You know one of the nice things about having my own website? I don’t need to worry about getting banned. In my last post I wrote the word “suicide”. When writing it I hesitated for a few minutes. I was thinking of what phrase I should use instead of “suicide” but would still drive the point home. Writing “uninstalled from life”, “committing not live”, and all of the other ways we’ve come up with to dance around the subject doesn’t have the same impact, if anything it lessens it. While I was editing it I caught myself on “suicide” again. I spent a few minutes thinking of how to edit it out until it finally dawned on me: who is going to ban me?
My one Twitter ban was from when I told a guy how to fix a glitch in Smash Bros Ult. There was a period where the online code would mess up and you could get stuck in a match. The only way out? Kill yourself (It feels weird being able to write this again). However, when I told the guy how to fix it I said, “You need to stock yourself by jumping off the ledge.” I specified the ledge bit because I wasn’t sure if this person was familiar with Smash terms or not. Two months later and I am hit with a temporary ban on Twitter with that post being the reason cited. I filed a dispute by providing context. I also provided evidence of this glitch and that killing yourself in the game was the only way to fix it. I was denied.
The funny thing to me is that these overly strict bans on terms like “suicide” and, “kill yourself” have done the opposite of their intentions. If you Google “suicide” you will be greeted with the Suicide Hotline number. I found this out when I was Googling a song I used to listen to and I only knew two lines from it. Google refused to display anything but results for suicide prevention. The lyrics weren’t even about committing “not live” but instead cultural suicide. This has resulted in people making funny terms to even talk about the subject. Which removes all weight from the subject and suicide has become more of a joke then it was before.
Sure, before you’d have people telling you to jump off a bridge or flat out say, “Go kill your self” but now the entire subject matter is a joke, so you see it more. When you tell someone to “go seek medical aid in Canada” it’s funny. There’s no real weight to the threat which means it’s okay to keep piling on. Slowly that no real weight turns into real weight and keeps growing because everyone thinks they’re splashing you with a cup of water. They haven’t realized that millions of other people are pouring their cups on you at the same time. Soon you’re drowning in a lake that no one thinks exists. Once others can see the lake, everyone thinks they played no role in forming it because they only splashed you with a cup of water.
I’m not saying we can’t joke about suicide, God knows I do. What I am saying is the weight of our words and actions become distorted when we need to censor them. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and every other major tech company is distorting the weight of not only suicide but many other words by censoring them. You’re forcing an army of people to create new phrases that will be seen as jovial, while also being damaging. That’s far worse than the impact of being told, “Kill yourself.” It gives a way out so they don’t have to think about their actions. Whereas the dude saying, “No, for real. Fucking kill yourself,” knows what he is saying. He knows the impact of his words and when it is time to reap what he sews there’s not out of, “It’s just a meme.”