#algospeak

This is going to be an interesting read

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We're fighting to protect people from: - Facial recognition dragnets - YouTube's abuse of creators via fraudulent copyright claims and demonetizations - Megacorp social medias modifying their algorithm to manipulate and propagandize you - AI art scraping - Algospeak

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I’ve noticed a rise in posts recently about people using algo-speak to discuss sex and death, saying it’s demeaning & silly. These posts are generally angry at the people who do it. So here’s a reminder for people who missed it:

We live in an age of intense online censorship!

This is in large part due to laws such as FOSTA/SESTA (2018), passed in the USA but which affect the whole world by limiting the ability of users on most major social media platforms to discuss sex & sex work without being shadow-banned or shut down. Similar processes apply in the areas of sexual assault & death.

“Algo-speak” isn’t a sign of people succumbing to censorship; in a perverse way, it’s actually a tool used to fight it, because it allows people to discuss these topics and keep their platforms. As algorithms evolve to censor more words, algo-speak evolves too. The human mind is much better at subtlety and context than AI, and communities are faster than the human moderation teams on social media who are supposed to stay on top of this stuff and shut it down. So algo-speak is essentially a linguistic arms race, where censorship meets the human desire to communicate freely.

So talking in code or talking around a subject? That’s not people sanitising discourse because they want to. It’s people self-censoring because they have to, to be heard. This is especially true when the topic is relevant to an oppressed minority, eg. sex workers talking in code so their accounts stay up. They can’t afford to get deleted, so they get creative. If you hear algo-speak used IRL, that’s a bleed-through caused by the state of internet censorship.

To be clear, it’s a fucked-up paradox. The necessity of algo-speak is really tragic. The hegemonic power of rich nations with discriminatory laws over regular people who often don’t even live in their country, is deeply depressing. The age of corporate control and online censorship has turned the internet we used to have into a spiralling and increasingly unusable nightmare. But THAT is the problem, not the users who get creative because they have to.

TLDR: You don’t actually hate algo-speak or algo-speakers. You hate censorship.