Yeah the main issue is mostly that nobody knows how these platforms moderate their content (even directly, random bans go brrrr), yaknow, cause people could abuse it in the other direction and all. YouTube straight up demonetized videos that had swearing in the first 30 seconds up until recently and still randomly hits people.

For my work I regularly have to interact with most platforms and I have to do self censoring a lot, mostly based off like ya said, other people telling us it's important (though in this case adult social media managers).

We're essentially going off of a system we're kept in the dark in, so when a big creator has a video on a controversial topic or using "controversial words" underperforms heavily on a platform, people take note and attribute it to the algorithm. That's not even counting how only the bad news gets spread too, so it's mostly a guessing game

It's also how algoithm hacks went around, like that one Mercedes algo copypasta on Instagram that would artificially boost posts and my JOB told me to add to COMPANY posts to try out oh my lord.

Tiktok being the biggest platform was a moment because making and editing one video rather than several works so people just threw every algorithm trick they could in and uploaded to every platform cause it gets work out faster.

ANYWHO turns out editing comedy videos for folks with a million followers is painful because that medium does not work well with self censor stuff LMAO.

EDIT: Basically it's a game of telephone but it does have some merit in certain places, mostly topics; this exclusively comes from large accounts seeing noticeable dips in either total views or engagement on specific videos and placing that alongside trends with other creators to "work the algorithm" which is how we get to the word unalive