In our feed-scrolling age, language shapes not just what we say but what we see.
When words of violence against women are muted, blurred or algorithmically repressed, the shared reality of that violence becomes harder to grasp.
Once heralded as spaces of voice and visibility, social media platforms are now quietly narrowing the vocabulary through which we name and respond to gendered harm, and this narrowing has deep implications for women’s identity, self-expression, and cultural authenticity.
When Words Disappear, So Does Accountability
Research shows that violence against women online is more linguistic than it is rampant. As platforms scale up language moderation, the vocabulary survivors and observers might use, such as “rape”, “assault”, and “coercion”, is increasingly neutralised.
When algorithms consistently remove or suppress posts using those words, or when writers adopt euphemisms like “SA (read: sexual assault)” instead of “rape”, or “unalive” instead of “kill”, to avoid shadow-bans, the community loses the direct naming of harm.
The result is a kind of linguistic erosion where the severity of violence is softened by the very platforms meant to amplify voices.
Coded Language, Hidden Harm
The phenomenon of “algospeak”, where users deliberately substitute terms to avoid moderation, illustrates how platforms shape language. Words once used to name harm morph into safer forms like “SA” for “sexual assault,” “G-word” for “grope,” or other truncated forms. This adaptation may seem clever, but it carries the cost of deliberate silencing and a reframing of stories.
When violence is described in euphemisms, the emotional weight, the relational context, and the specificity of what happened can be lost.
A platform that down-ranks content containing “rape” or “stalking” might elevate sensationalised or engagement-friendly posts instead—favouring outrage over precision. That means the vocabulary for violence against women becomes unstable, and survivors may struggle to find words that don’t trigger algorithmic invisibility.
Silence as Platform Policy
Platforms also struggle with context. A UNESCO-commissioned report titled “The Chilling” documented how moderation algorithms often fail women by either ignoring misogynistic content or over-censoring legitimate feminist discourse because of a lack of cultural and linguistic nuance.
The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) asserts, through the report, that women discussing abuse in their own languages or from marginalised communities find themselves de-platformed, or often, forced into coded speech.
The language of violence thus becomes unevenly available and inevitable to the degree that the harm is real, but the language for expression is fragmented. For women trying to speak about abuse, advocacy, or identity, the unavailable or mistranslated vocabulary becomes a barrier to authenticity, both personally and collectively.
The Identity Cost of Linguistic Narrowing
When a person loses words, they lose part of their story. For millennial women seeking identity expression, authenticity, and self-awareness, language matters.
The words used to describe the body, the harm, and the resistance all shape how women feel about themselves and how they are seen. If the term “sexual violence” is pushed into euphemism, the conventional structures for understanding and naming that violence shift.
A woman’s personal narrative of “survivor,” “advocate,” or simply “woman who was harmed”, for instance, becomes harder to anchor. Over time, the erosion of precise terms weakens individual agency and collective recognition.
What We Can Notice—And Reclaim
The fight isn’t about forbidding algorithms or blaming platforms in isolation. It’s about noticing how language is shaped and reshaped in the digital sphere, and how that reshaping affects identity, power and truth.
When you post about an experience of violence, do you pause to choose your words? Or do you feel constrained by what the platform will allow to remain visible and searchable? When you engage with content about gendered harm, do you sense that the words are muted, coded, or missing?
Reclaiming your voice means working with language consciously, recognising what terms feel evasive, what phrases carry full weight, and how you want your selfhood to be represented.
When women pay attention to the words we lose, and also those we choose, we begin to reclaim not just our stories, but the truth of our harm, our healing, and our existence.
A greater part of the reflection of authenticity is linguistic. The words we name ourselves with, the verbs we choose for our resistance, and the vocabulary we allow in our narratives all reaffirm the assertion that the narrowing of language means the narrowing of possibility.
