I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.
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[Algospeak] has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to... the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.
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The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.
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First up: wow. Somebody born in 1999, whose 27th birthday is this year, is now in the set of "old people". That takes some processing.
(I don't dispute that I'm old. I'm just saying that if I was 26 or 27 I probably wouldn't like being grouped with "old people"!)
But it we skip over that first sentence, everything else Anil says in this post is spot on.
It's bad enough that platforms (especially and starting with those most-popular with younger folks, like TikTok and YouTube) censor commentary or people for words: if it were done by a government, we'd consider their regime unjustly oppressive (as we do when it happens in China, where algospeak is particularly important as a mechanism to support free speech). Doubly-so when those are things that might often be important to talk about, like death and suicide, sexuality, rape, abortion, racism, or global pandemics.
It's worse when the chilling effect is so severe that people anticipate censorship and pre-emptively switch to algospeak. And it's worse still when that algospeak leaks out into environments where that censorship is absent. At this point, it's become anticipatory compliance: people regulating their own language to appease the perception of the shifting whims of a corporation that the speaker could simply ignore in the first place.
I know what you mean when you say that somebody unalived themselves. But when I reply, I'll be talking about how they committed suicide. Because words are important, and it's bad enough to let them be taken away... but it's worse when you willingly give them away without a fight.
Anyway, I hope Anil's words are motivating to the "not old" people who need to hear it.
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