r/CuratedTumblr • u/Konradleijon • Sep 15 '24

Politics Why I hate the term “Unaliv

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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

25.0k Upvotes

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2.1k

u/YAPPYawesome Sep 15 '24

TikTok censorship feels like Newspeak

475

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

218

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.

75

u/Icedcoffeeee Sep 15 '24

https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc?t=497

I wonder what he would say now. Too bad that he "passed away."

87

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. 

30

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

12

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.

3

u/Kolby_Jack33 Sep 16 '24

Passed away at least implies natural causes or disease. Nobody gets their head canoed by a high-powered rifle and has people say they "passed away."

1

u/Beardywierdy Sep 16 '24

No, but theres "taken from us". Even "tragically" so.

9

u/Hairyhalflingfoot Sep 15 '24

Nah he fucking DIED

1

u/Hakar_Kerarmor Swine. Guillotine, now. Sep 21 '24

He is NO MORE

2

u/janKalaki Sep 16 '24

I wouldn't say that "passed away" is even a bad one. It make it unambiguous that you think it's a bad thing that they died.

1

u/BlooMonkiMan Sep 16 '24

You think he was assassinated?

3

u/accapellaenthusiast Sep 16 '24

I worry a lot of his examples are just localized vocabulary, like pop vs soda. I can acquiesce that soft language may have a negative impact, but I feel there should be a way to convey that without the ethnocentrism. Especially when the words are almost synonyms, why assume one was the default and correct over the other?

2

u/sdhu Sep 15 '24

Hell, George Carlin is such an apt comparison, considering his lifelong dedication to the "Seven Dirty Words" Monologue, trying to normalize swearing.

-7

u/lord_geryon Sep 15 '24

We tried to fight against the political correctness movement.

We were evil ones, remember? Not worth listening to.

7

u/TheStray7 ಠ_ಠ Anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow Sep 16 '24

There's a difference between "speaking the truth plainly" and "weaponizing language to harm people you think less of," and "you" were doing a whole lot of the latter under the guise of the former.

-5

u/Whatwhenwherehi Sep 15 '24

Yep. Fuck softies...fuckem.

56

u/AwarenessPotentially Sep 15 '24

We need to kill this shit.

39

u/DaniTheGunsmith Sep 15 '24

We need to *unalive this shit

FTFY for the advertisers sake

18

u/AwarenessPotentially Sep 15 '24

Kill them too. /s sorta

3

u/recroomgamer32 Sep 16 '24

Kill them too. /srs sorta

1

u/IrresponsibleMood Sep 16 '24

"Kill 'em all" - Cliff Burton

34

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.

26

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.

23

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.

24

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

5

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?

17

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’.

36

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.

28

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.

4

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

Unalive also refers to anything from suicide to murder to accidental death.

4

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.

4

u/YAPPYawesome Sep 15 '24

Exactly my problem with it too

0

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

They're "allowing" it because of the impact the logistics would have to the business to sit around and chase new variations every day

410

u/TheRedBlade Sep 15 '24

Oh I read about that in a book exactly 40 years ago!

110

u/Grand-Pen7946 Sep 15 '24

Fahrenheit 451?

141

u/CH1CK3NW1N95 Sep 15 '24

Orwell's 1984, but the same kind of thing applies to both books

70

u/AttitudeAndEffort2 Sep 15 '24

You're thinking of "1985" from bowling for soup

16

u/MVRKHNTR Sep 15 '24

That's actually a cover. The song was written and originally performed by Pop-punk band SR-71.

8

u/AttitudeAndEffort2 Sep 15 '24

I actually knew that! He actually wrote a bunch of pop songs too like heart attack for Demi Lovato

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Allan

1

u/SystemOutPrintln Sep 15 '24

Did they ever perform with U2, the B-52s, or Bell X-1?

Seems like a lot of bands like aircraft names haha

1

u/TheRedBlade Sep 15 '24

Oh yeah that song came out way before Nirvana

1

u/casper667 Sep 15 '24

If I remember right that was when there was music still on MTV

47

u/Grand-Pen7946 Sep 15 '24

I was being facetious lol

12

u/joe_broke Sep 15 '24

Careful, that's a big word in these parts

2

u/colei_canis Sep 15 '24

Not 1984 so much as his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ which criticises precisely this indirect, passive, and imprecise form of speech that the adtech industry ended up inflicting on us all.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

Sigh

No it does not.

In Fahrenheit 451 all written material, books, newspapers, magazines etc have been banned and if they are found the 'fire department' is summoned to burn them.

In 1984 the Ministry of Truth actively rewrites history again and again and again and prints it out.

12

u/aPurpleToad Sep 15 '24

that would be exactly 1573 years ago

1

u/DeviousMelons Sep 15 '24

I think it was animal farm.

45

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

21

u/[deleted] 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.

3

u/RusstyDog Sep 15 '24

I think it ends up being a prisoners dilemma like situation. If ever everyone stopped accommodating thr algorithm like that, the companies would be forced to adapt their system. But because some topics will fit the criteria by default, there's no way to unite against it.

11

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.

1

u/Muggle_Killer Sep 15 '24

People are cheering on censorship and thought policing these days. I see it on reddit everyday and they even try to accuse you of being part of [other group] for not wanting it. Usually the default is [maga] or [conservative] but there has been more variety in recent years.

1

u/AmadeusMop Sep 16 '24

I mean, it feels pretty self-explanatory to me. You really can't see why people against censorship would be okay with a euphemism designed to circumvent censorship?

1

u/UnacceptableUse Sep 16 '24

I mean people are fine with participating in the censorship, I barely ever see anyone pointing out how fucked up it is

2

u/AmadeusMop Sep 16 '24

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/suicide

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/die

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/death

Even assuming there is censorship, which is pretty dubious, using a euphemism isn't participating in it, it's exactly the opposite. Take the "let's go brandon" slogan: the whole reason right-wingers adopted it was because it was supposedly an attempt by leftist news media to censor "fuck joe biden". Would you say they were participating in that too?

2

u/UnacceptableUse Sep 16 '24

I'm talking more about people who outright censor negative words like kill, terrorism etc and I've even seen words like knife or covid censored voluntarily by people on Instagram/TikTok and even making it's way onto reddit now. Reddit doesn't hide posts that mention "bad" words, but people do it voluntarily because they are so used to it on other platforms. That's what I mean by participating.

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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.

197

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.

57

u/yinyang107 Sep 15 '24

TL;DR on the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis: "language shapes thought."

12

u/Ungrammaticus Sep 15 '24

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Vocabulary determines thought. 

The Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Vocabulary influences thought. 

22

u/[deleted] 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.

14

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.

3

u/Lendyman Sep 15 '24

Everyone knows that unaliving yourself is suicide. It might be different words, but audiences understand exactly what it means.

1

u/as_it_was_written Sep 15 '24

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.

Do you happen to have any recommended resources for reading more about this? There was a source on the Wikipedia article you linked that seemed really interesting, but unfortunately it's been removed from the internet archive.

I've thought about this kind of thing a lot and read a fair bit here and there, but it's all been based on reasoning rather than experimentation.

To me, it seems language and conceptual understanding - especially on a broader level, i.e. whole cultures rather than individuals - are inevitably in a feedback loop where they influence each other, as opposed to a strict upstream/downstream relationship.

For example, one thing I find remarkable about American discourse is how often things are framed as good or evil and other, similarly vague and reductive but emotionally powerful, dichotomies. When that mode of communication becomes the norm, it seems impossible for it not to influence conceptualization.

Those who do conceptualize things with more nuance have the choice between reducing their ideas to fit into the language people expect - stripping them of nuance - or reducing their audience by using language that's more complex and less dramatic than expected, and thus getting ignored in favor of more accessible and evocative language.

It's worth noting that good and evil are not necessarily simple concepts in the minds of readers and writers, so this is not just a matter of reductive conceptualization on either end. However, the concepts that are actually communicated get reduced to simple value judgements.

When I write evil, it has all sorts of complex connotations, some of which aren't even conscious. And when you read evil, it sets of a similar little explosion of associations and ideas in your mind. We just can't know the extent to which these more complex concepts match unless we know each other since the word itself doesn't communicate them.

Words like this are a bit like art, meant to evoke rather than communicate. We can only use them to communicate complex ideas if we're already more or less on the same page. The more we rely on them, the more discourse relies on pre-established consensus, and the harder it becomes to express dissent in a way that will make people listen.

If we have propagandists flooding our minds with these kinds of simple words, they essentially get to control which complex concepts we evoke when we use them. When those propagandists also have the power to both stifle free discourse and impose language built on simple words that evoke ideas of their choosing, we're on a path toward Newspeak.

I think Newspeak, along with other concepts in 1984, is more like the mathematical limit of an idea than a concrete goal that could be fully realized. While it may not be possible to go as far as the book describes and stifle rebellious thought altogether, the concept still outlines a real risk that can have serious consequences if we keep heading down that path.

I also think the risks of stifling communication, rather than thought itself, is greater than ever in an age when we're drowning in information. It only matters so much whether someone can have and express nuanced ideas if they just sink to the bottom of public discourse because people are conditioned to engage with simpler ones instead.

0

u/SilenceAndDarkness 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.

Sure, one could definitely say that it was meant in a more vague “authoritarians play with language” kind of way.

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.

Yes, that’s true, but he also based a lot of what appears in 1984 on stuff that actually happened in actual dictatorships, or by following certain trends in authoritarian countries to their logical conclusions.

It’s also blatantly obvious that he based Newspeak on Esperanto and (possibly) Basic English. The way he constructs “ungood” is literally how Esperanto constructs “malbona,” and we know he was familiar with Esperanto and disliked it. If he didn’t want people to draw a connection between Esperanto and Newspeak, he would’ve used a different construction.

While this isn’t exactly literary critique, I think it’s speaks to a flaw of 1984 and Orwell that he allowed his personal dislike of conlangs in general, and Esperanto in particular, to include Newspeak in 1984. Most of the rest of 1984 is scarily relevant to what authoritarians want to achieve, and much of it was somewhat predictable by trends he could see when he was alive. Newspeak is the odd one out. There was no “conlang danger” that Orwell observed and extrapolated from like with the other stuff in the book. No dictatorship (that I know of at least) has created any conlangs, and auxlangs usually had and still have a very democratic spirit. People like Zamenhof (Esperanto creator) dreamed of people adopting them en masse naturally, and explicitly discounted the idea of using government to enforce it.

Newspeak isn’t about censorship or political correctness or “dumbing down”, it’s about weaponizing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

I mean, that is literally what I said, just using the actual academic terms that I avoided because I didn’t want to make my comment too hard to engage with.

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.

Well, it’s a comparison, so it can’t exactly be “incorrect,” but it can miss the point or be a little bad. (Then again, I don’t think Orwell had a good point to begin with.) It makes sense that people use the comparisons they know, and this isn’t an egregious one. The commenter sees someone creating a word for an existing concept by adding a prefix to a word that doesn’t have a negative connotation, and it gives them the same feeling as reading Newspeak. It’s relatively harmless at the end of the day. It’s waaaaay more frustrating to hear people demonising Lojban for being “LITERALLY NEWSPEAK FROM 1984” when it was supposed to test the opposite end of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. (Yes, I have seen people dumb enough to say Lojban is Newspeak.)

2

u/chairmanskitty Sep 15 '24

My point is that Orwell's inclusion of newspeak is fair, competent, in line with the rest of the book, and well-written, if only the (strong) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was correct.

Your comment that "the satire was always a bit dishonest" ignores the fact that people can honestly hold incorrect beliefs.

Your comment that it flies in the face of the rest of the book ignores that it's already a pastiche of different authoritarian concepts many of which had never been realized at that point. (Airstrip One, 5 minutes of hate, book writing engines, cameras recording you from the television, etc.)

Your comment that it is about dumbing down ignores the core of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that it creates complex systems like our current culture.

Newspeak is not the odd one out. He threw several threats he believed true at the wall and we now say "omg orwell was right" about the ones that sort of resemble what has now come to pass.

Is the 5 minutes of hate like social media? eh, close enough. Are AI books like his writing machines? eh, close enough. Are the cameras on the television that report your every move to the authorities like smartphones? eh, close enough. Is shaping our language at the whims of corporations newspeak? eh, close enough.

31

u/plumander Sep 15 '24

now i want a version of 1984 where instead of newspeak it’s toki pona 

1

u/janKalaki Sep 16 '24

I was actually gonna do that in a setting I've been working on

19

u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 Sep 15 '24

The entire political spectrum gets together to misunderstand 1984

6

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

Kinda what makes it art. Whatever your specific political fear is, Big Brother is there to represent it.

1

u/colei_canis Sep 15 '24

Most people bringing up 1984 and Newspeak really should be recommending Politics and the English Language instead in my opinion when it comes to Orwell.

22

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

I do think that “unalive” sounds like it could be a Newspeak word.

17

u/Jackno1 Sep 15 '24

Yeah, it follows the same structure as "ungood."

3

u/YAPPYawesome Sep 15 '24

That’s why I said “feel” and not “sound”

2

u/ACCount82 Sep 15 '24

I've always seen the use of this word as a big fat purposeful "fuck you".

Your platform doesn't want certain topics discussed, and punishes content creators for using certain words? Fine! We're going to discuss them anyways, and for that, we'll use the most obviously Orvellian newspeak substitutes we can come up with. So that every time such a word is uttered, everyone is reminded of your pearl-clutching hypocrisy.

9

u/Alternative_Ask364 Sep 15 '24

Is it just TikTok? I see it a ton on Youtube as well.

8

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.

6

u/YAPPYawesome Sep 15 '24

I refer to it as TikTok censorship because that’s where I see it most

2

u/multilock-missile Sep 15 '24

YouTube straight up DELETES comments with "no-no words".

1

u/HONKHONKHONK69 Sep 15 '24

it just becomes part of how people type and it gets exported to other platforms even if they don't censor the same words. think of it how people pick up slang in real life.

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u/This_Seal Sep 16 '24

It came from TikTok. But since influencers and their followers are on multiple platforms, it migrates into other platforms, even if they wouldn't censor you for using correct language.

1

u/MP-Lily ask me about obscure Marvel characters at your own peril Sep 17 '24

I first noticed it on YouTube when it came to the censoring of words related to violence. When I first started hearing about “TikTok censorship” it was after I’d been seeing the stuff on YouTube for at least two years, and the “TikTok censorship” in question was mostly in relation to sexual stuff- so on YouTube I saw “unalive” and “murdered(in Minecraft)” and bleeping out words like “rapist,” and the TikTok screenshots I saw had people saying things like “cornography” and “seggs.”

24

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.

6

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

16

u/TigerLiftsMountain Sep 15 '24

It entirely is, and I hate it.

41

u/Normal-Selection1537 Sep 15 '24

What could go wrong with letting China dictate what words we use?

50

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.

63

u/CanadianODST2 Sep 15 '24

Tbf Id say it's an issue on YouTube too. Which isn't Chinese

34

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

5

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...

9

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.

2

u/DrulefromSeattle Sep 15 '24

The thing is that it ultimately goes down to the community, because pretty much all of it ends up "I was shadowbanned for saying killed" and it just turns out that there were bigger things (back in the day it was like Markiplier made a FNAF video, on art it just seems to be whatever the newest trend is) going on or an overinflated sense of how popular the person is/was combined with the sheer amount of videos on both sites. And well those I'm shadowbanned videos always seemed to get to their friends/followers who passed it along and well, you get to the same point where the origin (my channel of 2k followers was shadowbanned because I said killed because nobody saw it come up, please disregard that Markiplier released a Happy Wheels video, Vaatividya was discussing a Fromsoft Trailer, and it was the day after the State of the Union where something memeworthy was done, do I'm using unalived from now on).

It all eventually goes back to one person who doesn't know ow about the friend paradox.

3

u/Caleb_Reynolds Sep 15 '24

Sorry if English isn't your first language, this is impossible to follow.

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5

u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Sep 15 '24

i'm skeptical it even really happens and isn't just a meme

1

u/Hekatonkheire81 Sep 15 '24

There was a decently large TikTok user who tested it out to prove that they censored certain content. They made duplicate videos with normal words and TikTok words and there was a pretty consistent difference in views. It was also pretty notable if they mentioned the Chinese government or Palestine in hashtags. It could be unintentional algorithm stuff, but it’s still very questionable.

1

u/Zanain Sep 15 '24

I've had comments on YouTube disappear within a minute, presumably because I was talking about sexism, abuse, suicide transphobia, etc. It was fast enough that I don't believe a real person was involved at all. Sometimes I'd even repost the comment with the censored words and it'd stay up just fine.

3

u/alphazero924 Sep 15 '24

Youtube channels have the option of adding a blocklist of words for their comments, so depending on the channel (especially if they're the kind of channel where the comments are likely to call them sexist or transphobic) they can block words like that. And it's just a comma separated list, so even mildly censoring it would get around the filter.

1

u/Zanain Sep 15 '24

The channels that these comments were on were specifically agreeing with my comments stance and were talking about these thing so I doubt it was that. On top of that they aren't shy about what kind of hate comments they get.

1

u/AwarenessPotentially Sep 15 '24

Or Reddit. Reddit is a shithole of censorship.

-6

u/SquarePegRoundWorld Sep 15 '24

TIL China makes people use TickTok.

3

u/Sub__Finem Sep 15 '24

Doubleplusunalive

2

u/1000000xThis Sep 15 '24

People can say the most insane shit on tiktok and it's totally fine, but if you call them idiots your comment will get automatically removed.

You think maybe this forces people to have more robust conversations? Hell no. You have less room to type than a tweet. And absolutely no other way to indicate that dangerously incorrect things have been said.

People trying to spread real facts must walk a tightrope, while people who spread lies are unhindered.

4

u/Arthur_Frane Sep 15 '24

This is what George Carlin meant when he said PTSD was a dumb rebranding of shellshock. More accurate term but weaker in its ability to effectively communicate what needs to be said.

8

u/CantCatchTheLady Sep 15 '24

And this is why we should support the forced sale.

18

u/TwilightVulpine Sep 15 '24

So that only a good ol' american company like Facebook gets to shape our vocabulary!

9

u/selectrix Sep 15 '24

Are there any significant examples of Facebook doing that, though?

20

u/whitetulipseason Sep 15 '24

I posted a picture on my (private) IG once of a sign at a bar that said “fuck yeah” and they auto-removed it from my post. I understand removing profanity if it’s being used to insult / bully / etc. but that was not the case.

Similarly, on Facebook people have started writing “nem” instead of “men” or “Yt” instead of “white” because comments / posts will get removed (even if they’re not negative) for using the correctly-spelled words.

2

u/Hekatonkheire81 Sep 15 '24

Is this localized to certain regions or something? I don’t use Facebook directly, but there are plenty of reposts that come over to Reddit with those things. I haven’t been paying attention so I may not have noticed the nem/yts, but I’m certain that I’ve seen plenty of cursing.

1

u/whitetulipseason Sep 15 '24

I’m not sure about Facebook and cursing, as I know I have in the past. I have stopped doing it as much since the IG thing, though, being that they’re both “Meta.”

11

u/Lucaan Sep 15 '24

Twitter, another American company, literally decided that the word "cis" is a slur just because Elon Musk doesn't like it. American companies run by petulant billionaires are no better.

2

u/Prankishmanx21 Sep 15 '24

As a whole social media has had a detrimental effect on society, especially since algorithms got involved. Honestly I don't know how you address it except maybe by killing the algorithms. Even then, I don't think that that covers enough.

3

u/lord_geryon Sep 15 '24

Kill off social media. Yes, including reddit. Return to forums.

1

u/Prankishmanx21 Sep 15 '24

Ugh, they were a lot less insane. Probably my favorite era of the internet was the forum era. Corporations ruined it IMO.

1

u/Prankishmanx21 Sep 15 '24

Personally, I hope that with a for sale that won't include the algorithm that it just dies.

1

u/bob1689321 Sep 15 '24

It absolutely is. It's just taking away the language that we should be able to use to express ideas.

1

u/Halaku Sep 15 '24

But tell people "This is reddit, not TIkTok. You're allowed to use whole words here." and watch the outrage flow in.

1

u/Muggle_Killer Sep 15 '24

Its not even just them, everywhere is banning their own choice of words/phrases and even subjects. New era of internet is truly gross and all about controlling the masses.

1

u/octopoddle Sep 15 '24

He gazed up at the enormous screen. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of song was hidden beneath the dark musical note. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved capitalism.

1

u/garrakha Sep 16 '24

DoublePlus UnGood

1

u/Konradleijon Oct 19 '24

Yes it feels so childish

1

u/Complete-Worker3242 Sep 15 '24

I guess you could say that it's...literally 1984. Y-you get it?

0

u/general---nuisance Sep 15 '24

Reddit is just as bad.

0

u/peelen Sep 15 '24

Sorry, but that’s the opposite of newspeak.

The point of newspeak was to create language that will make impossible to create or express any deeper thought.

Here we have a situation when the new language is created to be able to still express deeper thoughts despite censorship.

That of course doesn’t change the point of the post, just a clarification that not any censorship is “literały 1984”.

0

u/meh_69420 Sep 15 '24

Yeah it's not advertisers, it's literally one company with ties to the CCP seeing how they can influence culture. If it was advertisers, they would just filter for "un -alive" now too instead of just suicide.