I Censored Myself. Was I Wrong?

I censored myself in a blog post a few months back.

Then I started second-guessing the move.

Here’s what happened.

I’ll let you be the judge.

I use the Yoast plugin for WordPress to make sure my posts are SEO friendly. Yoast has done well by me and my website gets thousands of visits a month.

So just before hitting “publish,” I checked Yoast as I usually do. Yikes! It gave me a frowny-face score (red-alert!) on “inclusive language.”  My offense? Including the title of a very old bestselling book as an example of a point I was making: a 1970s bestseller in the thriller category that starts with a “P” and ends with an “O” and is six letters long. The other letters are S, Y, C and H.

Loath to be censored, I also felt loath to say goodbye to ranking on search engines. I caved and omitted the book title, since it wasn’t central to my thesis. Other examples abounded. My SEO score went from red frowny face to green smiley face. And this is how AI is going to destroy humanity.

Is this how AI will destroy humanity?

I’m only half joking. In this case, I felt justified in censoring myself — not much of a loss to delete that one book title as an example. Who cares?

But as we censor ourselves more and more to keep our online soapboxes, we will find that many points of view that speak truth to power will disappear. In fact, they are already diminishing and are certainly disappearing from many public spaces.

I know I have kept from expressing my opinions on various issues from health to politics. And I don’t believe it’s just one side or one party trying to silence the other. This happens on both sides of an issue, on both sides of the political spectrum. And it’s dangerous.

Polarization, intolerance and lack of diversity of opinions

It seems to me that the bandwidth for civil discourse (and freedom of speech) has grown smaller and smaller due to several factors. Here are a few of them:

• Demonizing each other: When we don’t do our personal work to heal our wounds, we end up projecting our unfinished business onto others. When we try to control others, we must ask ourselves where that comes from. When we don’t listen to opinions that disagree with ours, we can demonize the other, but when we listen, there is always the potential to learn, or at least to exercise compassion. It’s quite possible the other party has something to teach us, even if we disagree with most of their opinions and beliefs. When we don’t listen, we can shut down our compassion and lose touch with the fact that the other person is a human being. (I’m not saying to give space to hate speech – hate is not helpful; but society benefits when we can be civil and listen respectfully to other points of view.)
• Lack of integrity and inflammatory nature of social media and other platforms: Social media companies are generally not interested in keeping things civil. The structures of these platforms encourage polarization and inflammatory remarks. Many people feel intimidated about putting their work out there, anticipating intense, rude, or even threatening reactions. And many writers have experienced such things. A slightly rude comment might trigger a bad mood or stress, but a particularly threatening reaction can be traumatizing. And it’s not uncommon. An environmental activist I work with shared that she received death threats due to her defense of wildlife. When people fear for their lives, how can they/we feel free to speak and write freely?
• Concentration of power: As power has become more concentrated (from tech companies and tech billionaires to corporations with huge lobbying budgets and the consolidation of media companies), there’s less room for public discourse and greater potential for those in power to use their algorithms to advance or undermine certain positions and speech. Many people’s livelihoods are tied to their online presence, making it harder to take a stand on specific issues, for fear of losing their livelihood or their ability to continue having an impact online.

How do we resist censorship?

I’d love to hear from readers.

Have you censored yourself online? In what ways? How did it feel?

Or does it feel unsafe even to answer those questions?

How do we fight back for freedom?

For speech?

One step is to support those platforms that refuse to censor.

What else?

• What are you doing?
• Where are you going to share your ideas? Are there platforms that feel safe?
• How do you resist censoring yourself?
• How do you decide when to hit “delete”?