Access Denied

TikTok creators have gotten into the habit of coming up with substitutes for words that they worry might either affect how their videos get promoted on the site or run afoul of moderation rules.

It’s a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight.

Illich’s anecdote is, of course, a provocative reversal of the usual way that new media tend to be presented as a necessarily democratizing and empowering force, and it seems closer to mark as the events of the last decade or so have illustrated. The ostensible promise of social media was that anyone’s voice could now be heard. Whether anyone would

This is how algorithmic normalization happens. Normal is a word for the unobtrusive and average, whatever won’t provoke negative reactions. Whichever content fits in that zone of averageness sees accelerated promotion and growth, like “Strange” did, while the rest falls by the wayside. As fewer people see the content that doesn’t get promoted, ther

At a societal level, it’s a case of bias-laundering through technology

context collapse creates a “lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.”4