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Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language - Softcover

Aleksic, Adam

 
9798217006861: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
Softcover
ISBN 13: 9798217006861
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From linguist Adam Aleksic, known as @etymologynerd on social media, comes a captivating exploration of how internet algorithms are transforming language and communication in unprecedented ways.

“Packed with fascinating facts, of-the-moment observations, and a sparkling voice, Algospeak is a gift to any word nerd. Deftly covering everything from emoji etymologies and trendbait to Taylor Swift fanilects . . . Adam Aleksic is the wise, yet accessible internet linguistics oracle we need.”—Amanda Montell, author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Cultish

From “brainrot” memes and incel slang to the trend of adding “-core” to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and the way we use it: he knows the ways it has morphed and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues. As a social media influencer, Aleksic is also intimately familiar with the internet’s reach and how social media impacts the way we engage with one another. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform language as we know it. Our interactions, social norms, and habits—both online and in person—shift into something completely different.

As Aleksic uses original surveys, data, and internet archival research to usher us through this new linguistic landscape, he also illuminates how communication is changing in both familiar and unexpected ways. From our use of emojis to sentence structure to the ways younger generations talk about sex and death (see unalive in English and desvivirse in Spanish), we are in a brand-new world, one shaped by algorithms and technology. Algospeak is an energetic, astonishing journey into language, the internet, and what this intersection means for all of us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam Aleksic

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

How to Play Linguistic Whac-A-Mole

Remember Whac-A-Mole? The slightly unhinged arcade game where new characters keep popping up no matter how many times you smack them with your mallet? It might seem ridiculous to use coin-operated violence as an analogy for the serious linguistic changes we’re experiencing online, but Whac-A-Mole truly is the perfect metaphor for explaining how humans react to censorship. As soon as a word is banned, we find a way around it; that is, until content moderators catch wind of the new word and ban that, too. Then another word pops up, and the cycle repeats, trapping users and platforms in a never-ending loop of new spellings and substitutions that disappear once the algorithm catches on and the mallet comes down again. The faster and better the moderation tools are, the more words will be created. This is because the underlying idea—and our desire to talk about it—remains.

People have been playing this game since the early days of the internet. Frustrated with text filters on bulletin boards in the 1980s, netizens turned to “leetspeak,” a hacker dialect characterized by creatively respelled words. Since terms like “suicide” were censored in some chat rooms, leetspeakers wrote out coded replacements like “5U1C1D3” in much the same way that people began using “unalive.” If the chat-room moderators caught on, they could just change the spelling to another easily recognizable form, like “$U!C!D€.”

The tools being used have since grown more sophisticated, but the underlying process remains the same. Rudimentary word identification scripts might have been upgraded to fancy, AI-powered algorithms, but censorship is still driving linguistic creativity. If anything, the algorithmic era has spurred more innovation, because the game is happening faster, with more guesswork involved. Due to intellectual property concerns, not much is known about how these apps actually recommend content. Influencers are often subject to the whims of unknown and unfair criteria, with only opaque community guidelines as reference points.

This marks a major difference between leetspeak and algospeak: You could always immediately tell when leetspeak worked, because you would see your comment posted onto a message board. For algospeak, however, the goal is to make it onto a user’s “recommended page,” and it’s much harder to tell when you’ve successfully done that. Videos with sensitive keywords aren’t always removed outright. Sometimes, they’ll be “suppressed,” or shown to fewer followers. Creators can also be “shadowbanned” without warning or notification. We—and I’m including myself here—receive very little communication from the platforms, so we’re not sure whether videos do poorly because they’re bad or because they’re being censored. Understandably, then, we’ll err on the side of caution when it comes to euphemization.

Creators can sort of tell what does and doesn’t get onto the recommended page by looking at our video analytics. If I usually get most of my views from the recommended page, and then all of a sudden a video is getting views only from the “followers” feed, that’s a semi-reliable indication that some part of my video made the algorithm unhappy. Through this kind of trial and error, influencers can extrapolate a pretty good idea of what the algorithm rewards and penalizes, and it’s in this context that “unalive” was forged. When the word “suicide” wasn’t getting views, people turned to the next best term to tell their story.

While linguistic innovation like this is an exciting and normal thing, it’s reasonable to be alarmed at the way community guidelines are shaping important conversations, especially as people increasingly turn to short-form video for news or advice. Oftentimes, the mysterious rules governing social media are arbitrary or outright discriminatory. TikTok has historically been proven,1 for example, to artificially suppress videos by “ugly,” old, and poor creators, because they’re not as appealing to new users. This means that it’s often difficult to include larger audiences in discussions about things like disability, age, and income inequality. Nevertheless, we have no choice but to play the game and tiptoe around community guidelines wherever we can.



In 2022, the Charles Dickens Museum began a desperate social media campaign to get itself un-shadowbanned from TikTok. Whenever users would search for the museum’s account, nothing would show up. Instead, they would be cautioned2 that “this phrase may be associated with behavior or content that violates our guidelines” and that “promoting a safe and positive experience is TikTok’s top priority.”

Of course, the Charles Dickens Museum wasn’t doing anything wrong. They were mostly posting house tours or excerpts of old letters. Instead, the problem was with the TikTok algorithm, which was flagging the museum’s videos as obscene because they included the keyword “dick.” For all its fancy high-tech machine learning, the algorithm had fallen victim to a classic internet pitfall: the Scunthorpe problem, named for an English village where residents discovered they were unable to create AOL accounts because their hometown contained the word “cunt.”

Following an intense #FreeDickens campaign on Twitter, TikTok eventually agreed to unblock Charles Dickens–related search terms. However, it still remains difficult to curse—intentionally or accidentally—on any platform. While your videos won’t get removed outright, they’ll often be suppressed in search just like the museum’s. Especially if you’re cursing too much or too severely, your content will be hampered by the algorithm. If a video is eligible for the recommended page but still contains mature language, TikTok and Instagram will prevent it from appearing in clusters of similar videos in a user’s feed, which means that it’ll be pushed to a smaller audience than its work-safe competitors.3

Likewise, on YouTube, creators posting videos with severe or repeated profanity have to contend with “demonetization,” where they lose the ability to earn revenue from advertisements on their content. This is especially scary to influencers whose livelihoods depend on a steady income stream from their videos.

All this means that we have a lot of reasons to respell our swear words creatively online. If you look up the keyword “bitch” through TikTok’s search function, for example, you’ll likely encounter variations such as “btch,” “b!tch,” and “b*tch” in the video captions. Same with “fuck,” which will probably give you “fck,” “fvck,” and “f*ck”—none too different from the leetspeak letter substitutions of the past.

The practice of respelling offensive words is a centuries-old tradition known as bowdlerization, named for the Englishman Thomas Bowdler, who is mainly remembered for publishing some egregiously family-safe edits of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Self-bowdlerizing to avoid media constraints is not new: People have been doing it since at least the days of early newspaper comics, where sequences of graphic characters called grawlixes are still used instead of swear words to circumvent stringent syndication standards. The earliest known example is from this 1901 Lady Bountiful comic by Gene Carr:



Over time, some grawlixes got less thinly veiled as cultural norms against profanity...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217006861
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
257
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland