You Can't Say That on the Internet A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide. What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable. Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site's nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve's bared nipples failed Facebook's decency test. That's right - a venerable publication that still spells "re-elect" as "reëlect" is less puritan than a Californian start-up that wants to "make the world more open." And fighting obscenity can be good for business. Impermium, a Silicon Valley company that helps Web sites deal with unwanted reader comments, has begun marketing technology that identifies "all kinds of harmful content - such as violence, racism, flagrant profanity, and hate speech - and allows site owners to act on it in real-time, before it reaches readers." Impermium will police the readers - but who will police Impermium? Apple, too, has strayed from its iconoclastic roots. When Naomi Wolf's latest book, "Vagina: A New Biography," went on sale in its iBooks store, Apple turned "Vagina" into "V****a." After numerous complaints, Apple restored the title, but who knows how many other books are still affected? True, these books are still on sale. Unlike the good old United States Post Office, which once confiscated "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and other books it deemed too lewd, Silicon Valley does not engage in direct censorship. What it does, though, is present ideas and terms that have gained public acceptance as something to be ashamed of. Silicon Valley doesn't just reflect social norms - it actively shapes them in ways that are, for the most part, imperceptible. The proliferation of the Autocomplete function on popular Web sites is a case in point. Nominally, all it does is complete your search query - on YouTube, on Google, on Amazon - before you've finished typing, using an algorithm to predict what you're most likely typing. A nifty feature - but it, too, reinforces primness. How so? Consider George Carlin's classic comedy routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site. In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates "penis" and "vagina"). Of Carlin's seven words, Google would autocomplete only "piss." Until recently, even the word "bisexual" wouldn't autocomplete at Google; it's only this past August that Google, after many complaints, began to autocomplete some, but not all, queries for that term. In 2010, the hacker magazine 2600 published a long blacklist of similar words. While I didn't verify all 400 of them on Google, a few that I did try - like "swastika" and "Lolita" - failed to autocomplete. Is Nabokov not trending in Mountain View? Alas, these algorithms are not particularly bright: unable to distinguish between Nabokov's novel and child pornography, they assume you want the latter. Why won't tech companies let us freely use terms that already enjoy wide circulation and legitimacy? Do they fashion themselves as our new guardians? Are they too greedy to correct their algorithms" mistakes? Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation. Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era - journalists, publishers, editors - don't flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves, eager to deploy algorithms for fun and profit. Many of these gatekeepers remain invisible - until something goes wrong. Thus, in early September, the online livestream from the Hugo Awards, the Oscars of the science fiction world, was interrupted with a cryptic copyright warning, right before the popular author Neil Gaiman was to deliver an acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream - the site streaming the ceremony - was using the services of another company to determine whether its streamed videos violated any copyrights. The partner company draws on a very large video archive to see, in real time, if what's being streamed matches anything in its collection. Somehow, the celebratory video that preceded Mr. Gaiman's speech tripped a copyright match, and the feed was cut off, even though the organizers had all the requisite permissions (and, under the doctrine of fair use, probably didn't need them anyway). The author of the forthcoming book "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism."