It's been trivially demonstrable that the use of "forbidden" terms or swearing can affect your ranking on their algorithms, whether it be displaying your comment, or your post on someone's feed, etc., at least on Meta's platforms. So no matter how "cringe" you may find it, it's done out of some degree of necessity and precisely because of these dumb moderation mechanisms, not out of any misguided, altruistic self censorship.

>It's been trivially demonstrable that the use of "forbidden" terms or swearing can affect your ranking on their algorithms

Is it though? A lot of this self censorship seems to be a cargo cult thing where people just copy what they've seen other people do and assume it's necessary when it's really not.

>Is it though?

Yes. There are countless stories from Youtube creators who had their videos taken down or demonetized or had to edit and reupload them, because the AI detected that words such as "suicide" were spoken. And it's common knowledge that requests for review are routinely denied (presented as "we reviewed your case and the ruling stands", a judgment often received in less time than the runtime of the video).

>There are countless stories from Youtube creators who had their videos taken down or demonetized or had to edit and reupload them, because the AI detected that words such as "suicide" were spoken.

I don't believe you. I've never seen any evidence of that.

If I put "youtube creator can't say suicide in video" into DDG, among the top results:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/18f7mas/question...

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802245

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/13qhtu1/...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/youtube-co...

https://www.businessinsider.com/youtubers-identify-title-wor...

And there's a clear cause for it:

https://time.com/5096391/youtube-paul-logan-suicide-video/

1) Do you honestly think they would add "fuck" to a blocklist but then turn a blind-eye to "fck"? Basic profanity filters on old forum software were more strict.

2) I find it completely inane that you are willing to self-censor yourself for an algorithm. I guess we no longer need a ministry of truth if the people just produced censored content to begin with, right?

I don't think it's a literal blocklist; it's more an correlation algorithmically determined. If the four-letter word is correlated to hate or violence but the three-letter one is not then ... that's all that matters.

It’s very human. This is no different from people using terms like gosh, shucks, and darn, instead of their stronger relatives. It’s just how profanity works, no need to worry about it.

Fck is just as strong as fuck, not sure how that could be confused at all.

No, definitely not. It’s stronger than “fudge” but not quite the same as the real thing.

X today seems to not let any posts about death, swearing, etc get recommended.

Whereas if you replace those words with "unalive" and **'s, then you get far more views.

I'm sure there is some kind of filter.

Then you've got 'YouTube-speak', where video creators swap in alternatives to words suspected of making the algorithm downrank/demonetize videos. 'Unalived' being a particularly common one, to avoid mentions of killing or suicide.