Is it true that censoring potential triggers with asterisks, numbers and letters makes it more harder for people with reading disabilities to read and people will fill in the blanks and know what the word is anyways?
Yes, its absolutely true.
It also makes it harder or impossible for people who are triggered by those things to create strong filters online to keep from seeing them.
If you’re talking about rape, and you write it r*pe, then someone who has the word “rape” filtered will now SEE THAT POST that they were trying to avoid.
Censoring words that way is explicitly useful for GETTING AROUND FILTERS on sites that automatically filter those words. Censoring them is to avoid machine censorship so that the topics can be discussed, it is not to help people who don’t want to see them.
On a site like tumblr that doesn’t autocensor topics like that the best thing you can do is write them out fully so that people who are trying to filter them out can do so.
I didn’t realise that some people think *ing out words will make readers unable to know what the word is.
I suppose some people will have difficulty understanding words with *s in them, but then idk how these people are supposed to understand the rest of the post. Like if I said ‘do not interact if you romanticise r*pe,’ and a reader didn’t know what the word was, how would they understand my DNI? Or if you made a masterpost of ‘r*pe crisis resources,’ how would a person who didn’t know what the *ed word was understand the purpose of the resources?
The majority of people, of course, will get from context that these are rape crisis resources, even if they couldn’t parse the word r*pe. In which case they are now thinking about the concept of rape despite your *, which, if they’d blacklisted the word, is presumably what they wanted to avoid in the first place
Just…sorry for going off on your post to say probably very obvious things, @blackheart-biohazards, I can delete if you want, I’m just stuck on the idea that a) *s can stop the majority of people understanding words, and b) that this would be desirable or helpful.
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