Being on Mastodon is fun, but holy smokes, those guys want you to content-warning everything, it feels like--even crying. And I'm like, what, a basic display of emotion gets a content warning? It's not even extreme sobbing over some dead body; we're not pondering skipping out on a viewing of Grave of the Fireflies because we're already in a downer mood; it just appears to be a character sheet that happens to have several headshots of example emotions, and crying happens to be one of them. I see them on more advanced ref sheets all the time.
I get the warnings for, like, blood or guns or spiders. I can imagine why someone might not want to see those, but yeah, I dunno. Like, by this logic, you could content-warning happiness, too, if you're sad and you don't want to see someone else being joyful. Like, where is the line between content warnings, and regular run-of-the-mill content tags? Is just the semantics of it tripping me up?
I think a lot of people on Mastodon have forgotten what Tumblr taught us about trigger warnings and trolls
this is sincerely one of the major reasons I just can't use mastodon. My friends on there are very soft hearted and want to protect people from harm but this leads to what feels like every other post having some content warning for something extremely mild or anodyne and I just can't deal with it. It's one of the few things that makes me feel that icy touch of "the conservatism of age" that we were warned about, so I have to keep myself out of it so I don't lose my empathy or sensitivity.
The issue is that it's a shibboleth for at least a couple of different actual divisions, some of which I don't care about and some of which I do.
The reason why a lot of folks, myself included, have a kind of kneejerk negative response to content warning maximalists is that historically policing content warnings is strongly correlated with white people on mastadon making it unusable for non-white people.
(In many ways, a descriptive tagging system combined with tag filtering would be a much better solution, but not enough people reliably use tags either -- it's me, I'm terrible about that. Twitter clout weirdos made tags so uncool that we haven't yet recovered, even on sites like Mastodon and Cohost where tagging is functionally crucial if you want things to be findable.)
Anywho, whenever I'm asked to CW something (either personally, or generally) that I wouldn't instinctively put a warning on, I try to sort it into one of two groups:
- is this a CW that is inconvenient to me just because I am not personally harmed by it, whilst others are
- is this a CW that is enabling people people with privilege to render the lived experience of others invisible
There are some things that are genuinely hard to put into just one of those buckets. A lot of political content is like that; there's a lot of political stuff that is just electoral gamesmanship and dunkfests which folks should rightfully be able to avoid, but there's a lot of political stuff, some of which is electoral, which existentially threatens folks' lives, and it's messed up to ask them to hide it by default.
In conclusion, Mastodon is exhausting
this is a real problem within the broad culture there. it was never explained to me why my face was so offensive i had to hide it from everyone, just an expected behavior i was supposed to have already known about. very alienating
There are two major aspects to this, in my opinion.
The first is that CWs as an inidcator of Ontologically Good Leftist Politics, and especially “consent,” absolutely are used to police speech, especially in racialized and gendered ways. The frustrating thing about this is that it's hard to discuss without sounding like a conservative asshole who throws 2015-era language about “Tumblr” around. You have to be able to hold in your mind that Mastodon/the fedi/whatever is not “leftist” by dint of being “alternative.” It is largely tech built by individualist libertarians, with a substrate of particularly internet-poisoned, nominal anarchists/communists caked onto it. The idea of inherent leftism will be used to club you to death in front of anyone if you criticize concern-trolling about CWs as tone-policing, or suggest that a default stance of oversensitivity is corroding actual abilities to be considerate with “hugbox” dynamics.
The second is that I think an initial and long-running argument about CWs tells the writ large story of the ecosystem. Specifically, the “CWs are actually subject lines” argument was used to shout down people who did actually ask for basic CW etiquette like explicit images or descriptions of violence. Maximalism looped the idea of consideration around into the initial position that the Something Awful/image board cases were arguing, which is that CWs are just subject lines, not something with weight, but from the initial starting point of browbeating strangers instead of putting your shit under their noses without them asking.
If there's no proportionality, there's no social contract or social fabric. There's just techno-solutionist tools, and who gets to wield them for their own, often-petty reasons. Image descriptions are a close parallel – people will jump on you for having bad politics for not doing it, or not doing it right, so fuck it. It's all just vectors for strangers to get on your case anyway!
Can that be reactionary? Yes. But it's also something you think when you're a trans person being told to CW your face, and you aren't sure if someone is just overly-sensitive and needs to hear “then don't follow me for posts you don't like,” or someone who's hot to fire up a new harassment campaign.
