Editors’ note: Today’s post is by Chef Alice Meadows and guest chef Suze Kundu, science communicator and research community engagement consultant — both writing in a personal capacity as members of the #DefendResearch team. Suze is the brains behind Word Wipe!
With the Trump administration continuing to censor research, it’s important to continue to raise awareness of the dangers of censorship. From “abortion” to “women and underrepresented” via “continuum,” “field drainage,” and (a personal favorite) “peanut allergy,” PEN America’s list of banned words and phrases is a great way to see for yourself not only how dangerous, but also how ridiculous this sort of censorship is.
Now, #DefendResearch has joined forces with PEN to develop Word Wipe, an easy-to-use tool based on the banned words list, which was launched as part of Fall of Freedom 2026. It allows you to experiment with what a world redacted of these banned words would look like for you. Writing a research article? Got a favorite poem or song? What about a historical document? Just paste them into the source text box, hit the Word Wipe button, and see which — and how many — words are redacted. You might be surprised by the results! Ironically, even some of the President’s own Executive Orders would be censored if they were screened for banned words (check out the first section of this one from September).
Of course, the impact on research and research publications is much more devastating. How can you conduct meaningful research if words like “diversity” are banned? How can you show that your work is “evidence-based” or “science-based” if you’re not allowed to use those words? Why are words like “woman” and “women” banned, but not “man” and “men”? Likewise, “Black” and “people of color” but not “white”?
Please watch this video clip about Word Wipe and have fun — in a “good trouble” way — playing with it and sharing it with your communities!
Discussion
4 Thoughts on "#DefendResearch and PEN America Present… Word Wipe!"
I pasted the opening few paragraphs of “Pride and Prejudice” and you see, I knew that Jane Austen was a brilliant writer, but I didn’t know she was adept at avoiding censorship – lo and behold, no changes!
There are, for example, no “women” in her writing, there are instead “wives”, “daughters”, and “ladies”. As the first two are defining a person through another person, then my playful suggestion is to swap all women to ladies.
Because my dear fellow women, let’s all agree that we are ladies.
Haha that’s brilliant Anna! Of course, “mothers” are acceptable too — clever old Jane Austen 🙂
Thanks for sharing!
This calls for creative resistance. It reminds me of the slogan “Johnson molenaar” (Johnson miller”) which was used during the anti-Vietnam War protests in the Netherlands in the 1960s. The original, loud chant in the streets was “Johnson moordenaar” (“Johnson murderer”), but at the time, insulting the head of a friendly state was a criminal offense in the Netherlands. To circumvent the law and avoid arrest, protesters switched to chanting phrases that were phonetically similar to (sounded the same as) “moordenaar”, including “Johnson molenaar” (“Johnson miller”), “Johnson moordvent” (“Johnson killer guy”), or “Johnson moordpresident” (the adjective “moord” is informal/slang for terrific, excellent, but literally means “murder”).
There was a recent article about algorithmic censorship, basically how people have to use words like “unalive” to get around TikTok bans on words like “suicide”, and the pernicious effect that the resulting self-censorship has on our creativity and efforts.
https://www.anildash.com/2026/10/06/kill-unalive/
So I’m hesitant to let anyone police our language…
