Deeplinks
Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation works.
“Algospeak” is a new English dialect that emerged from the desperate attempts of social media users to “please the algorithm”: that is, to avoid words and phrases that cause social media platforms’ algorithms to suppress or block their communication.
Algospeak is practiced by all types of social media users, from individuals addressing their friends to science communicators and activists hoping to reach a broader public. But the most ardent practitioners of algospeak are social media creators, who rely—directly or indirectly—on social media to earn a living.
For these creators, accidentally blundering into an invisible linguistic fence erected by social media companies can mean the difference between paying their rent or not. When you work on a video for days or weeks—or even years—and then “the algorithm” decides not to show it to anyone (not even the people who explicitly follow you or subscribe to your feed), that has real consequences.
Social media platforms argue that they’re entitled to establish their own house rules and declare some subjects or conduct to be off-limits. They also say that by automating recommendations, they’re helping their users find the best videos and other posts.
They’re not wrong. In the U.S., for example, the First Amendment protects the right of platforms to moderate the content they host. Besides, every conversational space has its own norms and rules. These rules define a community. Part of free speech is the right of a community to freely decide how they’ll speak to one another. What’s more, social media—like all human systems—has its share of predators and parasites, scammers and trolls and spammers, which is why users want tools to he
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