Can the text-based censorship filters of the big social media sites be defeated? Here's an idea of how to do so and reclaim a beach head in enemy territory I got into a thread discussion with another anon over my PSA blurb text for spreading the world about Voat v/QRV. We talked about techniques of how to fool the keyword censorship filters that all the major social media sites are using now. Some things the anaon said stimulated me to think of this approach (actually been mulling on it for a while, but the discussion prompted me to think of a better, more enhanced way to implement it). The idea hinges on the concept of embedding non printable control characters into words. In ASCII and Unicode character sets (ASCII is a valid subset of Unicode), these non-printable characters have valid defined numeric values (binary at the level of executable computer code) just as do the visible characters. But the beauty is that censorship filters could be thrown off. A human reader of text containing these modified words would still see the words as they usually do (so long as a control characters like carriage return, tab, newline, form feed are not used). But a computer program would see all these characters when it's breaking the text into isolated words and these words that have hidden embedded characters would not match on their defined set of Wrong Think keywords. Now how would we implement this? Well, at the simplest, a software program would be written that would take a text body (say its your tweet, Facebook posting, or Reddit posting that you've composed in a text editor), it would go through and analyze the text looking for keywords, when it sees a recognized keyword it would modify it by putting embedded non-printable characters into it. It would insert these hidden characters at a different position in the keyword (on each occurance) based on a random number generator. That way a keyword doesn't get modifed in an identical manner each time. The keywords would be a glossary of terms that you, yourself could define as likely to be caught as Wrong Think words by the social media Orwellian censors. These "Wrong Think" words would be put into a dictionary file that this hypothetical software program would reference. Where does the output of this program go to? Well, it could write it to a file, but perhaps more useful would be if it would put the modified text that is the output of the program, directly into a clipboard buffer. Then all you the user have to do is go do a paste of the clipboard contents into your tweet, your Facebook posting, or Reddit posting. Then submit or publish posting. Now take note, that each time you run this hypothetical program on the very same input text body, the detected "Wrong Think" keywords that it modifies, will be modified at a different position due to a random number generator that the program uses. So each time you run the program the keywords appear to be different to any program that is trying to do censorship filtering. This would throw off AI programs that are attempting to train on learning a "Wrong Think" vocabulary - there just wouldn't be consistent keywords that line up. Even the same text body that is being pasted by thousands of users could all have different keywords if each user was running this hypothetical program to alter the text before pasting and publishing it. If anyone attempts to implement this program, here are additional suggestions: The control characters below ASCII 30 or the space character are limited and probably the censors would start cleaning text before analyzing it. But Unicode is a vast character space and there are other regions of non-printable characters that could be tapped into. So this hypothetical program should support Unicode - most people do these days - UTF-8 is very pervasively supported. Hopefully most Clipboards on computers these days will support putting UTF-8 text into the buffer and pasting it into programs, like apps running in web browsers. Well, I'm a back-end server kind of guy, but no doubt there are some skilled front-end web browser programmers that could implement this program so that it is integrated into the web browser as a plugin or extension. That would make it very convenient. Imagine after typing in your tweet that you just select all the text and then click some button on your browser tool bar and then the text is modified and transposed right in place by this hypothetical program (the selected text would be read as the input, the altered text would be put into the clipboard, and then the clipboard would be automatically pasted so as to replace the selected text). Then you just click Post or Submit button and you're done. That would be very, very convenient. Once we are all armed with this program, we can go back to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, create brand new accounts that they haven't already shadowbanned, and start using this special program for everything we post. Who knows, we might be able to start reclaiming a beach head (after all, this is modern 21st century information warfare that we're engaged in). ADDENDUM: An anon suggested just to modify all the text words in this manner - that does away with needing a glossary of Wrong Think keywords - an excellent simplification. Now another anon commented that the technique I described is much like what spam email does to get through spam filters. So I suppose my idea is just a re-invention of email spamming techniques. But I like to think that I'm re-purposing the technique to a good cause :-)