Apparently, I don’t.
Or at least that’s what our mates at Meta would have you believe.
Today I discovered that my accounts on Instagram and FB have been suspended. What?! Did the Geek Gods decide to save me from my scrolling sins in favour of more worthwhile pursuits IRL?
Um, no. These e-deities don’t trade in altruism, my friends. In fact, the reasons they gave for pausing my access to digital slop was something so alien to who I am and what I share online it concerned me – for 90 seconds.
A quick call to my very wise social media manager friend revealed the (somewhat) startling truth…
An army of AI web crawlers are waging war on unpalatable / illegal / abusive content. But the busy bots just aren’t big on nuance. It’s just slash and burn, baby.
Oh no. What to do?? Nobody wants their scrolling thumbs put on ice while their feeds are assessed and, all digits crossed, approved!
But never fear, algospeak is here.
For those of you who don’t know (or care), this is a self-censorship method which essentially assassinates the English language for the sake of ‘free speech’. And, as a result, it’s spawned gems like s3x, 4buse, nip nops and pew-pew – which refers to guns not bad smells. Who knew?
I guess we should all breathe a sigh of relief and be grateful that our tech bro overlords are out to get those online bad guys!
Either that or our privacy is officially… forked.
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