The censorship that’s happening across multiple social media platforms is appalling. First it was Facebook introducing its community standards, followed by Instagram, since it’s Meta owned too. Next came YouTube and then TikTok.
Try watching a true crime story these days. You’d better know how to read lips because the content creators can’t say murder, torture, gun, knife, stab, sexual assault, rape, kill, die, and God knows what else without losing their right to monetize. And what about TikTok? Wow, that’s a platform that has taken censorship to a whole new level. You can’t even say “ew” on their platform without getting flagged.
As someone who tries to find the original good intent – because the road to disaster is often paved with it – I applaud those who are proactive in shutting down hate speeches and internet bullying. However, these platforms didn’t know when to quit. The baby has morphed into a nitpicking monster. Topics that should be discussed openly – because that’s how problems tend to resolve themselves, by talking about them – are being flagged as offensive or too triggering. However, this censorship has offered us a loophole. Either abbreviate the “trigger words” or dumb it down.
Censorship Translator
- CA: Child Abuse
- SA: Sexual Abuse
- CSA: Child Sexual Abuse
- Unalive: Suicide or Murder. Check the context to understand which is which because the censorship doesn’t allow these words.
- Pew-Pew: Gun. That’s right folks, the language police wants us to return to toddler language with this one.
Then there are other words that we haven’t yet figured out how to dumb down or abbreviate. So, we rely on inserting numbers or symbols into the words, lest we risk being shadow banned, or worse. Die tends to look like: d1e or d*e. Incest becomes inc3st or some other variant. Pedophile looks something like p*d0ph*le, and so on.
I think we can all agree that the world would be a safer place without abuse, pedophilia, rape, and murder. However, banning these words will not make these problems go away. So, we must ask something crucial. Who are we helping by banning these words? Because it certainly isn’t helping the victims.
“Unalive” isn’t helping those with suicidal ideation.
Has anyone checked on those struggling with suicidal ideation lately? How are they finding help outside the crisis line? How are the social media healers supposed to help those struggling with the urge to end their lives if they aren’t even allowed to say or hashtag the word suicide? Who are these people who find the term suicide so offensive that we must ban the word? Why is it more important to appease them than to help those who are struggling find the resources they need?
“CA” does not help children who are abused or the survivors of “CA”
As a survivor of child abuse, I find it offensive that child abuse still exists. However, it’s more offensive when we are forced to see, hear, and speak CA in place of child abuse. Even more appalling is how not all child murders even make headline news. In fact, we only hear of a small fraction of those innocent lives who were beaten and/or malnourished to death. And yet, raising awareness on this issue so that we can do something about it is denied because the topic of child abuse and murder is too triggering. Banning these words only helps the abusers and murderers. And don’t get me started on how the censorship of the adult survivors of child abuse sharing their stories prevents the much needed reforms from happening in Child Failure Services.
“SA” and “CSA” enables the rapists and pedophiles
Imagine the ultimate violation inflicted on someone’s body and they are told to use minimizing language to describe what happened to them. The survivors of incest and child sexual abuse have the power to educate us on how pedophiles operate and groom children. But alas! This censorship isn’t even allowing us to say incest or pedophile. The rape survivor can’t say rape. So, we have all these banned words working against the survivor’s story.
So far, the term groomer isn’t banned. However, while all groomers are pedophiles, not all pedophiles are groomers. While there are pedophiles who violate children in our “traditional” understanding of rape, the pedophiles who are groomers are the “nice” ones who use “kindness” and “love” to manipulate the child into sexual acts. This is even more sick when the groomer is the child’s own parent. But oops! Incest is a banned word.
Evil, Like Shame, Thrives in the Darkness
We must accept that we will never live in a utopian world and attempting to manufacture one creates a dystopian world every time. This is what we are seeing now on these social media platforms, where bullying is okay as long as the one doing it is virtue signaling. People are allowed to morally police others over demonizing a mental illness just because the self-stigmatizing behaviors in abusers can be found in the DSM. And of course the censorship prevents us from raising awareness on dangerous people or help those struggling with suicidal urges find a reason to live.
The more we show the darkness in the world the more light takes over. These pedophiles and abusers live in the shadows…they don’t like people seeing or knowing what they do.
Understanding Sexual Abuse: An Interview with an Advocate
The above quote is from Becky Schonscheck, a powerful advocate I discovered on Instagram. Thanks to the censorship, she has been shadow banned so often, that she now sticks to the website she runs with two other advocates. But Becky’s words taught me something. Exposing evil – or shining a light on it – is how we defeat it. If we want safe spaces, we must have knowledge of unsafe people. When we can’t see, hear, or speak freely on evil, then evil is free to do what evil does best.