In praise of the content warning

[ljwrites]

These days, other than spending minimum time on Tumblr to chat with friends and queue up posts, my main hangouts are here on Dreamwidth and over on Mastodon, specifically the Fandom.ink instance run by our lovely mod alisx. Though my longform stuff is obviously here and I love commenting and interacting with people in thoughtful ways, the place where I spend the most time online is definitely the Mastodon instance, with its cozy community, nearly real-time interactions, and old-school forum feel.

I think one of the things that keep me coming back to Mastodon, in addition to the factors mentioned in my review of the platform, is something I only mentioned in passing in that post because I had so much else to go into: The content warning.

The content warning (CW) is much like the fold or the cut in blogging software, complete with a text label that you can put on a post to tell you what's behind the cut. People can click on the 'read more' button to unfold the post and see the rest of it, if they so choose. Users can also choose to unfold content warnings by default.

The CW has a lot of uses, such as hiding away potentially triggering or upsetting content. Current politics and sexually explicit content are CW'd on many instances, and other instances may choose to federate or not with an instance based on its CW policy. You can hide spoilers, which is hugely useful because it doesn't depend on others having to set up filters, which they might not have thought to do for new works. Since CW labels are generally 1-2 lines, having CWs on multiple posts also helps keep timelines and feeds shorter.

Though I compared the CW to cuts in blog posts, there are significant differences as well. For one thing, the CW does not incur additional loading time or take you out of the timeline you are browsing: The content of the post is already loaded, it's just hidden. This makes sense because it's often not worth it to users to take an additional few seconds to view a post that is 500 letters at best as opposed to a blog post that may be 500+ words. It also makes unfolding the CW a quick, painless decision, should the viewer decide based on the description in the CW label that they want to see the content. Also, as mentioned above, users have the option to unfold CWs by default, something that can't be done with blog post cuts.(1)

I like how seriously the CW takes the idea of consent: even if you follow an account or are looking through a timeline you still have a choice not to see content that may be sensitive for a variety of reasons. Combined with such functions as the option to unlist your post from public timelines and your posts being unsearchable by anyone but you unless you use hashtags, exposure on Mastodon is firmly an opt-in experience for both the content creator and the consumer. It's a very different ethos from the engagement-at-all-costs drivenness of for-profit social media, and it helps keep things peaceful and safe for everyone.

I find the CW together with these other privacy settings tremendously freeing when I write posts on Mastodon. Do I want to get in my feels with details about a show episode that came out yesterday? No problem, just CW it with spoiler warnings. Do I want to go on for an embarrassing length in a megathread? I can unlist later posts from the public timeline so only the first post shows up there, and my long-suffering friends can "un-follow me right now" as the meme goes. If they do decide to stick it out, at least I can take up minimal space in their timelines by putting the content behind a CW. Wanna get into discourse? Again, put it behind a CW. Got some crass or gross-out humor? A controversial position? Just CW them.(2)

Mastodon's content warning has been described as its "killer app" and I can see why. The fact that it's not common on social media platforms outside of blogs is also symptomatic of what's wrong with so much social media, because Mastodon's approach to consent and exposure is just common sense when you think about it. Too often, though, you see engagement and connectivity being prized over privacy or safety, the platform's interests put over the users'. Mastodon is far from perfect and it has plenty of problems ranging from the social to the technical, as some of its most dedicated users will tell you. The fact that it's still one of the best and most common-sense platforms out there is more of a statement on how bad the rest of the field is.

Notes
1. And let's not even go into how a cut could break a post altogether in Tumblr if the poster changed their URL or deactivated, while the stub of the post floated around via reblogs like a dismembered ghost.
2. Obviously "controversial" does NOT mean "bigoted." The latter will get you banned in most instances, and those instances that consider people's right to exist a matter of legitimate debate will find themselves blocked by the rest.