Americans are increasingly using code words known as “algospeak” to evade detection by content moderation technology, especially when posting about things that are controversial or may break platform rules.
has revealed the double-meaning of mundane sentences, like “touch the ceiling,” used to coax young girls into flashing their followers and showing off their bodies.
For instance, Telus International does not clamp down on algospeak around high stakes political or social moments, Hanna said, citing “camping” as one example. The company declined to say if any of its clients have banned certain algospeak terms. New forms of algospeak also emerged on social media around the Ukraine-Russia war, Hanna said, with posters using the term “unalive,” for example—rather than mentioning “killed” and “soldiers” in the same sentence—to evade AI detection. And on gaming platforms, she added, algospeak is frequently embedded in usernames or “gamertags” as political statements. One example: numerical references to “6/4,” the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
“One of the areas that we're all most concerned about is child exploitation and human exploitation. [It’s] one of the fastest-evolving areas of algospeak.”Other ways to avoid being moderated by AI involve purposely misspelling words or replacing letters with symbols and numbers, like “$” for “S” and the number zero for the letter “O.” Many people who talk about sex on TikTok, for example, refer to it instead as “seggs” or “seggsual.