Explained: Why people are censoring out letters of sensitive words with asterisk*

PS: I've lost two versions of this post, it's getting to me people, it's getting to me. Regardless, here's my third attempt.

I've noticed a strange new phenomenon in social media websites and web forums recently. People are 'censoring' parts of certain words with asterisks, it's just one letter replaced by an asterisk, so it's not like they're trying to hide the meaning, or not utter a 'bad' word like f*ck. What gives?

I discovered the answer to it last week when I tweeted something about Micha*l Jacks*n being a pedophi*e. I didn't expect it to make any waves. Not many people follow my twitter account, there's nothing of particular interest happening, and my timeline has not seen anything spectacular or viral in over half a decade. So like all of my other tweets I expected it to die out.

Except it didn't. It got a lot of traction, from seemingly random people who appeared to be huge fans of the man. Their accounts didn't feel like they could have been bot accounts either, everything was seemingly good, but I a nobody was being mobbed by Jack*on stans from seemingly nowhere. What tf was happening?

And then it hit me.

There's a certain type of people, whose number seems to only be growing, who search for their favourite keywords in the popular media, find out people who're writing on the topic online, and harass and intimidate them to either delete the posts, or just create a big ruckus. And they're using 'search' features of all the major platforms for that.

As a response, people are 'censoring' letters out of the words so their target audience more-or-less gets what they're talking about, but the randos who want to annoy them from search won't know what's happening.

Interesting, huh?