I suppose it's like someone saying "duck" instead of "fuck"; or those old curse filters in online games that blocked words like "analysis" so it became @nalysis instead.

What you're seeing is a mix of "professionalisation" and "protect the children" - essentially "you are in a place of work that has children" when you're on a platform. This is, of course, completely fucking nuts and defies logical analysis.

Folks find a way round, so you end up with work around terms, and the like. What we really need is a "kidsnet" - a heavily filtered version of the net for kids that limits communication options and auto filters content.

Advertising is an incoherent industry where it is generally understood and accepted for people to pay to not receive the product. Pay your advertising protection money or your content will be interrupted. Absolute racketeering.

Why do you care about what advertisers want unless you are getting paid by them?

News flash: you will never send a stronger message than ignoring advertisers and their whipping boys.

Social media just became an outlet for some people to let out steam. Unfortunately, not all people are able to turn around to fix their own personal issues, but instead end up succumbing tragically because they feel they no longer have power, and so they publicize their final deed, literally issuing their suicide notes online. That's why you have these social media corporations seeking to control suicide ideation by means of removing language connected to suicide.

I call them algorisms.

I remember when "an hero" was used, was always surprised people moved to "unalive"

I mostly feel the same way, but it's not without purpose. It allows for discussions of those issues on platforms that would otherwise ban it. Platforms like tiktok are so far reaching that it's almost an acceptable trade.

It's allowing the use of a platform that would otherwise be unavailable, instead of being relegated to the dark corners of the internet where no one will see it. Awareness is the first step.

Don't patronize those platforms.

So, if my channel is monetized anyway, I can say whatever I want, since I don't care about advertisers?

100% agree. ridiculous that people are allowing their online lingo to affect their irl speech

I'll put this up front, just to make it clear: I'm not going to sit here and say that advertiser's should hold any power over what we say or how we say it. In general, modern advertising is a cesspool of shit.

With that said, advertiser's have one main goal, to reach their target audience, and endear them to your product so they go out and buy it. If you're advertising on a platform like YouTube, there's going to be a nontrivial amount of pretty much every demographic, which is uncomfortable with such difficult topics or the words associated to them.

So I don't think it's surprising that they wouldn't want to advertise to their demo along side content that would upset or otherwise make their demo uncomfortable.

Building on this point, advertiser's are just reacting to a very real issue that some have with some words and terms. They might be upset or triggered or otherwise made uncomfortable/unhappy by hearing some things being said; I think it's respectful to those who would be triggered by other terms for "unalive"

I really like self censorship, but hate the reason behind its popularity.

Oh great. "unalives" is my term for a group of people in my D&D world who were sort of turned into ghosts by a vast magical accident. They were actually shifted into a demiplane created by the accident, but to outsiders they appear to be ghosts. Anyway if I eventually publish the world am I going to offend people and get accused of queer/transhate or slangjacking or something? I made it up many years ago when social media was MySpace, or even earlier.

It's interesting that now the narrative is that all these words are being censored due to advertisers.

By my memory, at least some subset of these terms was being self-censored because they were triggers or considered offensive for other readers / users of various sites and people were trying to protect others by avoiding words that upset them. That's what I was told about words like rape, suicide, and profanity like fuck, bitch, etc. At the time when I was first noticing a strong trend towards self-censoring, most of the sites I was seeing it on had little to no advertising, particularly not from major brands, so this while that may be the reason for the trend to continue, I'm not convinced that's why it started or how it became widespread.