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.
I think that’s what is happening. It’s to prevent the algorithms from hiding away their post due to controversial topics.
There’s no way any modern word filter doesn’t have a common symbol substitution list