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This but much broader. One of the things that really bothers me is the suppression of non-US use of language (or, from the opposite perspective, the incentivisation of US-like language & conformance to US cultural norms).

Take Youtube "content-creators" as an example making a living from ad revenue: Aussie / Scottish other native-English-speaking contributors face "de-monetisation" for presenting their natural selves and instead are asked to present according to US cultural norms in order to use the platform. And this isn't unique to Google/Youtube - the same applies to content-moderation across the internet.




It's a problem in the spanish speaking world. It's a recurring theme saying that you have to conform to your ad-revenue overlord, and that certain topics can't be discussed.

Some people does the content anyway but publish in non-US platforms, or at least somewhere small that can't curate content.


It's a problem in the English-speaking world too. IIRC the reason why YouTubers always say 'the pandemic' instead of 'COVID-19' or 'the coronavirus' is because of the risk of demonetization.

Some channels (e.g. RealLifeLore) even gate their videos on more controversial topics (e.g. war) behind a Nebula or Patreon subscription, with the rationale that they would get demonetized on YouTube.


I remember a guy who got his xbox account permabanned because his username was "kike8572", and the support wouldn't give him his account back even after explaining that kike in Spanish is just a shorthand for the name "Enrique" (his name).


To me, even a single instance of this is more hurtful and wrong than every other usage of the word "kike" online combined.

Better one hundred guilty people go free than one innocent be convicted wrongly. Something is horribly broken about our current system.


Do you have any more info about this?

I'm not sure what you mean and imagining people in AU going through accent training to sound like they're from the US... please tell me it's not that bad


One notable difference is the c-word, which is a gendered slur in the US, but not in Scotland or Australia.

I'm self censoring here because this is a US-run site and I'm afraid I'll get shadowbanned if I use it in full. I am not from the US and this word does not carry the same weight for me.


If I'm going to be censored for saying "cunt" I at least hope I don't have to do the censoring myself.


Only a cunt would censor you for saying "cunt".

Also, I find it funny that "cunt" is considered a gendered slew in the US (according to one of the parent comments). Being a cunt has nothing to do with gender, and everything with a character.


> Being a cunt has nothing to do with gender

Surely you see, though, how it could.


I see this argument as similar to the idea that 'bitch' doesn't have to do with gender. If that were true, wouldn't calling someone a 'dog' carry the same weight?

Let's stick with 'asshole'.


The truth remains that in US culture it does have this gendered meaning, and in Scottish and Australian culture it does not.

Context matters. Intent matters.


Context and intent is also the first to go in the censorship witch-hunt.

Google has fired many an engineer that mentioned that.


There's a bit that comedian Bill Burr does where he observes that referring to someone as "that fucking $XXX" is considered racist while "that $XXX motherfucker" isn't and it has to do with the former talking about the group $XXX as a whole and the latter very explicitly (uh, no pun intended) referring to an attribute of an individual.


Why are you surprised? In US usage it refers to female genitalia. I believe the non-US equivilant is 'fanny'.


[deleted]


Maybe, maybe not :)


Yeah as sibling commenters here allude to, I wasn't referring to accents; that's more about content accessibility and your target audience. You won't get your content taken down because of your accent.

It's more about cultural norms of acceptability - curse words are the obvious example but there's broader & more subtle cultural considerations w.r.t. what's acceptable to discuss and how it should be approached.


Depends on whether you're trying to get a large number of viewers, it's always been the case that you conform to a middle ground to get a large audience, if not many people can understand you you're not going to get millions of subscribers


Yeah that's a "problem" but imo that's more of a life problem (appeal to masses) than one emergent from how man-made online systems have been designed (conformance to arbitrary rules applied by a minority of controlling forces).


Does rumble require the same standard? Perhaps it’s time for more people move to the alternative websites.


Rumble is an "anti-cancel-culture" initiative and cancel culture is really a very separate phenomenon: cancel culture pertains to deplatforming based on political beliefs and impact, rather than based on where you're from or the way you speak.

I have no evidence to support the following, but looking at what causes this problem on mainstream platforms I would strongly suspect Rumble to be even worse. The cause of this problem is socially conservative US advertisers: Youtube's demonetisation algorithms are tuned to language that their advertisers feel it's acceptable to be associated with. My instinct would be that the subset of these advertisers who use Rumble would be more, not less, socially conservative.

If I'm wrong in my guess above, it's likely a result of scale. Rumble being smaller might simply not have reached the scale whereby algorithmic demonetisation is a thing. In which case it's only a matter of time.




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