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Since I’m a chronically online elder millennial, I’ve ingested a lot of discourse this year about the attention economy and how much evil corporations benefit from keeping us scrolling. As such, I’m on an extended break from TikTok and Bluesky, and cutting way back on Instagram and Threads. Which means I’m in the very middle-aged position of needing NPR explainers about what young people are up to these days.
Cue Code Switch’s recent episode: “From gr*pists to nip nops, how self-censorship shapes the language of TikTok.” The youths are using increasingly ostentatious euphemisms and code words on social media. Seggs for sex. Unalive for kill or murder. Pew pew for gun. The newest one to my aged ears is nip nops for nipples1. There’s a “the girls that get it get it” shibboleth undertone to any slang, especially one that’s native to the internet. And a lot of this sounds like infantilizing Cockney rhyming slang to me, but I am the one listening to NPR for this, so I’m not supposed to be one of the girls that get it.
The purported reason for these code words is the almighty algorithm. (TikTok’s in particular, but Meta—including Facebook and Instagram—as well.) The understanding, backed largely by anecdotal evidence, is that social media algorithms will artificially restrict content that contains certain trigger words. Which is why so many people on these platforms talk about “the man with the mustache” rather than calling him Hitler, which I find particularly fascinating considering how easy it is for white supremacists and Nazis to thrive on just about any platform—including this one!
(These kinds of restrictions never seem to do enough to protect vulnerable people from harm, to prevent malicious people from causing said harm, or to prevent bad actors from gaming said restrictions. Perhaps because the people designing and enforcing the restrictions never seem to take the harm too seriously, and all too often are fans of the harm in the first place.)
Again, I am chronically online, but I’ve heard this language bleeding into IRL communication as well (lol at me saying IRL) (and lol at me saying lol). More so than the language itself, though, is the instinct for self-censorship. Tyler the Creator is just the most recent person I’ve seen/heard mention people’s fear of being filmed preventing them from doing something they would otherwise enjoy doing. Human beings have always been quick to mind other people’s business, and our technology and social media platforms only make it easier and more incentivized to do so.
In that way, individual self-censorship has a sneaky way of scaling itself up. In a hostile environment, the genuine instinct to protect oneself and others from harmful language—and to make sure a message can actually reach its intended audience—can curdle into a much nastier instinct. It can become an instinct to prove one’s commitment to a cause; and, worse still, an instinct to prove that others are insufficiently committed. And it’s all too easy for bad actors to manipulate those instincts to genuinely violent ends. It’s all too easy for us to settle into a pre-fab panopticon.
In case you don’t count a number of philosophers amongst your nears and dears (shout out !), the most recent Superman movie gives a pretty excellent representation of the panopticon. (If you don’t want any plot details, skip to the next paragraph, but I don’t think this falls within “spoiler” territory.) We have a massive prison, full of prisoners locked in glass cubes. Guards technically exist, but they seem scarce. Instead, when a prisoner begins to act out, their cell neighbours immediately start snitching, and then fighting with each other about who deserves the credit for snitching and who should be punished for not snitching soon enough. The guards’ presence is barely necessary, because the omnipresent threat of punishment is enough to have the prisoners surveil and police each other. A perfect panopticon.
That same frantic energy, to prove that you are Good, so Good that you call out and seek to punish those who are Not Good, pulses through so many of our online interactions. The recent frenzy over some random strangers who went on a date to a Coldplay concert with each other instead of their spouses was one particularly weird example. Justifying the vitriol by saying that the man is a public figure (sis, you’ve never heard of him), or a billionaire (bro, how is yelling at him about his social life a class warfare tactic?), just gives a righteous sheen to what is, essentially, gossip. It’s all getting very I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil.
And the Salem Witch Trial energy coming from regular people only makes it easier for the malign and powerful to turn any of us into witches. Not for nothing, but the TikTok algorithm mindlessly scanning for trigger words in order to depress creators’ reach feels very similar, spiritually and methodologically, to the Trump administration mindlessly scanning for trigger words to defund pretty much everything this year.
The entire socio-political environment is terrifying right now. Exactly as terrifying as some of us had been warning it would be, mostly because Trump very consistently said on the campaign trail that punishing his political enemies would be a top priority. His administration has been shamelessly cruel in keeping this campaign promise, too. In the past 72 hours alone, Trump terminated half of all Department of Education staff, and fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner because she brought him some bad news; while the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will shut down after Congress cut all of its federal funding.
His villainy is at once so textbook and yet so over-the-top; both entirely predictable and nearly breathtaking in how complete it is. Our self-censoring and surveilling instincts kick into high gear when faced with such an omnipresent and vindictive threat. And institutions continue to line up to walk into the Trump buzzsaw, convincing themselves that there’s a right way to appease a heedless and petty dictator who doesn’t really want them to exist. “If we abandon any commitments to diversity and inclusion, that will save us.” “If we censor our journalists, that will protect us.” “If we let him deport just the bad ones, that will keep us in the country.” None of this is true, but they’re all trying it. And trying to make anyone who refuses to normalize this behavior seem unreasonable.
Except nothing that’s happening is reasonable. Authoritarianism isn’t reasonable by anything but the most cynical, least humane metrics. Moral cowardice and willful ignorance are not reasonable. And, try as we might, we can’t rationalize our way into being safe, or appease our way out of a fascist state, just like we can’t self-censor our way around a self-serving algorithm.
Speaking of algorithms! Please appease this one by liking and sharing this essay!