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Are Censorship Algorithms Changing TikTok’s Culture?
How social media users push back against the policing of speech
When I was a kid, my mother would speak in pig latin whenever she needed to have an adult conversation in front of my sister and me. Because I didn’t understand pig latin, I viewed these exchanges with childlike wonder, as a secret adult language or code that I could never replicate or comprehend.
In watching TikTok videos, I have started to notice another strange type of language use proliferating on the app. Unlike the freedom of expression that I saw in previous months and years, many users have begun to perform a kind of doublespeak, in which specific words and topics are discussed using abbreviations, euphemisms, and even omissions and pauses, where audience members are meant to fill in the blanks using context clues.
Like parents and adults talking in front of a group of small children, these combinations of nonverbal communication, symbolic writing, and coded language are commonly used to discuss topics that might be considered taboo or NSFW. And, although TikTok is known as an app for children and teens, this use of coded language by users of the site is not just an attempt to protect the eyes and ears of the youth. This use of complex communication styles and techniques is one of many ways that users are able to fly beneath the radar of algorithms that flag videos containing certain words, tags, or popular talking points.
While many users express their disdain for having to perform these verbal gymnastics when sharing important, or even just impetuous, information and data, I find these videos to be fun and fascinating examples of how humans have adapted to computers. Similar to my research on YouTube, this shift towards using coded language for the most mundane of words and phrases is quite common online, and it seems that most social media platforms get to a stage in their development when concerns about safety are reflected in the policing of content and creators. Through natural language processing and other methods, social media platforms are then able to streamline the censorship process by teaching algorithms which words and phrases do not meet the established community guidelines.
