Short: Listening Like a Conlanger: Word Avoidance on the Internet

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George discusses word substitutions people use to avoid Internet censorship, and how that could be applied in worldbuilding.

Original Script

One of the interesting things you find in internet spaces is the presence of content filtering and the attempts to get around them. On the one hand, the people who have control of a given space have impressive control over the language that is allowed to be used on their platforms. Yet, on the other hand, many of their tools are fairly easy to circumvent, especially if there aren’t expensive human reviewers involved.

The result of this is a really interesting environment for a weird kind of taboo avoidance. People avoid certain words not because of any genuine belief that it’s wrong to say them, but because there are people in power who have an effective means to ban those words, and a lot of their replacement strategies have a clear eye to keeping the meaning clear while avoiding the automated filters. This could be really interesting to think about for conlangers working in modern or science fiction settings, where the same kinds of filtering tools might be present, though I have a thought how it could even extend into less technological fantasy settings.

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This topic came to me as I was musing about the kinds of taboo avoidance I see on TikTok. I’ve been on TikTok for about a year now, and in that time, I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon of word replacement to avoid censorship. TikTok is known to do a lot of algorithmic enforcement of their community guidelines, and a combination of creators getting videos downgraded or removed along with maybe some technological superstition has led a lot of people to put together some interesting strategies to avoid potential censorship.

One very ubiquitous term you’ll hear or see is unalive. It seems that TikTok doesn’t like terms referring to death, so a lot of creators have used unalive as a substitute for die, kill, and even suicide. Note that this collapses the semantics quite a bit, though context will usually pick up that load. You can talk about someone who unalived, someone who unalived someone else, or someone who unalived themself. The meaning remains very clear, with an intuitive derivation. I’ve often mused about how I never see tabooing of terms relating to violence, and this still isn’t quite that, but it does include violence-related terminology. It is interesting that TikTok apparently censors words related to death enough for this euphemism to catch on.

In a lot of other avoidance strategies, it’s often more about how words are spelled in captions, which are easier for the app to censor than spoken words. Sex is replaced with seggs, people put random spaces into words in their captions, or follow 1337 conventions of replacing letters with similar-looking numbers or symbols, like 1 for i or the euro sign for e. One user seems to get by with mostly adding diacritic marks to vowels in banned words. Like unalive, it’s aimed at preserving the meaning while avoiding word filters. I even see people use “clock app” or the clock emoji in place of TikTok, presumably in case the site suppresses it’s own name to suppress criticism. 

I did encounter one avoidance strategy that didn’t really aim to keep meaning clear. For a while, I saw people replacing sex work with accounting and sex worker with accountant in order to talk about sex worker rights issues. Sometimes, they would call out the taboo avoidance with star emojis, but not always. And as always, this may be said out loud or may only be replaced in the captions. This strategy seems to also be related to a more complex tactic of telling allegorical stories — basically satire aimed at talking about something that’s likely to get removed or deemphasized by the platform.

As I alluded before, there are differences in how people implement all of these strategies, with some people saying the replacement out loud, while others only replace it in the captions. This, of course, can cause an accessibility issue when the captions don’t match the speech, but there seem to be cases where the app actually will not transcribe a particular word, indicating that it’s banned from captions.

Another place I have encountered some interesting word avoidance in the face of technology is on the Chinese Internet. It’s been a while since I read much about Chinese netizen language, so some of this is definitely out of date, but it’s still interesting.

You may know that China exercises a significant amount of censorship on online speech. This is a system that they’ve built up over the years, but it includes a mix of blocking select foreign sites, keyword filtering of social media, and human reviews of online content. The avoidance strategies I’ve seen mostly revolve around using homophones or near-homophones, which works very well in Mandarin Chinese, since you can find homophonous characters pretty easily.

A lot of what I saw around when I was paying attention to these things were actually more mocking replacements. Around the aughts, one of the slogans of the Chinese government was 和谐社会, meaning “harmonious society”. People mocking the slogan online replaced the characters of 和谐 “harmonious”, with a homophone (河蟹) meaning “river crab”. This escalated to incorporate a second slogan, 三个代表, “the three represents”, transformed into 带三个表, “wearing three watches”. This, of course, led to photoshopped images of a river crab wearing three watches, which was popular for a while.

But there is more straightforward, non-political taboo replacement. This is not episode 13, so I will let you go look up the grass mud horse and the french-croatian squid to figure out the “obscene” phrases they are replacing.

There are a lot of things that you can do with these sorts of replacement games. Obviously, this is something worth thinking about if you have some sort of science fiction or modern day world where these kinds of forces are likely to be present on different Internet-like platforms. You can be thinking in terms of your writing system and what can be replaced with what.

An idea that came to me was how this could apply in a fantasy setting. For instance, in the book Tigana, an enchantment is placed over the titular princedom on the Peninsula of the Palm by a foreign conqueror. People not from Tigana cannot hear or retain its name or many of the cultural products from the princedom, instead referring to it as Lower Corte. In the story, children of people from Tigana found each other through songs or other cultural knowledge they learned from their parents.

However, what if you took that basic premise, but applied some of that TikTok euphemism logic to it. Could they twist the name into something similar that outsiders could hear and retain? If it’s a transparent name, maybe they could use synonyms — perhaps the country is named the equivalent of Rose Kingdom, and various flowers end up substituted, or a description like Thorn-stemmed Kingdom. This all depends on how you decide the enchantment works, of course, and that’s all up to what limits you decide to put on it.

Of course, you can also take some inspiration from the mocking nature of some of the Chinese examples above, and come up with some fun, punny ways people refer to the ruling class or the official government. Who is making fun of the government? Why? What are the things they hit on in their satire?

In any case, exploring ways that people obfuscate words in an online context or some similar censorship situation can really help you tie language into politics and culture in your world. What things are censored? Why are they censored? What motivates people to talk about them anyway? How effective is the censorship? There’s a wealth of issues to explore this way.

Happy Conlanging!