Incident 394: Social Media's Automated Word-Flagging without Context Shifted Content Creators' Language Use

Description: TikTok's, YouTube's, Instagram's, and Twitch's use of algorithms to flag certain words devoid of context changed content creators' use of everyday language or discussion about certain topics in fear of their content getting flagged or auto-demonetized by mistake.

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
394
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2017-03-15
Editors
Khoa Lam
Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’
washingtonpost.com · 2022

"Algospeak" is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch.

Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase u…

Decoding what algospeak really means for content creators
fastcompany.com · 2022

If you've noticed the use of newly invented words cropping up on digital platforms or words used out of context or misspelled, it's not a new kind of social media slang—it's algospeak.

Terms like "unalive" take the place of "dead" or "kill.…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.