Why are people censoring "bad" words?locked

ɐɥO@lemmy.ohaa.xyz to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 215 points –

Whats the point of writing prn, f@ck, sht or anything like that instead of the actual words? You can still read them, its not like they are gone if you replace a letter or two.

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On Lemmy, there's no good reason. But they may be carrying over habits from other sites where there is harsh censorship of non-advertiser-friendly language

On lemmy.ml at least, there's a very good reason cause the admins are authoritarians. Can't even say "bitch" without it getting removed.

So then that leads to the question: why is lemmy.ml run by a bunch of prudish babies?

A better question is why do you feel the need to die on the hill of using slurs?

Because swearing is a natural part of the human experience and most level headed people don’t feel the need to suppress human expression.

Swearing serves an important biological need to express emotion and communicate. Psychologically, we swear to express strong emotions and when people swear, they are inherently viewed as more trustworthy or honest. Swearing helps people bond.

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"Bitch" is not a slur. It is a swear. Swears are fine, slurs are not. They are not equivelant, and shouldn't be treated as such.

I hate ml mods as much as the next guy, but also I would consider "bitch" to be kinda misogynistic in certain context.

The same can be said of any gendered term. That's honestly a comment on the context more than the word.

If you say the word bitch is as offensive as the f slur, t slur or n word, then you're saying those slurs are as harmless as the word bitch. If you believe that, I am offended by you. Do not put them in the same group.

see the problem I have here is by banning a word that is used as a slur maybe once every 1000 times you remove the 999 times it was not used as a slur, thereby making the situation worse rather than better. Banning words does fuck all to promote a healthier culture, all it does is make the vultures migrate to the next word they load up with negative connotations

Holy fucking hell. What kind of pearl clutching Victorian era bullshit is that?

Why do you feel the need to bitch about it?

"Don't do the thing" "I'm going to do the thing you just told me not to do"

Rape culture.

Rape culture

Because someone said bitch and doesn't follow your orders?

Lol.

But you're also probably trolling

No.

But thank you for establishing the fact you lack the cognitive capacity to engage this thread in good faith.

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I’m just surprised I haven’t been banned from .ml yet for calling out tankies when they do shitty tankie things.

Fun fact 1: if you do get banned or have your comments removed you'll only know if you check the modlogs. And likely only if you check the modlogs of the instance that took action against you as the modlogs don't fully sync between each other.

Fun fact 2: you have been in the past, here's a link to the mod actions against you on .ml

Fun fact 3: and so have I, I only just recently finished a 2 week ban over here on .ml for calling that kind of stuff out on here.

Edit: That didn't take long @gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works looks like you got banned for your comment.

Sounds shit, the admins must be right bitches

"Being polite and using inclusive language is authoritarian"

You can be goddamn polite and still swear without automatically becoming a fucking asshole.

What you say can oftentimes be more important than the words you use to express the idea

Here's a great stand-up routine that highlights what I mean. Fair warning: there's some pretty NSFW language in it.

"There are no bad words, but there are several bad ways to express what you mean"

--Me (tho I'm sure someone way smarter than I has put out the same idea, but better worded, ironically enough)

Although I totally get why lemmy.ml would want to do something like that, it's not "being polite...", it's "enforcing politeness..."

If you gave "authoritarian" to an AI that determined what it meant through it use alone, it would think it means "Won't let me be a nazi"

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Let's just get this out of the way...

Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits. And sometimes fart turd twat bitch.

Whatever is censored is being filtered by your instance.

I'm on an aussie instance, it just called you a fucken lightweight.

No censorship here. Could've guess with the instance's name but still good to know! Thanks :)

Whatever is censored is being filtered by your instance.

I fucking love the fact that im instance admin

Okay I’m going to eat the onion. What are words 5 and the last one?

C o c k s u c k e r is word 5. T i t s is the last one on that sentence. B i t c h is the last word of the post.

Lemmy.ml sucks. I really need to move on.

I fucked your mom

I haven't heard that song in ages

They played it in their most recent tour. Great setlist

That's awesome. I had it on a compilation record from fat wreck called, "Short Music for Short People" had like 100+ songs and the rule was they had to be 30 seconds or less. Had some bangers, that one included.

this seems... familiar

It's much older than that...

My video was posted 12 years ago and yours was only posted 9 years ago. Check mate, atheists.

Fuck, shit, pussy, ass, motherfucking, damn, bitch Bitch, damn, motherfucking, ass, pussy, shit, fuck

-Chop Chop Slide

Comes from the social media platforms that auto remove stories that contain certain words. Tiktok, Instagram, etc.

Cool, all the platforms I don't use anyway.

Think I just don't like places that are squeaky clean.

Some of them coughlemmy.mlcough has a swear filter

edit: world->ml

I'm on lemmy.world and there is no fucking swear filter.

My mistake, I meant .ml, accidentally conflated the two.

I do come across a lot of removed while browsing on my .world account when the blahaj is being iffy, not sure what that is from.

I think for posters on .ml, the words are actually removed and not just hidden from them. So that's why you see it from other instances on their posts too.

The communists are policing speech? Who would have guessed

A filter? Let me test it right now...

Fuck.

Unless this is a shadowban type filter, it seems to not be there...

Fun fact: you won't get told when your stuff is removed or if you get banned. You have to check the modlogs.

This is Lemmy wide.

And looks like it's still up as of 2 hours after you posted

Edit: Spelling

Edit 2: Spleling

I think it's not a swear filter, but more like a 'potentially discriminatory terms' filter.

I see. I don't mind filters that remove racist or homo/transintolerant slurs, that's keeping a community safer and inclusive rather than enforcement of politeness.

What's a female dog called?

Tbh that one drives me nuts, on some sites I can't even say "Yeah I was bitching about Bad Idea's availability to my shop's owner and he said he didn't want to carry their products because the guys running it are cunts." (Curious to see what happens to this comment lmao)

Like dude, I'm the one I said was bitching about the thing, don't fucking censor my colloquialisms, I wasn't even trying to insult me!

Let's test that one...

removed.

Edit::What do you know, it was actually filtered.

Wow I didn’t know that. Good thing I switched to a different instance (although it was mostly due to poor performance on lemmy.ml at the time).

I've seen that for words that are considered to be 'triggers', as if saying 'r@pe' is somehow different at all than just using the normal vowel.

That behavior drives me up the fucking wall, because by munging the word they make it less likely to be caught by user-invoked blocklists. Meaning they're forcing people to be triggered after taking steps to avoid such.

Don't fucking do that shit.

A lot of it comes from Tiktok culture. YouTube has started doing it too.

Videos that say "kill", "rape", "died", etc are all deprioritized by the algorithm if not demonetized entirely.

People have been editing subtitles to avoid these words, and the behavior spread.

I suspect it's largely become a habit from people being on platforms that have automatic blocked word filters.

I have been watching Rick and Morty lately and every now and then I have to change the site to find a version of the episode I'm watching where swear words aren't censored. Like, it's a show made for adults full of violent and sexual themes, so I think that most viewers have heard the word "fuck" before. I hate it so much when people censor "bad words", even though nothing prevents them from saying them.

There's a bar in my area that has the TouchTunes jukebox set up to be censored. I'm an adult at a fucking bar and I can't listen to something with a swear word, ha ha.

One time I was at a MicroCenter (kind of like Best buy) and Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" came on the store music. I was like who the fuck plays a radio edit of this song what's the point?

It was not a radio edit. We all heard "wanna fuck you like an animal" in all its original glory. A+ would buy wireless keyboard from there again.

God I worked at a bar that played NWA but with the naughty words bleeped out. It's a fucking bar! First of many problems with that place.

One show where removing the censor was a detriment: Metalocalypse. They used a guitar sound on our first few seasons, and replacing that with the actual a wear words was just… less funny? I’ve never felt that way about a show before, or since.

One possible reason is that some words on controversial subjects can attract mobs of posters with an agenda. They search for keywords to find threads to flood with their arguments.

So posters would get in the habit of saying something like "I love p1n3apple on p*zza" to avoid the wrath of pizza purists (made-up example, but substitute with anything more controversial).

This was a big problem during the 2016 election on reddit. There were armies of idiots who searched for comments containing 'Trump' and would brigade the shit out of it. But if you changed the 'p' to a 'р' (the Cyclic character) or changed the 'u' to a 'ս' (the Armenian character) miraculously you wouldn't be brigaded.

Because instances have language filters. On lemmy.ml you can't say "female dog", it shows as "removed"

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I have noticed that my phone will autocorrect/misrecognize some swears. Fuck is often duck.

At least on android, i find you can enable offensive words in keyboard settings to fix this

Because G-d forbids me from speaking or writing foul language.

Generally I don't care about words like bitch, fuck, shit, but there are certain servers and communities where cusses or other words are used harmfully towards groups that the community or server is inteded to be a supportive place for, and when they come up in discussion, even just as examples as what was said to them are rightfully censored or have a trigger warning placed in front.

Community mods and server operators can get overboard with this but they get that privilege because they do the work to moderate it anyway.

Fuck Shit Stack

To answer your question. They don't like that stuff.

EDIT Having instances censor stuff for you is bad. Users censor themselves is fine.

Shit mother fucker ass tits cunt cock mother fucker shit ass tits mother fucker shit come on

I still remember.

I have a habit born out of having young kids around of cartoonizing more expressive language that leaks over into online conversations. There might be a bit of that going on along side the more censorship style responses put out elsewhere.

Why not just cuss around children and teach them when it's appropriate? I've never understood "shielding" them from something they'll get exposed to with or without you. May as well make it a teaching moment.

I agree with this, but you should teach your kids, not other people's kids. I avoid it around kids because their parents don't want me to do it, but I do cuss in casual conversation.

Because teaching takes time, kids don't learn abstract concepts, like social cues, overnight.

Grandma told a funny joke, this is a lighthearted casual situation.
"Great Fucking Joke Grandma!"

It's not shielding them entirely, it's waiting until they are old (read:smart) enough to have a good chance of knowing when it's OK.

Because there really isn't a place where it's nessecary and thus appropriate. Sometimes it's cathartic, but in general it's used as a fallback for when other words and expression fail. In that regard it's less shielding and more setting an example.

Sorry, it's not true. A proper expletive conveys the precise emotional state and the unwillingness to preserve forced politeness, because one doesn't feel the need to appease others, or because the situation doesn't warrant it.

I disagree, there are definitely places where it's necessary and it's always appropriate where it's necessary. It's not a fallback for anything, it's not a failure of the language. It's a feature, not a bug. Probably don't want to do it in formal environments, but even then there are times when it is absolutely the right language to use.

I'm going to hard disagree, saying cuss words are a "fallback" sounds very elitist. Gives me real "we're better than that" vibes, like not cussing puts you in some higher tier of society.

I swear a fair bit but sometimes I feel like it's a cop-out... a lazy way to add emphasis, and if I think for a minute I can usually find more specific and expressive words.

Calling someone a fucking ass doesn't convey anything of what your point is. In those cases where someone absolutely can't be reasoned with swearing at them isn't going to change the situation, actions might, but words won't.

Another mentioned about it being needed in some cases where the situation doesn't merit politeness. In those cases though what's gained by charged emotional responses if you're going to engage at all? It's wasting energy on things that have no benefit to anyone.

Cursing really only has any meaning because we give the words power. Similar to slurs against various groups, they only have bite because we give them meaning and history. I'll give this challenge, give me an instance where any given situation was benefitted by their use though, outside of mere expression of rage or hate what benefit did it add?

Reminds me of the show „the good place“. Thought the replacements there are quite good. Like shirt, fork, bench, ash, deck, cork. The k in fork makes it hit better while „fudge“ just doesn’t scratch that itch when you need to express yourself with „fuck“

"Free speech warriors" when people choose to self-censor

What about n-word? You're thinking about that word right now. Makes no difference wether I use the actual word or not.

That’s a bit different though. We don’t (generally) use “n-word” in place of the slur the way someone might type f!#k or say “frick” in place of “fuck.” We use it to talk about the term. So when someone is censoring themselves with replacement it can feel pointless, since the sentiment is the same: we both know what word you want to use to express yourself, just use it. When you use a censored alternative to a slur, you’re not just swapping one thing in for another leaving your meaning unchanged. You’re communicating an intention to avoid what you know to be a symbol of hate in a context that has no hateful intent.

Well, words like "fuck" or "shit" don't indicate harm and aren't supposed to offend people, so I think people should censor slurs but not swear words. Like, I'm autistic and feel kinda bad whenever I see the r-word being thrown around (I assume that some people have similar experiences with racial slurs), but I don't get the same feeling if someone says "fuck".