Friday Squid Blogging: New "Squid" Sneaker – Schneier on Security

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November 21, 2025 6:55 PM

The words you can’t say on the internet
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251118-the-words-you-cant-say-on-the-internet

=Algospeak, as it’s often called, is a whole coded language built around the idea that algorithms bury content that uses forbidden words or phrases, either to boost the political agendas of social media companies, or to sanitise our feeds for advertisers.

History is littered with examples of social media companies quietly manipulating what content rises and falls, sometimes in ways that contradict their claims about transparency and neutrality. Even if it doesn’t come down to individual words, experts say the tech giants do step in to subtly curb some material.

!!!!The problem is you never know why a post fails. Did you say something that upset
the algorithms, or did you just make a bad video? The ambiguity has encouraged a
widespread regime of self-censorship. On one end of the spectrum, the result is people talking about serious subjects with goofy language. But at the extremes, some users who just want to go viral avoid certain topics altogether.

it could mean there are ideas that some people never get to hear.

In practice, though, social media platforms have repeatedly meddled with which voices are amplified or buried, contradicting their rhetoric about openness and fair play, according to investigations by the BBC, advocacy groups, researchers and other news outlets.

The problem is the policies governing social media are heavy handed and largely
invisible, says Sarah T Roberts, a professor and director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

People rarely know where the boundaries lie, Roberts says, or when the platforms quietly push some posts forward and others out of sight.

Social media companies make their money from advertising. Ultimately, that means their goal is to make apps that lots of people want to use, fill them with content that makes advertisers comfortable and do whatever is necessary to prevent government regulators from getting in the way, Roberts says. Every change to the algorithm and every content moderation decision comes down to that profit
motive.=

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

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