Why do I keep seeing this weird thing in comments and posts?

notfromhere@lemmy.ml to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 40 points –

I keep seeing removed in a lot of comments and posts and my question is why is that?

28

lemmy.ml (your instance) removes swears and slurs and puts fuck i mean removed in their place

.ml also removes anything negative about china. It’s basically a mild tankie instance

They'll also follow you around and downvote everything your account posts if you do something the CCP doesn't like.

I do that for people who use 'literally' non-ironically. Meh.

(really hoping it also filters fuck, doubt and regret has already set in)

This happened on lemmy.world last I saw was in /c/politics. Also fuck came through just fine.

It saves every post and comment on its own server, and filters it there. If you're viewing text through lemmy.ml it will not have the N word in it. Apparently fuck is not strong enough, hence my doubt in my immediate reply to my own comment.

edit: I assume if a user on lemmy.ml comments a slur on a lemmy.world instance it will also federate only the censored version, but I'm not sure about that.

I read through the lemmy.ml rules and didn’t see where they filter anything. Can you link me where they call out doing that?

lemmy.ml is run by the devs, one of whom is dessalines. He talks about it in general for example in this issue, and again in general in Lemmy's ideal Code of Conduct here (I say ideal because it's what they want, but instances are free to do whatever they want to, at risk of defederation)

I'm sure there are lots of other places they talk about this, but they seem to see it as an integral part of Lemmy, so perhaps there is no specific announcement post. You can join a different instance and you will see a lot less of removed.

Just because they don't announce they do doesn't mean it isn't happening.

I am trying to find more information on it, I didn’t say it wasn’t happening. Thanks!

I worry that implementing a filter means they agree to curate everything and be liable when it fails.

lemmy.ml has a slur filter active and built in that is on the aggressive side. Each server may have different filter words. If you post to somewhere that doesn't have that word in the slur filter but yours does, others will see the word and you will see "removed".

This is useful for servers that value a safe space for users against hate, bigotry vs. other servers that are a little more laissez-faire with censoring where appropriate.

One of the reason i don't have an account there like sometimes you just have to say "fucking hell what the fuck" instead of " removed removed what the removed " you know not every curse ever typed is insulting someone . I do understand that you need to cendor words which are racist or sexist but the rest should'nt be censored.

It's what you see when a user (or admin?) deletes their post/comment.

No It’s in the middle of a sentence or removed like mine.

Because we live in a censorship culture. It is very common these days to attempt to solve problems by deleting content.

Probably bigotry and racism being removed by the slur filter.

Mostly it's just innocent bystander vocabulary

Which, unfortunately, is what mostly is controlled when censorship is applied.

Better ten innocent people be punished, than one guilty person to free.

Blackstone’s Formulation 2.0, Internet Safety Version.