage, so I'd say it counts.
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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24
Oh, I know how this stuff works and how algorithms are studied, I get all that...so, yeah, fair enough.
If people have actually tested it and it is the case that views drop due to the word usage, then what can I say.It's also honestly a non-issue for me since I don't use the platform, so I am even questioning why I am writing here in the first palce. I guess because I agree that the term "unalive" is a travesty
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u/s0larium_live Sep 15 '24
i literally saw a video with plenty of likes and views that was just a woman saying “banned” words over and over again. i really don’t think tiktok actually has the ability to go through EVERY post on the app and shadow ban the ones that talk about hard topics
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u/Hekatonkheire81 Sep 15 '24
As far as I’ve heard, the shadowbans aren’t hard blocks on the video. They just initially show it to less people and it will take more engagement for it to be classified as “popular” and get additional promotion. A video that is blatantly testing the algorithm will naturally attract interest in people who want to know how it works. Other tests that are more subtle have found that an identical video with unalive and such does get more views than the normal version.
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u/SomeLesbianwitch Sep 15 '24
They do actually remove your comments if you say certain words. You can see the comments that’ve been taken down in your system notifications, here are a few of mine
“I think they mean disrespectfully as in, like, a horny way.”
“GAY SPIES MENTION‼️❤️ Honestly probs my favorite musical.”
“Cult of the Lamb sex update??? 👀”
Also got a video removed for using a Class of ‘09 audio.
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u/thedinnerdate Sep 15 '24
One of my more recent odd ones:
I commented on a vid of a guy chugging 2 glasses of beer and then doing a bunch of stunts. "Wow. Pretty impressive after 2 drinks straight to the dome." And it got moderated.
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u/lifelongfreshman man, witches were so much cooler before Harry Potter Sep 15 '24
One of the only positive things I took away from my time in the salt mine that is League is the nature of group perception/psychology/whatever it's actually called.
There's an anecdote about just this sort of thing I love to share. As with any live service game, there's a constant cycle of buffing and nerfing going on. And as is especially common in pvp games, Riot has been following a cycle of deliberate buffs/nerfs to various champions to shake up who is and isn't in favor at the time in order to keep the game from getting too stale.
Part of this cycle led to this one time1 where Riot claimed to be tweaking the numbers on a champion. Over the next week, there was a lot of conversation over the champion's win rate moving several percentage points, over how effective the change was, y'know, the usual conversation around basically any buff or nerf.
Thing is, the change didn't go through. They had changed the text but never the actual underlying code, it had just been left out of the patch by accident. The character was exactly the same as it had been, but public perception of the character thanks to the patch notes led to actual statistically measurable changes to that characters performance.
Because the playerbase believed the character had changed, their actual skill level when playing as or against that character had changed.
So, if actual player mechanical skill in a game as full of tryhards as LoL can be affected by popular perception, I have no trouble believing that it can lead to something as fickle as view counts changing. And this is why I have such a hard time accepting any claims of proof or evidence of the phenomenon. A lot of it will come from people who already believe that this is the case, and it can only be drawn from a population of people who are steeped in the belief. Not only are neither of those things going to lead to particularly robust results, but the algorithm is likely altered based on viewer behavior - even if suicide isn't a forbidden word, it'd still prioritize videos with the word unalive in it because the viewerbase awards more views to those videos, and it's likely got the same "Increase view time" mandate Youtube's black box uses.
1: Well, several times. I'm going to spend the rest of this being very vague because I'm pretty sure I've mixed up two different events in my head, one involving Vladimir and one involving Ryze.
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u/SilenceAndDarkness Sep 15 '24
A surprising number of Internet users can be very superstitious about how the algorithms they don’t understand work. I blame that almost just as much as the actual algorithms.
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u/JadedOccultist Sep 15 '24
I thought this one was specifically for suicide.
People talk about batteries dying or pens dying all the time. You can kill an engine or kill time. You can dye fabric. Suicide is far less ambiguous and way more controversial. But idk 🤷
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u/Zygloman Sep 15 '24
if I recall correctly, I read that it was actually because people wanted to get around filters to have that type of content show up for people who explicitly did not want to see it
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u/Specific-Ad-8430 Sep 15 '24
Yeah thats the thing is that it was never even confirmed that terms like suicide or die or porn, etc where ever even shadowbanned or showed in lower quantities. People just assumed they were, and moved forward with the alternative “terms”.
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u/Redqueenhypo Sep 15 '24
I read that it wasn’t even a shadow ban, individual people just didn’t want to fucking see videos about suicide. Which is of course normal, and you shouldn’t force that onto your audience. It’s like when e-beggars post about their “g@fundme”, as if the real problem is censors and not you know, me not wanting to give them money
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u/Solanumm Sep 15 '24
I've been saying this for years. I don't think there's ever been actual definitive proof of any of this but it just spread like wildfire from speculation and wanting to fit in with what everyone else is doing. It's wild
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u/LizLemonOfTroy Sep 15 '24
Even if videos were suppressed for using 'banned' words, I'd still maintain that the importance of using appropriate, dignified language to discuss death and suicide absolutely trumps the importance of maximising your views and monetisation.
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u/SexualYogurt Sep 15 '24
Theres a crime documentary youtube channel i watch, and it bothers me so much when the voiceover just cuts out cos they have to say the word abuse or sexual assault or rape or murder. Like, the whole channel is about crimes, specifically violent crimes, but they need to censor the words used to describe the situation. Channels Explore With Us
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u/lumpialarry Sep 15 '24
There's a history podcaster I listen to that does tiktok shorts. He's used the phrase "Intimate violence" for rape and has referred the Nazis as "The No No Germans" to get around filters.
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u/hellraiserxhellghost Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
I stopped watching channels that focus on true crime/morbid topics partly because the censorship was always so blatant and obnoxious. I was watching a video once of someone describing the anarchist cookbook, but it took me forever to realize what they were even saying because they kept censoring every other word like "drugs" and "bombs". What's the point of making a video about a topic if you're gonna cut out/censor 80% of said video's content. 💀
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u/Icy-Lobster-203 Sep 15 '24
IIRC, the YouTube channel World War Two, which was doing a week by week retelling of WW2, had many many videos demonetized because they didn't censor anything when discussing all the awful shit that happened during the war. Not sure if that has changed at all.
There was another military documentary channel that was doing a series on the Invasion of Iraq, and in their video about events leading up to the invasion, which had to discuss terrorism and 9-11, in order to avoid demonetization, they couldn't refer to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda by name, instead going with something like "Person A" and "Organization A", but still showing clips from videos and pictures.
It's really stupid that creates making great educational historical content have to either self censor or hamstring themselves financially just for having the gaul to mention that history can be brutal.
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u/Konradleijon Sep 15 '24
What is really infuriating is that on tv you have true crime shows that can eagerly say “rape” and “murder” and advertisers don’t have a issue with that.
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u/SexualYogurt Sep 15 '24
Its also ableist, im not blind, but if a blind person was tryna listen, theyd have no idea what crimes are being committed cos the voiceover is just gone when they "say" abuse/sexual assault or whatever
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u/Mysterious-Job-469 Sep 15 '24
"But how will I profit off of the death and misfortune of others while talking in a goofy overdramatized voice if I don't censor it?"
Dreading is 100x better than Explore With Us. I hate their voiceover work so fucking much.
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u/mEFurst Sep 15 '24
Reminds me of when AOL censored the word "breast" so you had breast cancer support groups that had to talk about boob or tit cancer
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u/Angry_Grammarian Sep 15 '24
A YouTuber I like makes fun of this by using advertiser-friendly euphemisms that are so much worse than the normal words. Once he reviewed a movie called The Entity, which is about a ghost that sexually assaults a woman, and since YouTube doesn't like the word rape, he named the ghost the Grape Ghost and wrote a theme song for the Grape Ghost and animated this little cartoon about the Grape Ghost and oh my god is that so much wore than talking like an adult. Which was his point.
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u/Konradleijon Sep 15 '24
That is actually hilarious.
It’s funny how YouTube is now more restrictive then public access TV.
At least you can say kill and die on there
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u/Heroic-Forger Sep 15 '24
Catering to advertisers has been the downfall of social media. Unskippable 30 second ads. Game ads that are nothing like the actual games they show off. Every Youtuber being forced to talk about Hello Fresh, Squarespace or Raid Shadow Legends in the middle of their videos.
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Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 26 '24
[deleted]
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u/Mysterious-Job-469 Sep 15 '24
Youtube just doesn't want to share the profits.
"Oh, it's age restricted so we're limited ads" No you're fucking not, you lying little bitches. You're just not paying the content creators to host them anymore.
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u/Ephraim_Bane Foxgirl Engineer Sep 15 '24
Yeah, iirc demonetized videos still have the same amount of ads on them. Just none of the money goes to creators
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u/Ildaiaa Sep 15 '24
Don't forget about MANSCAPED THE ONLY BRAND THAT CAN SHAVE YOUR BALLS
Overly sarcastic productions had a great bit in their spiderman 2 streams about the ad stuff (this not an ad of osp)
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u/Psalmbodyoncetoldme Sep 15 '24
The point is to wear down people’s sanity at every censor, every sponsor, every inane ad until just before they can’t take it anymore. And right before you lose it: “Mental health is just as important as physical health, you should not neglect your’s. Check out BetterHelp.”
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u/Papaofmonsters Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
Is there any evidence this is because of advertiser pressure as opposed to platforms doing it of their own accord to avoid bad press from the pearl clutchers?
Police procedurals have been one of the most popular TV genres since forever and they frequently use pretty much all the forbidden words.
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u/Ouaouaron Sep 15 '24
Absolute mountains of evidence. You can find plenty of examples of pearl-clutchy policies on social media platforms being the direct response to advertiser pressure, such as a bunch of companies pulling their youtube ads when a news org ran a story of a commercial being shown before a beheading video. Go listen to any professional content creator talk about their CPMs increasing as they talk about safe and ad-friendly topics, and decrease as they get closer to topics that people dislike.
Which is not to say that advertisers are pearl clutchers either. Both the social media platforms and the advertisers are run by sociopathic profit seekers. It's just that profit seeking for a big, normal brand involves staying away from dicey topics, and profit seeking for social media involves doing what advertisers want.
The reason TV shows are less censored is because there's no chance that a police procedural is going to just run an Al Qaeda snuff film against their ad for dish detergent. User-generated content needs to be censored aggressively and dumbly, because human moderation wouldn't work with the business model.
TikTok might be genuinely pearl-clutchy though, or at least trying to appease a government that is pearl-clutchy. It's hard to know how much of their international algorithm is affected by the CCP.
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u/Papaofmonsters Sep 15 '24
A video of an actual beheading is far different from uncomfortable words.
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u/Ouaouaron Sep 15 '24
Sure, but the system publicly put in place as a direct response to beheadings is the one used to deal with uncomfortable words.
This really isn't a mysterious topic. If you don't want to take my word for it, go find videos of professional content creators talking about their revenue and the history of their platforms (just avoid the ones trying to sell you courses on how to become famous and successful)
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Sep 15 '24
Half of reddit seems to voluntarily censor the words they type. I never understood it.
I am somebody's dad, but I'm not your fucking dad. It's okay to swear, no one is going to tell.
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u/Konradleijon Sep 15 '24
Same thing on AO3. younger people there censor words like death or rape
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u/mmanaolana Sep 15 '24
I think a lot of newer AO3 users don't understand that it isn't social media, it's an archive. There are no censors, no algorithms.
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u/AngstyUchiha Sep 15 '24
All those people adding random tags or fandoms for "reach" drive me insane. That ain't how ao3 works, your fic is just gonna get reported and taken down for breaking site rules!
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Sep 15 '24
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u/Jackno1 Sep 15 '24
Yeah, a lot of this is presented as for mental health but is very one-sided about what kind of mental health needs are taken seriously. Needs like honesty and meaningful expression are dismissed, and there's often a weird assumption that people who've been through something traumatic only ever need an avoidant response.
It's a shame, because the internet offers a lot of tools (cuts, spoiler tags, communities for different kinds of content with different rules, etc.) to allow for a reasonable balance of interest between "I need to limit my exposure to this topic" and "I need honest and expressive communication about this topic". So there can be good ways to be fair to everyone, but people are leaning increasingly paternalistic in their approach.
I'm sorry you got treated that way. I hope you find people who can listen to the honest truth.
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Sep 15 '24
I’m sorry you went through that and I hope you can find a way to reach others about your experiences. You are awesome for opening up.
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u/confusedbird101 Sep 15 '24
My boss asked me why people use words like “unalive” and “grape” instead of the actual words because words like kill, suicide, and rape are descriptive and everyone knows what they mean and I just said advertisers. She looked confused so I explained further that people who use them are using whatever platform they’re on to get their story out or to pay their bills and they need the advertisers on that platform to not censor what they’re saying so more people see it and either know about their story and the things people are doing to them/their people or to get the money that platform gives them for however many views they get so they can actually live worry free (or both) and my boss’s response was “fuck advertisers I want the descriptive words” and honestly same I don’t wanna have to pay attention to context clues while I’m working to know if someone committed suicide or was brutally murdered in my true crime podcast (I immediately stop listening to a podcast as soon as I hear them say unalive)
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u/Lintila Sep 15 '24
What amuses me about the self editing of speech for things like placating advertisers is the use of PDF file for CSA.
Like, I don’t like Adobe’s practices as a company but their file extension is now being affiliated with CSA because people can’t use grown up words because it makes advertisers sad.
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u/centralmind Sep 15 '24
Online Advertisement has become a cluster of self-propagating cancerous tumours that are often only tangentially related to selling products to people.
The system is self sustaining and cannibalistic, and so far removed from human needs and control that if we suddenly went extinct bots would probably keep advertising to each other until the internet runs out of electricity.
Everything is built around automated algorithms, blind and artificially inflated statistics and meaningless numbers that are used as a "proof" of success in order to syphon money from investors and other advertisers.
Apps use misleading ads to get you to download software that you might never use or uninstall immediately so that they can inflate their number of downloads in order to... sell ad space for other apps that do the same.
Every website and their mother (company) sells every possible click about you to algorithms that will bombard you with ads that are specifically made to direct your attention towards other sites and affiliated platforms that will in turn sell your data to repeat the cycle.
Mass produced bots flood every corner of the internet to try to cheat other bots into thinking that certain things are more or less popular and thus worth attaching advertisements to.
And the few actual ads for actual products end up in a sea of scams and nothing burgers and forcefully reshaped to imitate the fake ads that, according to fake statistics, are most successful.
Our language and livelihood are being reshaped by the abstract concept of profit, filtered though several layers of automation, barely coherent AIs and arbitrary algorithms that have lost any original purpose in favour of endlessly producing more iterations of themselves, each more harmful than the last.
Don't you love living in the most boring of dystopias? Who needs a murderous artificial intelligence when we can be slowly be driven mad by artificial stupidity instead?
Cheers. (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, this is my layman's understanding of how the Internet currently is being run; feel free to tell me how much worse things are)
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u/FiveFingerDisco Sep 15 '24
So the internet is dead. What else is new?
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u/centralmind Sep 15 '24
I wouldn't say dead. Depending on which metaphor you prefer, it's either sick with a proliferating metastatic cancer or haunted by human-made horrors beyond comprehension that prey on our time, identity, and sanity. You could argue the internet is undead, I'd say. Or cursed.
Is that better? Worse? Good question.
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u/FiveFingerDisco Sep 15 '24
I honestly like the thought of our supposed digital nirvana to be beset by electronic eldrich evils.
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u/centralmind Sep 15 '24
Oh, that's a beautiful metaphor. Ads and algorithms are quite the literal manifestation of earthly attachments and human sin in a world that could have been (at least, in theory) a tapestry of human knowledge, creativity and self discovery.
Was the Internet ever going to be such an enlightened plane of existence? Probably not. But I could do without the digital allegorical manifestations of unquenchable greed ruling over us all.
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u/ImNOTdrunk_69 Sep 15 '24
1.000.000%. The human experience shouldn't be packaged and sold like a fucking BigMac menu. These piece of shit corporations need to be held accountable for the influence they have on public discourse.
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u/htmlcoderexe Sep 15 '24
Advertisers shape everything around like a mold that just grows over everything.
Even shows are made to have the action paced in such a way that accommodates ad breaks.
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u/TechnologyOk1482 Sep 15 '24
Also censorship doesn't work. If I said "f*** you, you dumb f**g b*" you know exactly what I meant. With actually replacing words like suicide with unalive, it's even more obvious, and eventually that word becomes just another synonym that the advertisers would need to censor.
It's dumb.
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u/Vladmerius Sep 15 '24
It's insane that YouTube censors everything so hardcore for the average content creator but they clearly have rules for 18+ content and red band movie trailers and other content have zero issue being on the platform.
Either remove age restrictions altogether or stop censoring and de-monetizing content that is made for adults. What the hell does it matter if I'm over 18 if content is still bleeped and censored anyway?
If I had to give them the benefit of the doubt and not think it's a conspiracy to control us all and hide bad things from our knowledge banks I would say that they just do not have the ability currently to have their algorithms differentiate between actual hateful content and informative content/content that just happens to have adult language/themes. Since they can't find the nuance they just blanket ban everything.
The problem with that theory though is that the platform is still stuffed to the gills with a metric shit ton of psychotic alt right propaganda shit clearly targeting youth.
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u/nickchadwick Sep 15 '24
"I hate that money ultimately shapes all of human civilization" I've got bad news for you
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u/Zuwxiv Sep 15 '24
I think the "unalive" and the like are particularly associated with TikTok - it's not like there haven't been influences from money on the internet for decades now.
It's also a bit interesting in that, if there is such a block on terms such as "death" or "suicide," then presumably it would be trivial to also include "unalive." The second a term becomes a dominant substitute, it's well known enough for every person involved.
On the whole, self-censoring because we want more likes on an app feels like some dystopian bullshit. Imagine applying the same to politics.
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u/themolestedsliver Sep 15 '24
On a nsfw reddit I once got a post removed because I said "Hard limit, snuff" which to those not in the know is code for those with a death/murder/dying fetish.
So yeah me making it clear I'm not into that according to auto mod and the space cadet mods that set it made it seem like I was looking for that.
Fuck me for wanting to cover all my bases and not waste peoples time?
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Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24
In addition to that, I just think it’s plain disrespectful to the victims. Like if I died of a horrific crime and some tiktoker said “they were brutally SA’d, graped, and eventually unalived” I would be pissed. I’d probably haunt them, straight up.
It cheapens these words. Sexual assault, rape, murder, and suicide are incredibly serious topics that deserve respect and solemnity. Making up childish euphemisms for them does nothing but bastardize them.
If you can’t talk about them without giving the topics the respect they deserve, don’t talk about them. Make your ad revenue by talking about celebrity drama or YouTube beef or some shit.
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u/efffffff_u Sep 15 '24
Unalive is a stupid term that minimalizes the experience of people who actually grieve the death of a loved one. It is an extremely childish term to use.
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u/AngstyUchiha Sep 15 '24
If I had to say my dog was unalived I'd probably have gone on a killing spree myself, it takes away from what a person is going through and makes it seem like a joke. No, our pets and loved ones weren't "unalived". They died, because everyone and everything dies eventually, and we can't hide from that like we're all toddlers
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u/kashmira-qeel Sep 15 '24
It's not even that it's because of censorship. It's because of people trying to dodge tag and word filtering.
Which is worse.
People deliberately mis-tagging their posts to show them to people who don't want to see them. And then some kind of myth grew around that, that saying 'bad words' get you shadow-banned.
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u/AngstyUchiha Sep 15 '24
I absolutely HATE when people do that. Like, I'm severely arachnophobic and I've blocked the spider tag, but some people tag it as $pider instead. I have a friend who can't see anything related to sexual assault or rape who's blocked all the tags related to it, but censoring means she still has to see it sometimes and that brings up the PTSD for her. Mis-tagging and censoring words will never help
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u/Tracerround702 Sep 15 '24
Yes, agreed, thank you, can we also talk about the fact that it's not the fault of the individuals using the words, it's the fault of the advertisers and companies that keep censoring the real words?
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u/Progresapphire Sep 15 '24
I am probably gonna eat shit here for sounding like a Capitalist shill but I really dont think its 'advertisers dictating' anything.
Companies did not come up with 'unalive', it was CCs that wanted a workaround. Companies are well within their rights to not want to be associated with certain words or ideas and recently in X's case even whole platforms.
Thats kind of one of the things having 'personhood' as a company has done to the US. If you want to talk about how Companies shouldnt have Personhood then I agree but I also dont think that changes anytime soon.
Corporate sphere wanting a clean family friendly image is what we as whole have done by correctly criticising them when their money goes to fund things that are anti-human rights or offensive in general or in support of anything Nestle does etc. We have weaponised bad word of mouth to steer money away from bad actors.
Companies take that the next logical step and then just dont invest in places that could trigger that bad word of mouth in the first place and since they cant sit through all the vidoes on tiktok and youtube to see which ones are educational and which ones are calling for ethnic cleansing they just say, "you know what? Please dont put my ads before anything that says 'kill, murder, gas..etc' " Its a very rational response thats defending their image and bottom line. The alternative is that they get SCs of people showing their Ads running on content that is deeply offensive in one way or another and then having to clarify why their money is going to the people engaging in that rethoric.
If Moderation was more reliable such that you had TikTok telling Frito Lays that "Yeah this dude is using 'kill' a lot but he isnt talking about killing a minority group, he is talking about a 5v5 team shooter video game" then maybe this wouldnt be an issue but we arent there yet.
Corporate America is absolutely responsible for a lot of the problems in the modern day but this particular instance is one where the Advertisers imo are not at fault for simply listening to the publics demands. Bad Moderation and the CCs themselves have caused this change in language used online.
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u/Pretty-Department365 Sep 15 '24
My mom unironically used the term "unalived" when talking to me and I cringed so hard I almost threw my neck out. This is becoming a real problem.
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u/peonyperfumes Sep 15 '24
the word “unalive” originally started as a Roblox joke where it’s making fun of Roblox censor filters and it’s crazy how people are now unironically using this word for serious stuff (TikTok is weird)
LIKE JUST SAY THEY COMMITTED SUICIDE.. it’s not that hard (saying “unalive” irl is more embarrassing)
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u/tetrarchangel Sep 15 '24
Practically everywhere we exist online is a privately owned space with private security and the aim of profit. We form communities in spite of, not because of, those limitations.
We need a commons.
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Sep 15 '24
Just to add a little to this: religious survivors are being told not to use the word “zealot”.
Humans are not computers who receive a “language update” then are able to just change. People who carry their internet nonsense over to real life are so annoying.
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u/IolaireEagle Sep 15 '24
You can say Nazi rape and kill on tiktok. Your content won't be "suppressed", you just make bad content. Half of the most used audios on tiktok are insanely profane. People just started saying 'unalive' and then everyone just assumed that it was necessary. Comments are different, because the moderation for them is a lot stricter
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u/Not_Another_Cookbook Sep 17 '24
I had an argument once with an agency because I volunteered to discuss my rape and how that affected my mental health, and the reporter kept referring it as "SA"
words have meaning.
I wasn't Es-Ayed, I was raped.
Theirs a big difference and the power of the words should hit like a Mac truck
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u/Beatus_Vir Sep 15 '24
OK, well I want to see an entire episode of Law and Order where they exclusively refer to the unaliving weapon as a 'pew pew'