Online euphemisms need to grow up and get better

Language does not always get directly to the point.

Whether it is to save face, avoid upsetting others, exploit technicalities, elude sanctions, prove oratory cleverness, and so on, there are many reasons why people resort to euphemisms and colloquialisms when discussing topics that might be upsetting or taboo to certain audiences and in certain settings.

Death, sex, brutal crimes, violent atrocities, and disgusting sights are not suitable for everyday conversation but are still valid subjects of discussion for various reasons, even if social norms discourage them from being aired out openly and in front of certain people.

All that being said, even when one is being selective with their words, there is an additional need for one’s language to be suitable for the gravity of the topic as well as the setting it is in. This is where “algospeak,” I argue, fails.

Algospeak is a dialect of “netspeak” that uses certain codewords to avoid triggering social media content moderation flags. This trend soared as a result of everybody’s favourite video-sharing website TikTok reportedly flagging certain words in an attempt to keep the site clean, safe, and — most importantly — advertiser friendly.

Unfortunately, the heavy-handed rollout of this policy meant that discussions of sex, death, discrimination, and more inevitably got flagged regardless of context. Thus, users who wish to discuss these issues as meaningfully as one can on TikTok are relegated to euphemistic and colloquial speech.

YouTube reportedly also has a list of words and topics that can cause demonetization, regardless of context, to keep advertisers happy. The effect of these ham-fisted, unevenly enforced policies is the aforementioned algospeak and the issue I have with this current crop of internet euphemisms.

Net slang has existed for about as long as the internet has been publicly available. For all intents and purposes, it is an extension of real-life slang, cants, dialects, pidgins, and so on that humans have been developing for as long as we have had spoken and written languages.

There is no undoing any of that. What should be undone, however, is the slovenly choice of euphemisms that algospeak uses. For example, words such as “kill,” “porn,” “sex,” “rape,” and “suicide” are respectively replaced with “unalive,” “corn,” “seggs,” “grape,” and “sewer slide.”

All of these euphemisms are lazy, uninspired, and disrespectful, particularly the substitute words for sexual assault and suicide being a rhyming fruit and a corruption of the original into what amounts to wading through wastewater.

Only the bare minimum thought has gone into these basic rhymes, intentional mondegreens, and neologist synonyms that even elementary school students would find childish. When it comes to internet-based slang, algospeak is bottom-of-the-barrel, inauthentic, inorganic, unimaginative, and just plain silly at best.

While algospeak arose out of necessity to circumvent content moderation, the speed with which these terms have spread and been adopted by netizens shows an alarming willingness to conform to sloppily made rewordings than to meaningfully consider how to navigate or counteract social media platforms’ advertisers-first approach to moderation.

As explained in a blog post from JETLaw, Vanderbilt University’s journal of entertainment and technology law, in trying to evade censorship, users are engaging in self-censorship, which only reinforces the idea that these very real facets of life are taboo and so cannot be openly or honestly discussed without employing obfuscation.

Also, the use of codewords in otherwise publicly open discussion forums leads to mis- and impeded communication as those not in the know must contend with otherwise common words being used to mean something drastically different.

Algospeak is not the natural product of any niche groups or subcultures, it is a badly designed tool that barely manages to do its one job very poorly.