Six months ago, I looked up how to humanely euthanize a sick fish on Reddit. I found a method and now my fish is dead. Since then, Reddit has sent an email every week with novel ways to kill fish of all sizes. The algorithm must think I’m a fish mass murderer. It won’t stop.

At the same time, we’ve seen enough social networks come and go that we now understand the consequences of making content moderation an afterthought. Ask Reddit, which just a few weeks ago thought to explicitly ban hate speech — years after nurturing communities of racists, nonconsensual porn distributors, and other blights on the internet.

This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.

Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more