drama!

@magicalleatherbear

we should be sensitive to people who are triggered by terrible content

and we must also shout fascist abuse from the rooftops to summon appropriate outrage

and sometimes those noble goals are at loggerheads

so i would be lying to you if i told you i know where the line is

but i do know that, just as gore content without a trigger warning is wrong, extreme sensitivity to the common terrors of the world we live in is also wrong

because it serves fascism to hide that

@benroyce
You do get that the word abuse itself is a memory trigger for abused people who don't like to be triggered by some news - no matter how valid or important it is?
If you get that, you understand that CW isn't there to censor, but to be nice and to make life better for certain people. That's part of why people use the Fediverse and don't use Twitter.

@benroyce are you calling out people who don't have the spoons to deal with all of this?

I myself am a highly sensitive person and I agree that things need to be talked about... but everything that's been happening already formulated a most grotesque pattern spanning centuries, perhaps longer and we need to break that pattern and fight back against it rather than just saying "hey this happened to that person" and lack of accountability doesn't help, though I never saw the post you referred to.

@magicalleatherbear

https://mastodon.social/@LibertyOverGov/116111406940789068

@benroyce I’ve seen CWs on pics of food. It’s ridiculous.

@benroyce what "law enforcement" did there was completely unnecessary and ties right back into the human rights violations I mentioned...

@benroyce what "law enforcement" did there was completely unnecessary and ties right back into the human rights violations I mentioned...

@benroyce

What I mentioned here is adds the layers that have actually made me physically sick:
https://4bear.com/@magicalleatherbear/116106609791477917

It all stems from patterns of human rights abuses... many modernized in contemporary times too.

@magicalleatherbear

yeah

exposure to sadistic brutality emboldens resistance to it... up to a point

past that it merely desensitizes and imparts a sense of helplessness

it's a tricky line

@benroyce indeed!!! I saw your messages and I agree with a lot of what you said.... that being said were you aware of Greg Palast's documentary on Vigilantes Inc? Millions of people were purged from voter roles for no reason

@magicalleatherbear

and THAT must be broadcast with a megaphone

@benroyce@mastodon.social
Mhm. I see your point and I am not saying you are wrong because I wanna ponder this a bit. But I wanna offer a counter argument to see what you think about it.
We don't know what may cause people problems.
I have a common phobia for example, but less common than arachnophobia. People sometimes posts spiders with cw. People never post the thing I'm afraid of with cw.
To them the thing is harmless, they don't even think that someone had to quickly look away and scroll the page down. They don't know they likely caused nightmares and worse sleep than usual.

To a victim of abuse maybe even reading about a topic is enough.

Your point of CW as a fascism tool to kinda censor things is an interesting one though.

@benroyce

I tried but nobody said anything about it.

https://4bear.com/@magicalleatherbear/116080541595793999

What happened in 2024 Trump is of course trying to do again.

drama!

i need to rant about #ContentWarning creep

i posted once of a Ukrainian reporter whose corpse was abused by Russia. i got calls for #CW. no pictures, no text details, just a link to a story

i suspect some CW calls are a manipulation to hide fascist abuse

certainly some are sincere

but they aren't serving a valid goal. an extreme level of sensitivity is absurd and unactionable

gore? absolutely CW

but some calls serve #fascism by hiding abuse. abuse we rightfully need to broadcast

@benroyce If you look through mainstream news photo annuals from WWII to the 1970s, or Life magazine, it’s astonishing how much gore they printed. Our contemporary media has protected society from the real violence of everyday life as well as war. Instead, we have a cartoon or video game understanding of what real,violence entails.

@raccoon

i would reply with:

some topics are cut and dry obvious CW topics

but some topics are only triggering for some, some topics for a few, and some topics for vanishingly few

and so the question is where we draw the line

and it is simply a matter that we can draw the line at the wrong spot, in either direction

such that there is no clear answer, it is a large grey area. and it all depends on intricacies of context and intent and the exact nature of the content

@benroyce@mastodon.social
Yeah I agree. A thing I say about this topic is what do we do? Do we content warning everything because there's potential triggers everywhere? Do we cw only some stuff, leaving some to unfairly deal with their phobia/trauma? Or do we stop using cw completely?

I think, the way things are now we have no good tools for this.

The built in cw tool is the stuff one would use for graphic things you don't wanna risk opening around people (boobies, corpses...) But we need a solid system that allow us to post stuff and let people filter what they don't want to see.

Example, if I post a spider I could avoid adding a cw, but I could add a hashtag and people with arachnophobia could have a filter than removes spiders from their timeline.
But I'm going off topic here.

drama!

i need to rant about #ContentWarning creep

i posted once of a Ukrainian reporter whose corpse was abused by Russia. i got calls for #CW. no pictures, no text details, just a link to a story

i suspect some CW calls are a manipulation to hide fascist abuse

certainly some are sincere

but they aren't serving a valid goal. an extreme level of sensitivity is absurd and unactionable

gore? absolutely CW

but some calls serve #fascism by hiding abuse. abuse we rightfully need to broadcast

@raccoon

no you're not going off topic, appropriate hashtagging is absolutely necessary for this grey zone

@benroyce I think there is nuance here around where we go for news. Some people come to fedi just to play with their friends, they receive their news from other places and share links with friends and family via signal. Sharing something without a content warning because "everyone needs to see this" implies that everyone isn't already reading the news in other places, putting us a savior/beacon for distributing news that is readily available everywhere. We are aware of the horrors, very very very aware, we are building momentum of revolution. And sometimes we just need a breather from the horrors because the horrors invade every single point of our lives. I do post about #uspol because I want to be a part of the conversations and I want to find other people who align in the revolution. Fighting over how we disseminate information is not going to bring more people to greater awareness. We also need spaces of softness and whimsy to keep us grounded in the tender possibilities of what CAN be built when we aren't lost in the madness of it all.