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hi, thought you might be curious to know that tik tok doesn’t ban people for using certain words. Human moderators review flagged posts and policy is about context (for example talking about suicide vs telling people to kill themselves)

source: my roommate is a moderator

I absolutely believe it (although I'm sure there's some automatic moderation; my company has a fraction of the content Tiktok does and we trained an AI a couple of years ago to help with moderation) (it's not very good and we're not supposed to call it AI when talking to customers)

The thing is it kind of doesn't matter, because people believe very firmly that it does, so they all act as if this is the case. In fact the misunderstanding might be much more effective at changing behavior than actual censorship: addiction studies in the 70s and 80s indicated that unpredictable rewards are much more motivating than predictable ones, so every coincidental instance where someone is banned/shadowbanned for using a "forbidden" word does much more to reinforce the belief in the censorship than consistent actual enforcement would be.

Actual censorship does happen on social media. Some of it is broadly helpful (eg. German laws about how you can talk about Nazis) and most of it is not (eg. three major payment processors being able to dictate exactly what content they find appropriate or not). There was a time where posting on Tumblr or twitter about suicide would get your post hidden, for well-intentioned reasons (suicidality is contagious and people on the internet are assholes; unfortunately they didn't take into account that the internet also contains many people's entire support systems). It's not a totally irrational belief.

Tiktok culture gave rise to "unalived" and its equally obnoxious brethren not because the censorship on Tiktok is stronger than elsewhere, but because people there think it is, so I think its perfectly reasonable to blame Tiktok for the vocabulary shift, although you're correct that the reasons are more complicated than people usually assume.

#tiktok #language drift #censorship

Challenge #01517-D056: A Strange Land

The past is another country. – @knitnan

Pam walked around the corner into another world. At least, that was what she thought to begin with. The very air smelled different. Disgusting, in its own way. None of the buildings were familiar. And everyone was dressed really weird. And everyone was staring at her. Pam clung to her purse and tried to be discreet in digging out her self-defense stuff. It had, of course, settled to the very bottom of her bag.

She flinched away from someone approaching on her left. It was a man with a huge jacket and an honest face. “You’re all right, now, ma'am,” he said in a keep-calm tone of voice. “We’re going to get you somewhere safe and you can talk all about it, okay?”

They thought she was underdressed? What? But she was wearing the perfect outfit. Jeggings and a bikini top with a cut-down, loose wife-beater with a glittery “Cheeky” written across the front. But then again, everyone was dressed like they were all going to this super-formal event. Of the women she saw, none of them had a skirt above their calves, let alone their knees. None of them had an exposed elbow. And most of them were wearing pearls.

#instant story #just add prompt #time travel #shifting standards #language drift

Challenge #01517-D056: A Strange Land

The past is another country. -- @knitnan

She flinched away from someone approaching on her left. It was a man with a huge jacket and an honest face. "You're all right, now, ma'am," he said in a keep-calm tone of voice. "We're going to get you somewhere safe and you can talk all about it, okay?"

They thought she was underdressed? What? But she was wearing the perfect outfit. Jeggings and a bikini top with a cut-down, loose wife-beater with a glittery "Cheeky" written across the front. But then again, everyone was dressed like they were all going to this super-formal event. Of the women she saw, none of them had a skirt above their calves, let alone their knees. None of them had an exposed elbow. And most of them were wearing pearls.

#instant story #just add prompt #time travel #shifting standards #language drift