Dealing with Users and the Passive Voice
- Data were lost.
- The server was down.
- Posts were deleted.
- Accounts violating our terms of service were created from this location.
- Restrictions were placed on your account.
- The situation is being investigated.
The passive voice now makes me think of the German news (when the Podcasts app on my phone is behaving reasonably well, I listen to the news in German as I drive to work) because there are so many bits of news about Terroranchlägen, and every single one of them reports the death toll using the construction sind getötet worden. Functionally, that phrase mean “were killed,” but slightly more literally it is “became dead.”
(German uses the verb werden, “to become,” where English would use a form of “to be” in constructing a sentence in the passive voice. In case you were wondering, werden is a copular verb, so its subject complement is in the nominative case, violating one of the rules that learners-of-German construct when creating their mental model of the grammar. It also, as shown in the example above, takes sein when forming the perfect tense, much to the chagrin of many English speakers. Worse for me, there is only moderate overlap between the sein verbs in German and the être verbs in French.)