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Comment by redcobra762 | Hacker News Reader

Oh please, if you’ve interacted at all with a video game community in the last decade you know this kind of humor is alive and well…

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It is, but it will get you banned.

Has no one else noticed the rise of censorship evading slang among zoomers? Eg saying "unalive" instead of "kill". I remember there was a big file with a bunch of these for chinese youth I found fascinating some 15 years ago. And now we have to do it too.

Oh yeah because burdening children with the challenges of… using slightly different words… is a real shame.

Are you saying censorship is fine because people can just use other words?

There really is no point engaging with you then.

It's not censorship, it's new^H^H^Hbetterspeak (tm). A more friendly and inclusive version of the English language.

You call it censorship, I call it freedom of association. These are private organizations deciding what they allow on their own platforms.

But more importantly the “kind of humor” your originally highlighted is absolutely alive, as evidenced by your own point that people use words to get around whatever censorship there is of the most extreme versions of that humor.

The older I get the less useful I think this distinction between "official" and "unofficial" is. "Officially" King Charles can dissolve the UK parliament, but "unofficially" he can't. Power is power and we know it when we see it.

So yes I would call being banned or having your language limited by major global platforms "censorship", despite the fact that officially they're just private organisations.

You're just saying you only care about some people's rights and not others. Part of the 1a and the general concept of freedom is that you don't have to put up with people saying stupid shit everywhere, such as in your own home.

"My own home" and "twitter" are very different in scope.

How? What about a bar? A stadium? Is it just the number of people to you, then? If I can pack enough people who agree with me into a field, do I now own that field?

You either agree that people who own things get to decide how those things are used, or you think that people don't get to own things. There's no "well, a lot of people use this thing" exception to property ownership.

Or, I guess you could try to nationalize the space since so many people use it, but I'm guessing "as you get older" any form of government is objectionable, despite this being exactly what you seem to want.

Why do you believe that private corporations should be more powerful than the government?

Why do you believe some people should be more powerful than other people?

I don't. Where did you get that viewpoint from?

So why do you believe that private corporations should be more powerful than governments and have censorship powers that the government doesn't even have? Twitter, Meta, and Google affect our day to day life and control what we see far more than the government does. Why do you think this is a good situation to be in?

So why do you think some individuals should have their rights prioritized over others? Twitter, Meta, and Google are owned by people who want to do specific things with those companies, and you want to ignore their rights entirely. Why do you think ownership isn’t meaningful?

The similarity to China isn’t a coincidence. This is all coming from the cultural dominance of TikTok among young people, which (to my knowledge) algorithmically downranks any content that has those words in them.

It’s a common Chinese strategy, born of Chinese censorship requirements, which TikTok naturally used when presented with similar-enough problems outside of China.

This goes far beyond TikTok. Twitch, Youtube, the jurisdictions of Canada, the UK, Australia... this is one thing I'm not willing to blame China for, I am just noting how close it is the same thing that China does.

It's probably from the era of content silo algorithms that really do not like and punish your content for saying certain words, like COVID-19 in mid 2020, or "dead" today (I seem to recall a YouTuber having to beep himself saying that word very recently)

These kids grow and learn with Youtube after all.

Don't blame zoomers, blame American puritanism in tech.

I'm not blaming zoomers, no more than I am blaming chinese youth who have to talk about "aquatic producers" to avoid being censored for even discussing censorship.

Ironically I tried looking for a list of officially banned words on twitch. All I found was journalist spam 'summarising' and telling me how I should feel about it.

One site had a list of 50 words, all of which they censored, literally:

- N-word

- F-word

- C-word

- S-word

- T-word

When I scrolled to the end ( "A*kissing" ), I got a newsletter popup.

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