Revealed: The secret code words being used to beat online censorship

Telegraph

6 days ago

Youth slang has always been an ephemeral, shape-shifting thing, arriving as if from nowhere, taking over the lexicon, then fading out, to be replaced by other popular words and phrases.
But since the advent of social media, words no longer spread organically through a population. Those that catch on tend to be artificially and often cynically disseminated by a power we cannot see but are very much guided by: the algorithm.
As etymologist Adam Aleksic writes in his engaging and very readable new book Algospeak, 'We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, driven by the invisible forces behind social media and its algorithms.'
Aleksic is young and very online himself. Aged 24, he's just two years out of Harvard University, where he studied linguistics. Since graduating, he has built a multi-platform empire making catchy short-form videos about etymology and now, a book.
@oliversoxford Please don't censor this it's educational we promise #etymology #linguisticsmajor #linguistics #languageevolution ♬ original sound - Oliver's Oxford
The stated mission of Algospeak is to reveal the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it. What it hones in on, however, is how language is used and spread on social media, how politics is affected (of which more later), and how younger users are getting past keywords and topics that are increasingly censored or outright banned on social media platforms. Using 'seggs' instead of sex, for instance; 'unalive' instead of kill or suicide; or emojis, such as the watermelon, to talk about Palestine (a Six-Day War reference).
'The censorship force is causing language change to happen faster,' explains Aleksic.
But why? This censorship, he says, exists partly to avoid incentivising things like suicide or eating disorders. But, unsurprisingly, it's not only ethically motivated. 'A lot of the rest of it is what's going to make [the social media platforms] money… and we have a little bit of banality of evil going on there,' he says.
In the UK, there will soon be another block on certain content reaching children on social media: under the Online Safety Act, from this month algorithms will have to filter out content deemed harmful, or else face large fines. Content creators will presumably respond as they have done before: by finding imaginative new ways around this. It's a process Aleksic refers to as linguistic whac-a-mole, and illustrates the difficulty of effectively policing this democratised medium.
Social media researcher Emily van der Nagel calls it 'Voldemorting', which in practice means avoiding typing certain keywords, just as wizards in the Harry Potter books avoid saying the name of the evil Lord Voldemort.
This, in the social media age, is how 'taboo' topics are discussed and it's given rise to an explosion of semiotic workarounds: Donald Trump goes by '45' or '47' (the 45th and 47th president of the United States), 'the Cheeto' or 'orange man', and now, the taco emoji (for Trump Always Chickens Out); the corn emoji may be used as a replacement for 'porn'; and so on.
As soon as a platform bans a keyword, a human user will find linguistically innovative ways to get past these barriers.
'We're able to figure out new ways to talk about what we want to talk about. Humans are good at circumventing these algorithms,' says Aleksic.
Raised in Albany, New York, he's the son of two Serbian immigrants, both atmosphere research scientists. 'So I was the oddball for being the humanities person,' he says.
His passion for linguistics started as a teenager, when he came across a book on the subject. He found himself hooked, and started a blog called The Etymology Nerd, which then snowballed into @theetymologynerd.
He's sitting in front of an exposed brick wall, a background that appears in many of his TikTok videos. These consist of him explaining – at breakneck speed to hold his viewers' attention – the origins and meanings of words or phrases, or interesting features of the way we use language.
He speaks almost as fast and excitedly during our chat, so it's unclear where his online persona ends and his offline self begins. A false distinction, perhaps, for a content creator like Aleksic, who's immersed in the digital world with 1.5 million followers on Instagram, 744,000 on TikTok, 630,000 on YouTube, a Substack newsletter with 57,000 subscribers. As such, he knows exactly how to pull in an online crowd.
'It helps that I'm literally studying how influencers talk [and] what are the tricks,' he says. 'If you want to do well in the algorithm, you've got to predict how people think. It definitely helped that I was studying the tactics.'
One of which is his million-words-a-minute talking speed, because there's a very real risk that if you pause for breath, your audience will grow bored and scroll on. Aleksic is open about how he uses these tricks to bring linguistics to a broader audience.
He is also canny about his subject choice, often discussing slang words and phrases, like 'skibidi' (which has no real meaning), to appeal to his young, digitally-minded audience. His TikTok post on the phrase 'he's cooked' (meaning he's in trouble or exhausted) received almost 120,000 likes, suggesting the TikTok generation is especially interested in having its language explained to itself.
That he's managed to interest millions of followers in etymology is in itself impressive. That he's using his platform as a digital content creator to critique the media he's built his career on is perhaps even more so.
There are processes Aleksic wants his audience to be aware of where language and social media is concerned. As an etymologist, he is naturally concerned with where words come from, but so should their users be too, he suggests. Slang words appropriated from online or offline subcultures are used in harmless ways by others who have no idea of their origins. But what if you knew that some of those strange slang words your children and grandchildren use – known as 'brainrot' among the initiated – come from online incel culture [the term for a subculture of men who consider themselves unable to attract women and therefore hostile in their attitudes to women]? 'Mewing', for instance – a jaw exercise that supposedly improves facial bone structure – hails from the incel playbook, which centres on the belief that some men are discriminated against for not being good-looking (or a 'Chad', to use their term).
While plenty of kids use these words simply to connect with each other, and with no intention whatsoever of spreading incel culture, Aleksic argues that incel culture has nonetheless found its way into the mainstream by way of its slang and memes.
'There's middle-schoolers talking more like incels… The ideas get Trojan-horsed through the meme[s],' he says. 'I do think the words have an ability to shift what I call the consensus reality. It makes it more palatable to accept these ideas about lookism, the [incel] philosophy.'
Incel slang words spread online initially because people find them funny, he suggests.
Other types of language and content spread online because they are extreme and so provoke emotion – often anger – which drives engagement, which in turn makes money for the platforms. The collateral damage, arguably, is nuance, objectivity and moderate opinions.
'We're just fed this extreme version of reality,' says Aleksic. 'In the US, you're more likely to get far-Left or far-Right perspectives because the middle doesn't go viral. There's nothing attention-grabbing or spectacular about the middle and nothing that will be pushed further by the algorithm.'
This, he believes, helps explain the re-election of Donald Trump as president. Just as the telegenic John F Kennedy was better suited to the TV age than Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Trump is better suited to the social media, or algorithmic, era, Aleksic argues. 'What works with algorithms? Memes and trends. Trump is extremely meme-able,' he says.
The language Trump uses lends itself to what Aleksic calls 'remixable sentences': Make X Y again; this is the greatest X in the history of Y.
'There's no good memes coming out of the progressive side [of politics] and that's a very important thing to pay attention to,' he says, 'because it shapes… our perception of what's happening.'
Still, Aleksic is chipper and at pains to present all this not as the end of civilisation as we know it but as a continuation of existing phenomena. It's the medium that's new, he stresses, not the behaviour: in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead, American author Norman Mailer replaced every use of the f-word with 'fug' to get it past his publisher (just as I am calling it the f-word here because this is The Telegraph).
Social media is something of an equaliser, Aleksic suggests. The old rules of language aren't policed in the way they once were. The traditional linguistic gatekeepers, such as newspapers – or, in repressive regimes, the government – don't control how we express ourselves on the platforms, where we're free to use endlessly inventive slang and censorship-avoiding tweaks to regular words.
He doesn't want to sound like a 'doomer' (a term he doesn't need to explain). 'The main takeaway is everything is the same except it's happening way faster and… [is] compounded by human-algorithm interactions,' he says.
Older readers may see it differently. Never before in human history have we lived our lives through a screen we carry in our pockets, with an algorithm, rather than humans, curating, dictating and shaping our world view, how we relate to each other, and how we experience life on this planet. Maybe, actually, that is the scary part.