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Rewriting Reality: The Politics of Online Censorship and the Sanitization of Language
- Miranda Autor
- Mar 10
- 7 min read
Spend enough time on TikTok, and you might eventually make your way into the land of TraumaTok, where you are never more than one scroll away from encountering someone on the worst day of their life. With the rise of social media and its subsequent normalization in our day-to-day lives, people have become increasingly more comfortable sharing every aspect of themselves online, from the most minute details like their favorite color to more personal experiences like the time when, as a kid, they found out what stranger danger means firsthand.
However, in this age of individuals oversharing content, there has also been an increase in the use of Algospeak — the substitution of words with more palatable alternatives to get past censorship imposed by social media platforms, which use algorithms to prioritize what reaches people’s feeds. Using euphemisms to slyly refer to serious issues (e.g., “unalive” as a new term for suicide, the grape emoji to represent rape, or replacing letters with symbols like in “4b0rTiOn”), platforms like TikTok and Twitter have reshaped the way individuals interact and deliver messages online. Beyond the personal, this has also shaped political messaging, with discussions on war effectively being silenced at the point where they are deemed inappropriate for public consumption.
Screenshots of Algospeak usage on TikTok.
As Algospeak continues to gain popularity, this means that individuals are increasingly engaging in self-censorship. Rather than resisting the influence of algorithms, they have chosen to accommodate and work around it, sometimes using it to their own benefit to signal group belonging by using the language favored by their peers. With this shift in internet culture, there is thus little current reckoning over Algospeak’s roots in moderation targeted primarily at making platforms marketable for advertising over users’ benefit.
This self-imposed sanitization of everyday language reveals a dangerous trend in the politics of current discourse around the impact of social media on society: The increasingly layered communication of critical issues, caused by the inability to directly refer to real phenomena, shows the extent to which the linguistic landscape is determined, then limited, by those in power. As individuals continue to opt into self-censorship and use Algospeak, sanitizing their language preemptively in online spaces, it is a telling sign of their place in the hierarchy of power — being influenced instead of influencing.
Through the various views of politics, beyond simply being the art of government, it is important to note that defining politics as an exercise of power draws attention to who has it, what it controls, and how it is used. In the politics of online censorship, this can be studied through the three dimensions of power outlined by Steven Lukes: decision-making power, agenda-setting power, and power as thought control.
All three dimensions are crucial to how online censorship works, highlighting aspects such as the limits of what can be posted on platforms, the determination of access to this discourse, and the reshaping of what individuals feel is allowable to put online in the first place. Hand in hand, they create an, in part, self-perpetuating system of suppression.
Decision-making power: Who decides what individuals can post?
This can first be seen through the first dimension, decision-making power. Contextualizing it through its usage on social media, this can be studied by analyzing the control that social media platforms and advertisers have over what and how individuals share their lives. When individuals, and even organizations, are reliant on social media platforms to be able to reach a wider following, this empowers companies to dictate what is allowed to reach that following to begin with through two main tools: algorithms creating personalized feeds for each user and outright banning certain types of content that they find disagreeable.
In today’s social media landscape, platforms have created a reliance on personalized feeds, such as TikTok’s For You page, to deliver content directly to your door, allowing you to mindlessly scroll through videos without critically thinking about what it is that you want to watch. Although these algorithms are influenced by your own interests, with companies prioritizing the content that you are most likely to engage with, the problem is that this prioritization is not merely done out of benevolence to maximize the user experience — rather, it serves to maximize the company’s bottom line.
Algorithms are used to subtly deliver advertisements, slipped between the hundreds of posts that individuals have become accustomed to seeing each day. While this may seem like an easy price to pay for free entertainment, there are also more perverse incentives at play; in the prioritization of certain types of content, there is also inevitably the deprioritization of others that are not quite as advertiser-friendly.
Take, for instance, discourse on Palestine in the wake of conflict with Israel, often involving graphic imagery and tales straight out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Throughout Instagram and Facebook, properties owned by Meta, Human Rights Watch found over a thousand instances of censored and suppressed content expressing peaceful support toward Palestine. Although this is not representative of all posts made in support of Palestine and toward the denunciation of Israel, there remains a lack of accountability over how this shifts the decision-making calculus of individuals. Due to social media dictating much of what users read and watch, particularly amid the decline of traditional media, this limited what creators found themselves able to post — especially when fearing the loss of access to a platform on which they make a living, such as through mechanisms like shadow-banning.
What is important to note in this case is that the decision to censor was not always aligned with Meta’s content policies. Although decisions were sometimes made arbitrarily, with inconsistent moderation by biased individuals, the fact of the matter is that Meta had the final say. With companies holding the keys to the gates of social media, they act as judge, jury, and executioner for everything that goes online, leaving individuals to adjust through quick fixes like the aforementioned Algospeak.
Agenda-setting power: Who has access to important conversations?
Looking into the second dimension of agenda-setting power, another problem with how individuals respond to the suppression of their content is that this can make conversations on important issues go underground. By construction, Algospeak is often more difficult to search; the ways that symbols and emojis are used to imitate the appearance of words limit the effectiveness of search engines, especially when there is a lack of specificity embedded in the replacement. Terms like “unalive” may remain searchable, but when there are special characters in the mix or when these are emojis that are also utilized in other contexts, discourse can be lost in the void of social media, leaving you reliant on the algorithm to hopefully bring it back.
This poses a problem of accessibility for individuals who are unaware of such euphemisms or who do not have the same capacity to process them. Downstream harms like less accessibility for disabled users exist at the point when these terms, for instance, cannot be read by screen readers for the blind or cannot be picked up by those less-versed in social cues. Meanwhile, for those just learning the ropes, people who genuinely want to learn more about important sociopolitical issues or engage with the myriad of ways that individuals become vulnerable on the internet, they become lost in a sea of buzzwords that are difficult to understand. Aside from being hard to get into, they are also hard to find in the first place; faced with multiple barriers, many stop trying.
Counterintuitively, Algospeak also makes it more difficult for people who want to avoid certain terms as new forms pop up, and they find themselves unable to blacklist every variation. Instead of the echochambers that one might assume this affects, this actually harms those with phobias or lived experiences of suffering, for whom they need trigger and content warnings. Left unchecked, these are individuals who are forced to avoid related spaces in their entirety because of a lack of protection.
As such, social media platforms end up effectively drawing the line on how far conversations can go while also preventing you from ever opting out entirely as long as you remain. Discourse will always be able to exist on social media — that is not up for debate, especially when users constantly search for how to resist its suppression — but there are distinct differences in how individuals come across it and are able to participate, preventing the creation of new, more broad-based agendas as time moves on.
Power as thought control: Implications in nuancing discourse
Sanitized language like Algospeak ultimately shapes our ideas of what is considered acceptable behavior; the censorship of terms is a slippery slope to silencing more nuanced discourse, which refuses to engage in similar censorship. Power in the form of thought control thus becomes an important dimension in terms of its implications on the more long-term effects of self-censorship.
Eventually, this culminates in individuals themselves engaging in self-censorship online, perpetuating these systems and normalizing their overreach. Returning to the example of discourse on Palestine, the watermelon emoji has long been a symbol of Palestinian identity due to sharing colors with the flag, but it has gained popularity amid algorithmic suppression as a way to bypass it. While there is nothing wrong with representation — symbols themselves can convey a great deal of meaning and solidarity — the ability to subvert online censorship in more subtle ways with Algospeak can mean the loss of incentive to go against the systems that necessitate it more directly.
As knowledge is passed down on how to get what you need across, without ever directly saying it, the need for resistance is lost in translation through the grapevine of cultural osmosis. People pick up the sanitized language of censorship without knowing its history, cementing it as their primary means of communication instead of a stopgap measure at best. Eventually, this comes full circle: Once replaced, even the simple usage of the original terms can become controversial as the reason for why the shift occurred is forgotten and is deemed to be matters as simple as being “politically incorrect.”
What can we make out of all of this?
In the same way that politics is an exercise of power, the sanitization of language shows the extent to which palatability has become a guiding principle of our lives and presence in the wider sociopolitical sphere. With changes infiltrating our everyday lives and without the context behind these changes being shared to the same extent, resistance against the system of censorship is inevitably stifled, both internally and externally. In the future, this self-censorship is likely to lead to larger harms, whether it be advocacy groups and victims being neutered in their ability to communicate their struggles or an influence on how future research is worded, and more.
The personal is political has long been used to explain how our lives are shaped by forces far larger than ourselves. However, as much as these systems determine what we do, we, in turn, have the ability to determine them. The language that we use is ours. At the end of the day, it is important to remember and refuse to shrink ourselves, our history, and our values for a whitewashed version of reality that will never come true should we refuse to interrogate it.
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