Tag Archives: Censorship

Seven Dirty Words

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In 1972, George Carlin wrote a bit titled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” It caused quite a stir with conservatives and even ended up in front of the United States Supreme Court. The debate raged for more than a decade, and then Tipper Gore pitched a shit fit over her daughter hearing Prince sing about masturbation. Senate hearings were held with the end result of the fiasco being the introduction of the Parental Advisory labels on music. Then, in 2014, someone with a stick up their butt brought us the Clean Reader App, in which they would replace all the nasty swears that hurt your eyes or make you go blind or turn you into deviant criminals with something more palatable. In a post I am one hundred percent in support of, Chuck Wendig famously told the Clean Reader folks to go take a piss. I even wrote about it as well.

But this isn’t a post about censorship, not really. It’s a post about Facebook and how they are hellbent on ensuring creators/artists/writers dance on command and that we know they don’t give a single flying fuck about us. We are their printing press; we shall not be compensated in any way for this privilege, and we can do nothing about it.

You may ask, “So, why don’t you leave Facebook?”

A mighty fine question. Many of the more prominent pages are leaving for the likes of Substack. I haven’t made that jump yet due to their problematic handling (or lack thereof) of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. There’s Patreon, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, X, Bluesky, and a whole host of other social media platforms, but in the end, none of them are perfect for writers. Ultimately, writers focus their energy on places where they get the most juice for the squeeze. I have a decent (and growing) following on Facebook, and I’ve managed to sell more copies of Near Death By A Thousand Cuts than I ever thought possible. But here’s the thing: I’m left wondering how many more I could have sold if Facebook didn’t have two different sets of Seven Dirty Words.

Upon reading the first set, you’ll see two trends:

  • Kill
  • Death
  • Murder
  • White
  • Men
  • Racist
  • Anything derogatory towards right-wing politics/politicians/voters

In the United States, inciting violence is one of the few limitations of the First Amendment, so any private company that appears to be on board with that gets itself in hot water. That’s why Facebook will slap a ban on you for using violent and life-ending words like “kill,” “death,” and “murder.” Do you see how I might think that the title of my book might be seen as problematic? It didn’t even occur to me that it would be because, contextually, nothing about it is offside. My first mistake was assuming that context matters. Much like the Pearl-Clutching Puritans (PCP) who balk at the mere mention of a single bad word, the Facebook algorithm doesn’t care. Strangely enough, it doesn’t have a problem with the likes of Jim Jefferies tossing around the word “cunt” like he’s salting a bowl of popcorn, at least not until a PCP files a complaint).

The remaining words on that list have all landed progressive accounts in Facebook jail. “White,” “men,” “racist,” or anything derogatory towards right-wing politics/politicians/voters. This is where it gets amusing because context suddenly starts to matter for these words. It’s perfectly fine to scream and yell nonsense about being an “oppressed white man,” but gods forbid you factually state that a white man did something oppressive. You see this in the language and spelling progressive accounts use. “White” becomes “wyte,” “man” becomes “person with a dangly appendage,” and so on. There are a whole host of double standards. Just look at the word “cocksucker.” You can use it as a pejorative against a liberal, but you’ll get your wrist slapped if you use it against a conservative (don’t use the word as a pejorative in any situation, okay?)

So, my reach was negatively affected because I chose a title for my book that included a dirty word on Facebook. I’d be okay with it if that were the end of it, but as it turns out, that was just the beginning. You see, Facebook makes money off the content of its users. We are their printing press, remember? Furthermore, they want us to pay them to boost the content we already provide them for free. They already limit who sees our stuff. Of my 2,500 followers, if ten percent see my post, that’s a high number. On average, it’s about five percent. They want me to pay to reach the people who have gone out of their way to tell them they want to see my stuff. So what about the other ninety-five percent? Similar to their other list of Dirty Words, if you make a post that uses any of them, you can be guaranteed that your reach will hit rock bottom like a motherfucker.

They are:

  • Comment
  • Share
  • Link (or use of a link to anywhere but Facebook)
  • Buy/Purchase
  • Sell/Sale/Sold
  • A currency Symbol, ™, ®, ©
  • Amazon/YouTube/TikTok/…

In a nutshell, Facebook doesn’t want me to make any money while ensuring they make as much from my content and follower data as possible. They claim to have all the monetization programs, but if you read their fine print, you’ll see they don’t have to pay you out. I know more than one person who has “earned” thousands of dollars and has yet to receive a dime. My reach tanked by more than half the month after I enrolled in their “bonus program.” I was using the ™ symbol in my BossCat posts, and someone suggested that might be affecting my reach, so I stopped and guess what? My posts instantly got more reactions.

Indie writers (and even midlist writers for the Big Five or anyone at a smaller house) must wear many hats. We are small business owners without extensive marketing budgets or powerhouse publishers behind us. We are like the local mom-and-pop shop on Main Street. We rely on word of mouth more than anything else. Meanwhile, Facebook keeps pushing us further down. There’s a solution: Facebook can still make billions, and pages like mine can earn a living. That would require Zuckerberg to calm his tits for half a second, though, so it’s not likely to happen. I guess you can add Algorithm Manipulation Specialist to my collection of hats.

Jeepers Flipping Cripes!

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For those of you in writing circles you have no doubt heard about CleanReader. Much hullabaloo has been raised over this app in the past week and due to (justified) outrage from the author community this abhorrent app/reader has decided to remove its entire library completely and make some modifications to its app based on “feedback”.

For those who may not be aware, CleanReader is an app that (until recently) sold books and allowed the user to set a “cleanliness” setting. Once that setting was established the app would scan through the book and replace all objectionable words at that cleanliness level (e.g. “fuck” would likely be eliminated at a low setting but you’d have to jack it up to squeaky clean levels to get rid of the words less objectionable to puritan eyes).

Image courtesy Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net

Once authors knew this was going on a great many of them went completely bat shit crazy for a bevy of reasons. In the link from the previous sentence Chuck Wendig talks about consent. This comes in a couple of flavours.

First, authors/publishers weren’t even asked if their works could be sold in conjunction with the app. Not so much as a single email saying:

“Oh hey there content creator/owner! We have this app that’s going to materially alter the text in your work and we’d like to sell your varying levels of offensive literature alongside it to maximize the efficiency of the bowdlerization process. Is that cool?”

Anyhow, once authors/publishers started to find out the floodgates opened and requests, nay, demands started pouring in for books to be removed. The popular indie author website Smashwords demanded that ALL its titles be removed. Legally the app company had to comply, and to their credit they did so in rapid fashion. Not to their credit, however, is the fact that they had to do it posthaste because they didn’t do any of the appropriate consultation to begin with.

Next there’s the obvious objection from authors that the words in the books are precisely the words that were intended for the reader. No others. Order from what’s on the menu please. No substitutions! Writers take their words very seriously, and they should. Words are our art. Manipulating them (and manipulating them for profit, no less) without consent is illegal (it’s more legally grey in the US but it’s black and white pretty much everywhere else. It’s the literary equivalent of the metric system. Take a gander at Moral Rights).

“But you can buy a copy of a book and mark it up all you want.” 

True. If someone wanted to buy a book and cross out all the “fucks” and write “darn” over top, that’s fine with me. So if this app had a setting that let the user say something like, “If you encounter the word “fuck” in this book please replace it with the word “darn”. If you encounter the word…” you get the idea. It would be the digital equivalent of taking a pen to a book they bought. I’d have to be okay with that. Of course, that’s assuming that the digital copy of they book they have is actually theirs, and get this, it’s almost always not.

In just about every instance you’re not actually buying the ebook outright. You’re buying the privilege, by way of a licence, of reading said ebook on a personal device. In this case, it’s tough nuts fuckknockers, you get to read it as is, just as if you borrowed a physical book from the library. First sale doctrine does not apply.

Image courtesy adamr at freedigitalphotos.net

In summary, the not asking permission to bundle up book sales with this piece of shit app pisses me off. The fact that they’re manipulating an author’s words without permission pisses me off. The fact that some self-righteous app creator just up and decided what words were “bad” REALLY pisses me off. Sure, there are tolerance settings, but by whose assessment? The self-righteous app creator, that’s who. They’ve decided not just what words to replace (and the tolerance level at which to replace them) but also what to replace them with. Chuck Wendig has a nice round-up post here with some fabulous examples. By my assessment it is censorship, and as we learned two posts ago I’m not cool with that. This debate even started a glorious pissing contest between Jenny Trout and I on Twitter in which she went all arms-waiving-bonkers (it was good times).

So, if you’re one of the very few who think CleanReader is just the type of thing for you and you want books that appeal to your “sensibilities” I suggest you just go find some books that meet your morally high standards and then you can save yourself the app purchase.

Alternatively, and I’m going to borrow a wonderful turn of phrase from Chuck Wendig here, you can jolly well fucking write one yourself.

Image courtesy nattavut at freedigitalphotos.net

~ Andrew
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Consequences of Freedom

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I wasn’t going to use her name because I didn’t want her to get any more attention, but I feel quite strongly that if I sit here twiddling my thumbs and complaining to the couch cushions that that’s the same as condoning what she’s doing.

So here we go…

Until two days ago I had never heard of Jenny Trout. That’s actually a lie. I had heard of her but only in the context of a blog post by Chuck Wendig a couple months ago. He mentioned how he liked her blog (but didn’t agree with one of her positions). Aside from that, I couldn’t have told you two things about her.

Then, two days ago Anne Rice posted a comment on Facebook and Twitter about her support for the website Stop the GR Bullies (GR refers to Goodreads). It’s a website dedicated to calling out authors who bully other authors (for reasons other than a negative review, which I’ll take up in a future post). Anne’s comment was this:

If you click the image it will take you to Anne’s original Facebook post

Attached to this post was a link to an article on STGRB on Jenny Trout, who has taken it upon herself to become the self-appointed literary moral compass of the Internet.

The summary: a (once) best selling author is actively encouraging the banning and/or pirating of another author’s work.

STGRB does not link directly to Jenny’s website but there is a screen grab in their post that contains the URL. I typed it in manually and read Jenny’s article and two things happened:

  1. I felt sick for giving her the site traffic
  2. I gave her a very unflattering nickname. One I’ve been talked out of using for a variety of good reasons (as an aside, I have wonderful writer friends)

In her rant Jenny freely admits that she hasn’t even read this highly-offensive-it-must-be-banned book. She claims it is about the glorification of racism and rape and how this subject matter has no business on the shelves of your local bookstore or on the hard drives of your personal e-readers. It contains BDSM erotica (because that’s all the rage now, with Ms. Trout even penning titles under a pseudonym). It’s also about an actual President of the United States and his actual slave mistress. Oh, and in the book the characters are vampires and/or werewolves. And one more thing: this story is just one in a series with the same underlying characteristics: #BDSM, #erotica, #POTUS, #mistress, #vampires, #werewolves. (hashtag: not my thing).

Ms. Trout rightly points out that since the offensive work is protected under the First Amendment there is no legal recourse for removing the book from shelves (digital or otherwise) so she’s taken it upon herself to start a crusade.

She’s demanding her fans and readers demand Amazon, B&N, Kobo and the like remove this content immediately. If that doesn’t work, and you feel you absolutely must read this book, then go pirate it so at least the author and publisher don’t get any money. 

Um…. excuse me?

I wonder, what would Jenny Trout’s publisher think if another author from another house took issue with one of her books and started a campaign to pirate them?

Let’s be perfectly clear: racism and rape are bad. Together they comprise the Daily Double of humans at their absolute worst. However, in a free society, no one person / group / organization / government gets to take away the right for someone else to write about it – and by my assessment that’s exactly what Jenny is trying to do.

Express your displeasure with the book to your heart’s content. Tell people it’s not worth reading, that it’s a glorification of All Things Terrible, that they are bad people for even reading the synopsis. But don’t you dare go down the road of book banning. Book banning is half a step removed from book burning, and we all know what history (and Ray Bradbury) has to say about that, now don’t we?

Free speech does not mean you are free from the consequences of saying or writing things to which others object. For the book and author Jenny Trout saw fit to attack, the consequences will be determined by the reviews it receives, the number of sales, the number of future sales or publishing deals for the author (or lack thereof), and so on… The system is already set up to self-regulate in this regard. Time and reader response will tell.

As for Jenny Trout, her consequences appear to be the ostracizing of  a whole swath of readers (and probably publishers) that aren’t going to touch her books or her blog with a ten foot fishing pole – myself included.

~ Andrew

Read This F***ing Post

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So Justin Trudeau has faced some criticism from the Conservative Party of Canada, specifically the Prime Minister, because he dropped an F bomb while in a boxing ring at a charity event last week. Some days later when asked about it on a popular talk show he replied with “Um… [exaggerated sigh], shit, what do I say?”

Of all the stuff I’ve read about it I have yet to hear one person mention how an English swear word to a French person doesn’t carry the same weight. Maybe it’s the media trying to avoid fuelling the whole English/French fire that people up here love to stoke. Maybe it’s a non-issue. I don’t know, but I’m surprised I haven’t seen it come up.

I worked for a guy who owned the company and spent a week golfing with him in Hawaii a bunch of years back. He was French but spoke English better than a lot of people I know. When he’d swear on the golf course it was almost exclusively in English. Being the owner of the company and all I tried to keep it together every time I flubbed  a shot but eventually let loose some choice swear words – in English. It didn’t phase him at all.

However, when I three putted from inside 5 feet to go from birdie to bogey and dropped what I thought was a very well paced “tabarnac!” he got serious in a hurry and admonished me for using such foul language. You see, English swear words were just stupid words with no meaning. Let loose with a “osti de tabarnac de calice” in La Belle Province and you’ll turn a few head for sure.

Image courtesy photostock at http://freedigitalphotos.net

For me, it’s all about context. Call someone a name, any name, and you’ve made it personal. I’m not saying never do it (some people deserve to be told the truth) but if you do be well aware that it comes with certain consequences (good ole Justin called someone a “piece of shit” in the House of Commons back in 2011. However true a statement it was, it was probably offside for Justin to mention it in that forum).

In my opinion, using a swear in a different manner and with a different context, like how our future Prime Minister did more recently – twice, should’t even garner so much as a raised eyebrow. If it draws attention to the fact that he’s more in touch with the average Canadian and then gets people to run out and vote for him in the next election then I supposed that’s just a bonus.

When Jean Cretien was Prime Minister he swore in front of the Queen! (in French – “merde” – which translates to “shit”). When Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, was Prime Minister he caused a ruckus by mouthing some choice words in the House of Commons. Later he translated what he said to “fuddle duddle” and accused the opposition of “crying to mama”. To him, it was no big deal. I guess the apple doesn’t fall too far, whether it’s from the family tree or from the political party.

I’ll tell you one thing, given the choice between honest statements that contain swearing and perfectly scripted lies that are free of expletives, I know which one I’m fucking voting for.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Iu2CAwQaU]

~ Andrew

Your Comment Is Awaiting Moderation

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Pre-moderating: sensible thing to do or petty censorship?

When it comes to pre-moderating comments on blogs I have to say that I’m a little bit baffled. If you’re a site for children I totally get it; and the same for a news or media outlet, but if you’re just one of a boat load of blogs out there, from the big name to the small time, what’s the rationale for pre-moderating comments?

News sites tend to moderate the hell out of their comments. Given that they are in the business of spreading news to hundreds of millions of people it behooves them to keep a tight reign on the content below their headers. The last thing they need is for some wingnut to fly off the handle in front of an audience the size of most nations.

For most things corporate I understand as well, though I do find it refreshing when the big players don’t turn every web page like a giant legal cover-your-ass exercise. The Google Blog doesn’t moderate their comments – at least it doesn’t pre-moderate them (it’s possible they just delete anything that doesn’t meet their standards for submission after it’s posted). While Google isn’t exactly a small time company they’re also well known for being a little more relaxed about things so I’m taking the absence of pre-moderation of comments for what it’s worth.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8gCV0KYdJc?rel=0]

As for my little corner of the blogosphere I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that a comment would need my approval before I allowed it on my site. It smells a little bit like censorship, don’t you think? Besides, who the hell am I to say what people can and cannot say about something I fully intended the entire Internet to read (or at least a few hundred people)?

Back in 2005 I had a different blog and one particular asshole starting commenting and causing a ruckus. For a time I just didn’t allow comments in hopes he would find someone else to hassle but realizing that it wasn’t fair to other readers who did want to comment I turned them back on. It was at this point that I tinkered with the idea of moderating the comments. In the end I chose not to, but had my finger on the “report” button just in case he got out of hand. He never did. Contrary to some beliefs, there are a lot of problems that will just go away if you ignore them.

A brief poll to a few friends who blog and a little bit of research on the web dug up the following nuggets of extrememly precise data:

  • A large number do not moderate their comments
  • Many only moderate for spam
  • Some use a form of word verification
It would seem that for those who moderate spam is the biggest concern. No one wants a slew of ads and unrelated links clogging up their comments section and this is where I think the word verification comes in. That was one thing I ended up implementing myself, and as far as a security feature goes; forcing a person to enter in a couple words just so you know they’re not a robot isn’t much, but it does keeps the spam down and in my case also allows anonymous comments (while I prefer people stand in front of their comments by putting their name on them, I can understand that some people may have concerns over privacy and things like that).

There’s lots of comment plug-ins for the popular platforms like Blogger and WordPress and both have at least a couple variations on moderation. Another one is Disqus, which I used for a while but abandoned for reasons I don’t remember.

But to the question at hand, is it just best practice or are we making it out to be worse than it is? As far as my blog goes, I’ve decided that until I actually have a problem I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I like to think of it as giving the public an opportunity to disappoint.

So far, they have not (except this person).

~ Andrew

For those interested, here’s a sampling of a few news sites and their moderation policies:

NY Times
Click this sentence for just the policy text

CBC
Click this sentence for just the policy text

Huffington Post