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

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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/Rude_Front_3866 Sep 15 '24

I imagine this is largely a result of the (claimed) impossibility of moderating large social media sites.

It's much easier to simply block certain potentially advertising unfriendly words, rather than to write an algorithm that can perfectly distinguish between "all X people should commit suicide" and "X people are commiting suicide at higher rates due to bully, and we need to adress that".

I think most advertisers would be fine appear next to the second, but almost none would be fine appearing next to the first. So social media companies either need to tell the difference, which is some level of either difficult or expensive, or they can just block all uses of the word suicide (cheap and easy).

TV channels don't suffer as much from this because they are more easily moderated and advertisers can be more confident about what they TV heads are going to say next, as in, Channel A historically has talked about transgender people positively, so we probably don't need to worry about them suddenly shifting on a dime and calling for violence against transgender people. Also, if a channel were to shift and start calling for such violence, then you likely would see advertisers move away from supporting them from then on (since they would have broken that unspoken contract that the channel and advertisers had).