A Short Story About Self-Censorship
CW: This story contains mentions of violent crime.
Janet Crane peered through her glasses at the ancient iMac in the home office, typing out a web address with her arthritic index fingers and wishing her husband was here to do it for her. Jerry had always been so good with computers.
The front page of FindACop.com flashed on the screen. One side was headed ‘Victims’, and could be sorted according to date or category of crime; the other was was devoted to ‘Detectives’, listing profiles with star ratings and per diems. People had already gotten accustomed to begging strangers online to help them pay their medical bills. When the collapsing US economy could no longer even keep its police departments open, it wasn’t long before ordinary citizens began crowdsourcing justice, too.
Janet scrolled through the posts left by other people like her (she refused to call herself a ‘Victim’ just yet). It didn’t take her long to notice the strange way the posts were written. People wrote about being ‘salted’ above vague descriptions of bloodied noses and black eyes. A page called “The Vineyard” was full of users, nearly all of them women, talking about ‘grape’ — as if adding a single letter could turn something so awful into something sweet. If she burned someone’s house down, would she have to call it a “barbecue?”
Jerry had told her about this: the ‘algorithm,’ he’d called it. Some machine or other that looked through people’s posts and decided which ones you should see. It didn’t like swear words, which Janet understood well enough, but it also didn’t like other things. It didn’t like things that were uncomfortable. And if you made it uncomfortable, it would bury your posts so far down the page that they might as well not exist.
Well, Janet might not know much about the computer, but she’d been an English teacher for nearly four decades; she knew a thing or two about choosing the right words.
Don’t say ‘gun.’
Don’t say ‘home invasion.’
Don’t say ‘shot.’
She studied a few more posts, to try and get a sense of the style. Then she began to type.
Our house was visited by dangerous strangers last night while we slept. A pew-pew was held to my husband’s head while he opened the safe and handed over our valuables. Then he was unalived right in front of me.
Please help me find who did this.
It was, Janet thought, a perfectly inoffensive summary of the most terrifying night of her life.
She hit send, then looked at the doorway. Across the hall, the bedroom lay in semi-darkness. She took off her glasses so she wouldn’t have to look at the dark red stain on the carpet, or the splinters in the headboard.
The computer pinged. Janet wiped her eyes, replaced her glasses, and stared at the message.
We’re sorry, but your post goes against our community guidelines.
Your account has been suspended for 30 days.
I wrote this story for Not Quite Write, a flash fiction competition that involves writing a story in 48 hours, based around two prompts and an “anti-prompt”, which were as follows:
- Your story must feature the word CRANE.
- Your story must feature the action of burning something.
- Your story must break the rule “use active voice.”
Sadly, I didn’t make the longlist. But the organisers of the competition were kind enough to give me a shoutout in the latest episode of their podcast!
And if you fancy reading more of my work, please subscribe below:
Phil W. Bayles 
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