To be fair damn is not offensive where as dumb was used to label disabled people and then used as a generally derogatory term. I’d rather censor dumb than damn.

Overall, we use Mute not Dumb for quite a while now, and so those saying dumb to mean stupid generally are not conflating mute with stupid, so I don’t think it’s worth fighting people over. Just vocab that shifted, even if it had a derogatory connotation at the start, being this far removed from it it’s just too late to bother.

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago (3 children)

But does censoring a letter change anything? Does reading f*ck read any different to fuck? Does the reader get more or less offense from it?

Censorship doesn’t really seem to accomplish much and if anything draws extra attention to the censored word. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought without it.

Who’s benefiting?

[–] Cornflake@pawb.social 5 points 4 days ago

Frankly, I think single-letter censoring like that is silly. It really doesn't achieve anything and nobody benefits from it

[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Usually this is because they are posting to social media and many social media environments use OCR to scan screenshots for "offensive" words. If the scanner finds something it deems unacceptable, the post will get a smaller audience or might even be disallowed.

The censoring is for the machines, not the people.

edit: Fixed autocorrect.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think the reasoning is that if it's censored, it's an acknowledgement from whoever did so that "this word isn't appropriate in this context, but the text is worth sharing"

[–] Cornflake@pawb.social 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's probably the reason it's been censored, but I didn't take the original screengrab so I'm not sure

[–] cadekat@pawb.social 5 points 4 days ago

The tip of the gun also appears censored. This is probably some misguided attempt to appease some algorithm somewhere.