In a now-deleted tweet, a friend recently remarked on how she was seeing TikTok users say “shreks work” as a replacement phrase for “sex work” that wouldn’t get the video censored. In this context, “censored” means not necessarily deletion, but the punitive kind of shadow-banning that will ensure the video doesn’t get uplifted by the algorithm into the For You pages of other users.
When I replied expressing interest in this phenomenon, I was linked by internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch to an article she’d written in 2018 about “Voldemorting,” a term coined by scholar Emily van der Nagel to describe the resistant practice of censoring out or coining new names or phrases on social media to avoid algorithmic discovery.
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