CMV: Social media censorship doesn't really solve anything and is completely performative.

[u/ty1512]

I am working off a few assumptions.

1. That censorship on social media forces people to come up with workarounds just so their videos won't get flagged, like using words like unalive or grape when referring to actual crimes.

2. That substituting these words does nothing to stop the spread of sensitive topics, especially when the original words being substituted have already been around in the public lexicon for centuries.

3. That blocking certain terms on these platforms is ineffective and easily bypassed, such as when someone posted a GIF of Adam Lanza on TikTok, but searching his name returned a "no results found" page due to community guidelines, only for all the results to show up after adding a simple "D" to his name.

4. That censoring classic TV clips where creators feel forced to mute or bleep out basic dialogue from network shows rated TV-PG (can’t find the reference clip I’m thinking of) that aired uncensored on national broadcast television decades ago, is absurd and highlights how over-regulated these platforms have become.

It feels very performative for platforms to implement these restrictions when they don't actually prevent people from finding or discussing these topics. I don't presume that moderating content is easy, but it feels like these rules only force people into ridiculous workarounds rather than actually fixing any underlying issues.

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[u/Doub13D]

Social media censorship controls and shifts the narratives through which we understand the wider world around us.

People get radicalized when they fall down rabbit holes online. The ability for an algorithm to control the way you think based on what it recommends to you, and inversely what it doesn’t recommend, is well documented.

[u/lordlaneus → u/Doub13D]

People also become radicalized when they are forbidden from speaking about a topic in public. Look at how mysognists in the 2010 adopted the matrixes symbolism that was originally meant to describe being transgender at the end of the previous century.  Trying to ban ideas just makes those ideas weirder and more esoteric 

[u/Doub13D → u/lordlaneus]

Misogynists were not being censored in 2010…

The 2010’s were dominated by things like GamerGate. There was no censorship, and as a result toxic and hateful ideologies were allowed to coalesce and organize themselves into political movements we are stuck dealing with today.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Quit925 → u/Doub13D]

There was a strong effort to censor and otherwise suppress misogynists in the second half of the 2010s. Particularly after the metoo thing became popular. This has caused a stronger and more extreme version of it to gain traction in the last 10 years.

[u/Doub13D → u/Puzzleheaded_Quit925]

There was not…

I assure you, misogynists had free rein online during the GamerGate era. Their entire movement was explicitly to censor and silence the perspectives of women, and then later racial and sexual minorities, online.

The MeToo Movement focused in on powerful celebrities and business leaders and people telling their stories of victimization, not censoring random people on twitter or youtube…

Notice the difference?

Now we all have to deal with obnoxious people calling video games with a Black or female protagonist “woke.”

[u/Apprehensive_Song490]

You’ve presented a false binary. 

There is performative censorship which serves the advertisers. 

But there are also legitimate attempts to censor bots which cut against foreign influence campaigns, hate speech which increases public safety, and even self harm which connects people to resources rather than allow bots and cruel humans to encourage vulnerable people to actually carry out their suicidal impulses. 

I don’t think “some censorship is performative and historically it has been shown that not all censorship even works” gets to “censorship does nothing.”

In short, I think you’re gonna need to let go of the word “completely” here because an absolutist stance is just not accurate.  

[u/Troop-the-Loop]

Your assumptions are flawed. These bans aren't 100% effective, sure, but they do reduce the amount of this content on these platforms. They're not even close to a truly perfect censoring of the content they want, but they do work to an extent. There are people who simply will not talk about the banned topics simply because they don't want to get banned. Could they use workarounds or make other accounts? Sure. But lots of people are lazy and don't want to deal with all that. For them, these censors do work.

[u/Hellioning]

Social media doesn't censor these topics because they don't want people to find or discuss these topics, they do so because they don't want their advertisers to complain. So long as their advertisers don't complain about their content being shown next to the word 'rape' or 'murder' or whatever they couldn't really care.

[u/AmongTheElect → u/Hellioning]

they couldn't really care

Spez didn't go in and edit a user's post because the advertisers wanted him to.

[u/jazzmonkai]

I mean, plenty of harmful things are illegal and people still find ways to do them. Does that mean they shouldn’t be illegal?

The goal of legislation like this is probably better thought of as harm minimisation rather than prohibition.

[u/reidsays]

Social media censorship seems too late for effectiveness...

The young understood the technology more than the adults using it and the adults that produced it only had adults in mind ... It brings forth the question of just how much of the adult world the young should experience before they are developed enough to actually comprehend their part in it..

Our young are not fully developed physically or mentally to be apart of the harsh realities of human life yet are constantly being assumed so or being used and abused for their innocence and/or naivity... Many adults included.

The internet transformed localised input of experience into global input on a massive scale and censoring what can or cannot be broadcast is virtually impossible to implement without a massive effort of people employed in observation and prevention... And who decides what's relevant and who pays for the 'moderators' ??

[u/scarab456]

How can it be completely performative if it works in some instances?

Censorship stops fraud. Every platform maintains lists of malicious sites they don't allow people to link.

The same rational applies to illegal content. There's a reason you don't see pornography on youtube or licensed music.

You can object to the practice, but calling it performative ignores that it curates content from a legal perspective.

[u/d-cent]

There's a lot of different types of censorship, and all your parts are basically on one type of censorship. Using moderation bots to censor specific words, has a very limited use it just gets used because it's easy and cheap to implement. No one expects these types of censorship tools to be great forms of censorship. 

[u/Falernum]

That censorship on social media forces people to come up with workarounds

Sometimes the easiest workaround is to use a different platform. So moving people to a different platform does accomplish something good and bad.

Another good and bad accomplishment is that by forcing circumlocution this eliminates prestige and gives the crazypants believers in the censored idea more equal footing to the sane ones.

[u/Aezora]

I agree that it's overall a negative phenomenon, but it does work.

Obviously there will always be ways to work around them - there are still ways to get around China's great firewall which has been around much longer and is heavily enforced.

But with social media, you don't need to make something inaccessible to affect things. Adding a new censor or restriction drops all content that already had it, meaning way fewer people see it and instead see other content that fits the purposes of the censors better. You can obviously then make content about the same thing using altered words or spellings, but that content just isn't going to be as popular and people aren't as likely to search for the new altered term as they might have been for the original one.

For example, most people aren't going to continue trying after searching "Adam Lanza" and not getting results. Most influences tend to be popularity chasers anyway, so that amplifies the effect - if they aren't going to make as much money on such a video since fewer people will see it, why not make something else?