‘Code’ lets social media users hide racist slurs

If you come across a tweet that seems angry about Skype, Yahoo and Google, it may be far more sinister than a complaint about online service.

A tweet from Alex Goldman of the podcast Reply All included a screen shot of a list of racist slurs and their code names. Google stands for the N word; Skype for an anti-Semitic slur that nearly rhymes; Bing for derogatory terms about Asians; Yahoo for Mexicans; Skittles for Muslims; and so on. The purpose, he said, is to avoid having social media accounts suspended while being able to publicly “share racial slurs.”

For example, one user, tweeting as @WhiteGuy__1488, says, “Trump is not a National Socialist. If he was, he wouldn’t have kids that married skypes.” Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, is Jewish.

According to BuzzFeed writer Alex Kantrowitz, the code may have originated on 4chan, an online message board, as an attempt to circumvent a Google program called Jigsaw, designed to combat abuse and harassment online.

“There’s more to this,” tweeted user @SupX. “They are trying to trick new censoring AI filters to ban words Google, Yahoo, Skype, etc.”

Earlier this year, mic.com posted an article stating that some racist groups were placing three sets of parentheses around Jewish surnames, like (((this))), “to identify and target Jews for harassment.”

This story was originally published October 1, 2016 at 9:57 PM with the headline "‘Code’ lets social media users hide racist slurs."