I do not need to explain algospeak
What we have now is a world where people are pro-actively self-censoring their online speech. This is bad. These self-censors have moved this speech into the real world. This is worse.
When you survey people about why they replace ‘rape’ with ‘grape’, ‘kill’ with ‘unalive’, or ‘sex’ with ‘seggs’ there is a long and incorrect refrain: ‘the algorithm’.
It is a lie.
We now have a new infantilising language construct spreading into meatspace and poisoning our spaces driven by a fear of influencers social media posts being ‘shadowbanned’. Except it doesn’t happen. It’s not real. There is no algorithm that is hiding your posts because you mentioned that a joke killed. There is no robot throwing your posts in a bin because you talked to a sex therapist. It just doesn’t happen. Do you really think evil media corporations would limit engagement because of fucking words? It’s literally their bread and butter. It’s like talking to your dealer about $350 bottles of wine - whatever monitoring is happening is smarter than you think, it’s 2026 and we’re poisoning the soil with enough compute to determine that yeah, you’re defs buying cocaine. I’d be offended if however many billions of dollars are funnelled into five-eyes couldn’t pick that up. And saying children shouldn’t be killed in a reel is just speech. Unless coerced by legislation a company that relies on keeping your eyes on the scree for as long as they can is not going to filter posts out of a feed because of spicy words - they’re the best ones for that.
So let’s dissect this a little.
The primary source of income for online influencers is click-through for ads. The secondary source is sponsorships.
Sponsors will ask influencers with a floor of followers and topics that reach an audience to advertise their products - this person reviews food, let’s get them to sponsor our knives, this person goes to theme parks, let’s get them to talk about resorts or flights or whatever. This person can breathe let them show off clash of nordvpn. Sponsors will usually look at videos and yes, probably not want their product show off during a video about the Columbus 7. This is not algorithmically driven, but sponsors are also lazy and will ctrl+f a bunch transcripts to get your vibe and look for words they don’t want around United Airlines or whatever. ‘Top 10 horrific plane crashes on US soil [NO SURVIVORS]’ probably pushes you out of that one.
Click through ads are shown around wherever and are sold via a third-party - these do not care at all about the content of the video unless it’s marketed toward children, which means that the analytics for that video can’t collect further demographic data or have ads targeting its viewers as a legislative requirement.
So influencers started replacing these words and use ‘the algorithm’ as a convenient scapegoat - everything you see online is fake. it’s about potential sponsorships. It’s money. It’s always about fucking money.
This excuse then spreads to the masses who, largely, don’t know what an algorithm is let alone how they work. It is a mysterious force inside their phone that tells them what they see and a lot of mis- and under-educated about digital media literacy has caused far more harm in the last decade than we currently understand.
This specious understanding then spreads to their viewers who also, fearing the power of the algorithm, self-censor their language.
So I guess this is the story of how a cargo-cult like fear of ‘the algorithm' has bound the masses into hallucinating their own panopticon.