Content warning in social media
when content warning becomes the part of cancer culture

Date: 2019/12/02

Note: this post is part of my new series of posting every day for December.

Mastodon has an interesting feature, called CW, or content warning. It is an extra field that you can fill, to warn people what you will write about. It would have been a useful feature, but instead we ended up at a state, where people ask others to CW their food post, or eye contact, which is just crazy to me. I am not a social person, but I don't have a problem with eye contact at all.

I don't understand food cw, and I especially dislike that vegans cw their pictures. Fuck, we are the minority here, we have every right to show the delicious food that we made.

Honestly I used CWs only for mental health stuff, as some experience might be triggering for others.

And I am forever greatful, that pleroma doesn't have CW, instead it called subject. It's basically a description for your post. I think the change in language immidiately made it more acceptable for me. It is basically the same function, but the difference in phrase for me, it just more friendly, and doesn't put pressure on me: do I need to put this in CW or not?

I see more and more people triggered by CW itself, and I think we will end up more on the policing side of things, and not on the reasonable side. People ask and will ask for CWs for ridiculous stuff and the fediverse will be even more divided place as it is. In fact some people might go back to twitter or facebook, where there is no option for content warning, just to get rid of it from their screen and timeline.

Content warning doesn't make a place more friendly for people, but it can annoy more, alienate more from an otherwise good and growing community.