• @otacon239
    link
    9721 hours ago

    Are we censoring “dumb” but not “damn” now?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      120 hours ago

      To be fair damn is not offensive where as dumb was used to label disabled people and then used as a generally derogatory term. I’d rather censor dumb than damn.

      Overall, we use Mute not Dumb for quite a while now, and so those saying dumb to mean stupid generally are not conflating mute with stupid, so I don’t think it’s worth fighting people over. Just vocab that shifted, even if it had a derogatory connotation at the start, being this far removed from it it’s just too late to bother.

      • @otacon239
        link
        2320 hours ago

        But does censoring a letter change anything? Does reading f*ck read any different to fuck? Does the reader get more or less offense from it?

        Censorship doesn’t really seem to accomplish much and if anything draws extra attention to the censored word. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought without it.

        Who’s benefiting?

        • @toynbee
          link
          3
          edit-2
          15 hours ago

          Usually this is because they are posting to social media and many social media environments use OCR to scan screenshots for “offensive” words. If the scanner finds something it deems unacceptable, the post will get a smaller audience or might even be disallowed.

          The censoring is for the machines, not the people.

          edit: Fixed autocorrect.

        • CornflakeOPM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          519 hours ago

          Frankly, I think single-letter censoring like that is silly. It really doesn’t achieve anything and nobody benefits from it

        • Skua
          link
          fedilink
          420 hours ago

          I think the reasoning is that if it’s censored, it’s an acknowledgement from whoever did so that “this word isn’t appropriate in this context, but the text is worth sharing”

          • CornflakeOPM
            link
            fedilink
            English
            219 hours ago

            That’s probably the reason it’s been censored, but I didn’t take the original screengrab so I’m not sure

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              518 hours ago

              The tip of the gun also appears censored. This is probably some misguided attempt to appease some algorithm somewhere.