Algorithmic Censorship Is Changing the Way We Talk

How slang emerges from social media rules

- MATTHEW PETTI

THE KIDS THESE days have a lot of silly euphemisms. Porn becomes corn. Sex becomes seggs. Nipples are nip nops and a picture of an eggplant can stand in for a penis. Killing someone becomes unaliving them, and people kermit sewerslide instead of committing suicide. Everything slightly risqué or unpleasant becomes baby talk. But not because teens are overgrown infants—it’s a bottom-up response to top-down censorship.

As social media have become a bigger part of modern life, platforms have adopted elaborate policies to appease advertisers and politicians who might not be happy with the content that people organically share. Besides simply deleting content and banning creators, sites can subtly nudge users, algorithmically promoting certain sorts of content while demoting others. The policies are often frustratingly opaque, but many users have figured out what will or won't anger the invisible censor.

That doesn't stop them from talking about taboo topics. For the younger generation, social media is often the first and only place to learn about various elements of the world they live in, and sometimes those elements include sex, drugs, violence, and politics. So teenagers have come up with an elaborate system of cheeky substitutes for words that would otherwise get their content shadow banned. Emojis and wordplay form a language.

Adam Aleksic explores this "algospeak" in a book of the same name. Aleksic runs Etymology Nerd, a popular TikTok channel that explores linguistics and the broader social issues around language. He learned through trial and error what the algorithm would reward and punish.

For example, when he made a video analyzing the controversy around the slogan From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, he found his view count shrink by 90 percent. (So much for politicians' claims that China was using TikTok to push anti-Israel incitement.) In another video, Aleksic discussed how the word