Iv seen posts with people substituting rape with r@pe. Other than bypassing filters I can’t see a reason to censor just 1 letter that doesn’t actually censor the word? I see if you fully censor the word, but even still context completely ruins the censorship.
Pretty sure it’s done to avoid videos/posts being removed by TikTok/Twitter/FB and the likes. For example, you can’t use or say the word “Suicide” on TikTok, that would get the video removed. So people say “Unalive” to get around that. This way, they can still talk about difficult topics without the dumb censorship.
If you’re seeing it in places where that isn’t an issue (like Lemmy, for example) they may just be doing it out of habit.
There was this tiktok where a woman was talking about how her cousin was shot and killed for knocking on her neighbor’s door to get her kid’s thing and she used “unalive” to describe it. It was very jarring to hear in such a somber context. It feels very dystopian that people have to self censor for the algorithm. Same with youtube and any mentions of covid.
A lot of this self censoring is algorithm voodoo. Nobody knows what makes these platforms mark your videos as age restricted, so people do silly stuff like say, “unalive”. I’ve seen many videos where people use the word kill that aren’t age restricted.
How Orwellian.