Social media forcing people to see self-censorship as normal has to be in the top 5 of the most harmful things they are doing.
It’s amazing how many people will self-censor and add disclaimers when speaking irl these days.
cws/disclaimers are good
censorship (including self-censlrship) is bad.Content warnings seem to be useless or add stress
The excellent podcast Search Engine has an episode on this topic with a guest expert in the field who absolutely agrees.
It’s yet another dystopian online trend that China pioneered over a decade before the ‘free’ internet adopted it because money.
Instagram was already forcing people to self-censor before TikTok became a thing
Instagram or smart phones didn’t exist when China started it. This isn’t about TikTok starting anything.
The censorship on Tiktok is crazy. The AI based comment removal is completely arbitrary - for example, I once had a comment removed for calling a public figure a walnut. Meanwhile, the comments are absolutely packed with the most vile comments. In particular, for content relating to my country there are thousands of comments openly celebrating and glorifying the deaths of migrants and some seriously explicitly racist rhetoric. It leads to people using silly workarounds to content filters that must be trivially easy to identify automatically, but aren’t, raising the question of why bother with such extreme censorship in the first place?
This is the kind of shit many of us have been trying to warn about when we push back against language police. It may be an easy argument to swallow when examples of actual bigotry are held up for you to see, but the systems which are created for such a purpose can and will be used to hide serious matters.
“I got banned from a subreddit for calling someone a retard in 2016 and this sole act of INJUSTICE against me has resulted in a Chinese company algorithmically removing content posted by users reporting on crime”
You get it
You certainly dont want to be the main subject of those low quality videos
