{"id":36024,"date":"2016-10-04T02:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T06:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36024"},"modified":"2016-10-03T10:51:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T14:51:07","slug":"when-you-suppress-hate-speech-you-dont-actually-eliminate-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/10\/04\/when-you-suppress-hate-speech-you-dont-actually-eliminate-it\/","title":{"rendered":"When you suppress hate speech, you don’t actually eliminate it"},"content":{"rendered":"

People seem to be surprised that censorship generates pushback from the censored. In this case, the more active censorship of certain words by Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies has encouraged the targets of the censors to come up with other ways to communicate<\/a> with fellow-minded people, in this case a simple substitution code:<\/p>\n

Now a new type of hateful internet code appears to be emerging: The systematic use of innocuous words to stand in for offensive racial slurs. Search Twitter for \u201cgoogles,\u201d \u201cskypes,\u201d or \u201cyahoos,\u201d and you will encounter some shocking results, like this tweet: \u201cIf welfare state is a given it must go towards our own who needs. No Skypes, googles, or yahoos.\u201d Or this one, reading \u201cChain the googles \/ Gas the yahoos.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does this mean? Nothing good. In this lexicon, \u201cgoogles\u201d means the n-word; \u201cskypes\u201d means Jews; and \u201cyahoos\u201d means \u201cspic.\u201d The word \u201cskittles\u201d has come to refer to Muslims, an obvious reference to Donald Trump Jr.\u2019s comparing of refugees<\/a> with candy that \u201cwould kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n

By all accounts the lexicon seems to have been conceived on 4chan<\/a> \u2014 a message board famous for its trolls \u2014 as a response to Google\u2019s improved method<\/a> for identifying pages and comments with offensive content and potentially removing or flagging them. The title of the 4chan post<\/a> that seems to have started it all is \u201cRIP alt-right trolls, SkyNet is coming for you.\u201d The trolls responded with a loosely organized effort called \u201cOperation Google<\/a>,\u201d which aims to get around these algorithms, and to trick them into blocking the names of their own services and companies.<\/p>\n

Hence the use of \u201cgoogle\u201d to mean what is arguably the most offensive term of them all. For a fuller list, including coded anti-LGBT terms, click here<\/a>. (Warning: It\u2019s not pretty.) This list appeared on 4chan\u2019s \u201cPolitically Incorrect\u201d \/pol\/ board, and has been widely shared on Twitter and elsewhere, and similar terms can be found as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People seem to be surprised that censorship generates pushback from the censored. In this case, the more active censorship of certain words by Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies has encouraged the targets of the censors to come up with other ways to communicate with fellow-minded people, in this case a simple substitution code: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,15],"tags":[459,328,99,593,310],"class_list":["post-36024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-google","tag-racism","tag-socialmedia","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9n2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36024"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36025,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36024\/revisions\/36025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}