Speaking about free speech, I’ve been noticing something on YouTube that bothers me a lot.

Why are the words rape and suicide being censored so hard? Because they’re “triggering”? Some things should be triggering.

A rape survivor should be able to talk about what happened to them without sugar coating it or saying “r-worded” in its’ place. She wasn’t “r-worded”, she was raped and has every right to talk about it and use the word that defines her experience.

Same thing with people who have lost loved ones to suicide…they aren’t allowed to talk about what happened without using the termed “unalived” him/herself.

They aren’t protecting anyone by censoring these words, they’re shaming the victims by saying their experience is something that cannot be expressed publicly.

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I know; this really bothers me, too. I’ve been making a little screenshot collection of “why tf is this being censored” and planning to make a post about it.

Of all the things to censor…. It’s so fucking annoying and stupid

100% agreed.

wtf is happening to our society?

It already happened. Time to pull it back into coherence.

Apparently 😭

Sadly, the list of words that can demonetize content on centralized social media will only continue to grow... which is absolutely ridiculous, especially in cases like the ones you've presented. However from what I know, YT is one of the worst.

Which sucks because YouTube is probably the best means to give and get important information.

They are doing it to bypass the platform's censorship.

Yes and I’m saying why are the platforms censoring those particular words and who do they think they’re protecting? To me it seems like censoring those words only protects to perpetrators

Oh sorry, I thought you were saying people were doing it voluntarily to spare feelings.

I think the platforms do it to appease their advertising partners.

I still don’t understand the reasoning

Advertisers consider themselves as sponsors of the videos their ads play with. They worry that people will associate their product with something negative if their ads are played alongside that negative thing.

Great. Lets pretend life is something it’s not to appease advertisers 😂

Yeah it's dumb. Maybe nostr and v4v fixes this, but I'm afraid most people have grown too used to getting things for "free". YouTube is not interested in improving the experience of users because the users aren't their customers, they are their product that they sell to advertisers. They only want to increase engagement so people watch more videos and more ads.

Hmm but I always associate Grammarly with suicidal.

After AI explosition, Grammarly just died...

Expect nothing from YouTube, their ai even censors the comments in real time

I imagine it’s the same with other social medias too, yeah?

Not to the same extent

🤔interesting

I expect censorship from them.

Currently agree with you more, Nos

🫂🫂

🫂

I just noticed I wrote Currently instead of Could Not 😂😂

I think other people have said it, but it's pretty much to get around censorship and to avoid being demonetized. It's extremely stupid, but that's life on a centralized platform, I guess.

💯the dumbest and most counterintuitive thing ever

Agree. Please stop „helping us“

🎯

Not a new trend that's confined only to social media. Governments don't want their docile tax-playing sheep to be inspired to unalive themselves because that would reduce taxes they received. Note that the MASH TV series theme song had its lyrics completely removed ie instrumental only. Not the movie it was based on though : https://youtu.be/p0xy-LoDi94?

While other governments are beginning to condone and profit for suicide

Good point. Are some governments more enlightened than others? Or more motivated by profit? 🤔

Yeah. It's fucked.

Not a new trend that's confined only to social media. Governments don't want their docile tax-playing sheep to be inspired to unalive themselves because that would reduce taxes they received. Note that the MASH TV series theme song had its lyrics completely removed ie instrumental only. Not the movie it was based on though : https://youtu.be/p0xy-LoDi94?

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Always the case with censorship. It does more harm than good.

💯

In epsteins time, those words would get a oneshot ban hammer on all the legacy medias.

Is that when it started?

It may have been benign prior/ but I really think it might have been around epstein when peak social media fuckery was the name of the game.

YouTube really went downhill since 2020. It’s like walking on eggshells now

Yeah that’s what it seems like. You can’t say anything. True crime podcasters especially

Advertisers pay. Advertisers drive the censorship imo

Fuck censorship.

I think that in a sense it's taking the power from those words. If we don't say them, we "forget" about them, then they can be re-vamped in to something less than 🤷‍♀️. I'm not great at putting my thoughts in to words about this, maybe you can get the jist of what I'm trying to say...

That’s kind of how I was thinking. It’s just putting rose colored glasses on reality

Glad you understood what I was trying to say. Words are hard some days. The ugliness doesn't go away because of the flowery language 🤷‍♀️

Semaphore. Cartesian. Diaphanous. Pretty words!

Yes. And I love pretty things and would paint the world with rainbows and sunshine if I could 💜

I’m not super helpful

Same. I love derailing a good conversation.

Sasquatch.

Yes that is pretty messed up. I feel like it got worse with TikTok when 'unaliving' became a replacement for death.

Censorship does something interesting to language. When there is a will there is a way.

https://youtube.com/shorts/sznoikfRA24s

Notice the title of the short 😅

I was gonna say! I’m sure it’s not just YouTube. These substitution terms sound so stupid

It's like they're trying to convince people that rape and suicide don't exist. Corporate control needs to end.

Guess why. Isn't it your first suspicion when someone trays to hide or suppress evidence that they have something in common with the shit?

Amen.

Love him, miss him

💯

I only just noticed this the other week. Seems to happen with a load of words

They are protecting the offenders.

Not the victims.

As more high profile cases become aware by the public these censorship tools become essential for damage control.

A vile practice that deserves a class action lawsuit against youtube for violating freedom of speech.

I know what religion(s) promote this garbage behavior... and it's not who you think necessarily.

Maybe figure it out yourselves (or DM me and I can tell you straight up).

Society is so concerned with "protecting" that they forgot the consequences of endless protection from hard truths: A complete inability to deal with hardship and a total lack of perseverance and grit.

Damn. Well said

I really agree with you. Saying the right words and the truth is always useful but unfortunately in cases like the ones you just said it's no longer like that. By doing so you deviate from the truth.. 🤷‍♂️

Censoring the word "suicide" was originally the discussion topic that Bluesky staff picked as an excuse to block me from their main accounts and start promoting more targeted harassment against me on there (long before they banned me)

They openly said they would censor anyone that mentioned suicide on Bluesky in any context, and I kept replying in the thread where they announced the policy change, standing up for suicidal people who need to talk to others. This was in the past few years where I've been worrying about Digit every day, so this blatant targeting and ostracization of suicidal people makes me beyond angry

A staff member in the thread called pfrazee blocked me and it snowballed from there

I ended up changing my username to "blocked by pfrazee" so anyone asking about it would get a reminder of the day this all started and what topic was being discussed

Sadly #nostr is only like 10% better than Bluesky and even the npub I'm replying to has joined in with the targeted harassment against me here on nostr by muting me