It's a social media thing. Supposedly posts get deprioritized by the algorithm if they contain "family unfriendly" words like kill or drug references. No idea if it's actually true or just a myth, but it's why users edit out innocuous words in these screenshots.

Lots of social media now deprioritizes "advertiser unfriendly" content. Especially TikTok. So, the response to that is to self-censor so that you still reach full engagement. It's an arms race to keep swearing without the algorithms silencing you for doing so.

Depends, actual censorship of words exist worldwide.

Pointless censorship however i have only seen in US and Japan, but both for very different types of content.

Honestly at this point it's just engagement bait. Yes, the trend is awful and terrible and stupid, but also people cannot resist the temptation of calling that out as well, so now it serves double-duty of being easy comment farming (note: this applies more to places like reddit than here on Lemmy, but I'm speaking in generalities here).

It's a kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't thing in terms of responding to this stupid self-censorship.

pRoFaNiTy

The most infuriating US thing to me