I understand the idea of shielding people from content that would be upsetting, but my own experience is, that I feel a little anxious as soon as I read Trigger Warning […].
How is your experience with it? Are you happy with it, or do you thing there are better ways to address dark topics?
They are harmless, so don’t see why not. I rather them to censorship. I remember mainstream media was heavily editing/censoring the footage of the killing of Charlie Kirk, and even posting the “far away” shot onto the same platforms that had close up, raw, uncensored footage. I heard it debated by them if a content warning and uncensored footage would be more beneficial.
I think the high quality footage itself of it actually made people more sympathetic/outraged about it, just seeing a man die that way
This is the correct take.
Content warnings on everything seems silly until you think about what the alternative is. It’s much better to have largely uncensored media that people can engage with intellectually, making their own decisions if they want to experience it or not.
The alternative is visible in the advertiser-friendly hellscape that mainstream social media has become, where people can’t even say words like “kill” or “drug” without being buried by the algorithm.
For a healthy society to exist, people need to be able to interact with sensitive topics and challenging ideas.
Imagine if the the news was able to show the actual true suffering in Gaza. I remember seeing Ukranian media publish uncensored images of mangled corpses and fragments of people’s skull still with a scalp and hair among rubble from Russia’s invasion. I think with the interactive nature of the internet, offering a content warning, then a censored version, then an uncensored version is the way to go. I imagined an interface possibly which starts with a content warning and then a “censored” toggle visibly turned on by default, but can be toggled off.