Content Warnings on Mastodon
Potential and Drawbacks of the ‘Friendliest’ Social Network.
An entry by by Jacqueline Burggraf, Laura Gil and Anna Kuschezki
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Media, Technology and Society
The purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk in October last year set in motion an exodus onto other social media platforms. Not only do people oppose Musk’s frequent controversial statements and opinions, they are also dissatisfied with the way he is running the platform and changing Twitter as the new CEO.
Mastodon is considered the social media platform that is most similar to Twitter – which is why it has experienced a tremendous growth in users in the past few months. On October 26th 2022, the day before the Twitter purchase became final, there were 5,6 million accounts on Mastodon. On December 14th, this number had grown to 8,4 million accounts – in less than two months.
While Twitter and Mastodon share many features, there is one feature on Mastodon unfamiliar to former twitter users that has sparked a lot of debate: content warnings.
Let us take a step back and explain:
What are content – or trigger – warnings?
Let us first look at the term ‘trigger’ from a psychological perspective. Here, the term trigger refers to certain external stimuli that can trigger negative experiences in mentally ill people. Most often, the term ‘trigger’ is used in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder. In this context, triggers have a connection or similarity to the traumatic experience. These triggers can be certain people, situations, or even sounds. For people affected by PTSD, this means that they relive traumatic experiences in the form of what is known as flashbacks. These flashbacks are an involuntary, uncontrolled, and sudden re-experiencing of a traumatic situation and place a great deal of stress on those affected, especially if they are unable to prepare for the trigger. Based on the trigger warnings, everyone can then decide for themselves whether they want to consume the content or prefer not to. Thus, the benefit of trigger warnings is to protect people from possible triggers.
However, content warnings originated in forums for victims of sexual violence. There, their purpose was to prepare readers for explicit content. Trigger warnings are like other content warnings in that they all try to protect users. The difference, however, is that trigger warnings only apply to people suffering from PTSD. They are similar to the Voluntary Self-Regulation of the Movie Industry (FSK), which regulates certain content for children and teens. The difference: trigger warnings are aimed at adults. In recent years, trigger warnings have found their way into commercial media. There, they are increasingly used for content other than sexual violence and are intended to protect people from disturbing content, whether or not they suffer from PTSD.
What are the reasons to use content warnings?
Many educators advocate for content warnings when they are used to protect people with PTSD or other serious mental illnesses. Additionally, content warnings can be used as a means of inclusion to help people with mental illnesses participate in classes at school or university, for example.
Basically, content warnings are designed to prevent people from being exposed to topics that could cause flashbacks or other mental health problems. The warning then has the effect of allowing these individuals to prepare for the topic and thus avoid the trauma dynamic.
Another reason for content warnings can also be the so-called Werther Effect. The Werther Effect shows that the type and style of reporting on suicide can have an impact on society’s opinion of suicide. Thus, a certain type and style of reporting can thus lead to an increase in suicide rates.
Is there also criticism of content warnings?
Yes, there is!
Experts fear that trigger warnings could be used in an inflationary manner and thus lose their meaning. Moreover, the increased use of trigger warnings for topics that do not require it could lead to a trivialization of PTSD and sufferers could feel patronized as a result. According to critics, the fact that such trivialization is already taking place is demonstrated by the fact that the term trigger has entered the vernacular of many people and now describes a wide variety of different things and situations even independently of traumatic experiences. Another criticism is that the frequent use of trigger warnings makes the trauma term increasingly imprecise. It is no longer about trauma in the psychological sense of a one-time, severe and overwhelming experience that is relived after being confronted with triggers, but now it is about these triggers being seen as causes of traumatization.
Now back to Mastodon:
Mastodon was created in 2016 by Russian-born German software developer Eugen Rochko. According to Rochko himself, he created Mastodon because he used to love Twitter but became dissatisfied with the platform. Mastodon’s mascot is – you guessed it – a Mastodon. Mastodon is based on open-source software, which means that the social media network is completely self-hosted. Since Mastodon is a non-profit company, there are also no ads on the platform: Everything is financed through crowd-funding to this day. So how does Mastodon compare to Twitter?
First of all, both platforms can be classified as microblogging services, where people can post short messages for their followers. Users have an account with a profile picture, a biography, a user name – visually, Twitter and Mastodon are very similar. The main difference is that Twitter is centralized and Mastodon decentralized. That means that Twitter is run on a single server by one company, and Mastodon is a collection of many servers – or instances, as they are called on Mastodon – that form a big network. Each instance is run by its respective owner, who can set their own rules and content for it. An instance can be as small as a single account, but also have thousands of members.
Users can follow other single accounts on Mastodon, like we are used to from other social media, but also join the aforementioned instances. There are many instances on Mastodon, for various topics, interests, and groups. The biggest instance is mastodon.social which is run by Eugen Rochko himself. Mastodon also has timelines, like most social media networks. Users have one federated timeline, where all their recent posts are collected, and can have multiple local timelines that are limited to posts from just one instance. Users can write posts, reply to posts, and ‘boost’ posts – which is the equivalent of retweeting on Twitter. However, there is no Mastodon equivalent for quote-tweeting yet which means retweeting a post and at the same time leaving a comment on it. A lot of recent Mastodon users, especially Twitter migrants, have criticized the lack of this feature.
Content warnings as a feature are unique to Mastodon, at least when looking at the major social networks. While a lot of people utilize content warnings on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms, they can only include them in their captions or post texts themselves – and the social network is not involved. In comparison:
This is how you use content warnings on Mastodon
When posting, users can add a content warning at the top in a separate field if they choose, and they can also add a reason for the warning or another short phrase stating that they are using a warning. From the viewers’ side, when there is a content warning, the rest of the content is collapsed and only the warning is displayed. Users have to actively click ‘show more’ to see the full post.
Mastodon also has a content warning solution for pictures. When users add media to their posts, they can mark the content as ‘sensitive’ which causes the picture or video to be hidden behind a blurred overlay when the post is published. Again, users have to actively click the picture to see it unblurred. When users add a content warning to a post, and include media, Mastodon will automatically blur the media thumbnail as well. This means that users can use the picture blurring feature without a content warning at the top of the post, but not the other way around.
The concept of content warnings has been discussed many times by experts as well as on the internet. There are many people that do not see the need for content warnings on social media, or even view them as harmful.
So why does Mastodon offer this feature?
Mastodon and its creator, Eugen Rochko, have a self-proclaimed ethos of being friendly, polite, curious, open, caring and decent. Which means everyone should feel welcome and be able to use the networks safely. In Mastodon’s own online guide on how to use it, they suggest to use content warnings to mark triggering or offensive content – but since everyone can freely add and word content warnings to their posts as they wish and without any restrictions, the warnings are used for a variety of content.
Is Mastodon really that friendly?
As mentioned, Mastodon is generally considered to be a very friendly platform. Researchers wanted to find out if the impression is true and examined 13,590 trending posts in 2022. The posts were examined to see if they had a positive, neutral or negative sentiment. Al-khateeb et al. found that most of the posts tend to be negative. However, the mood of a post alone does not say much about how people interact with each other. Therefore, the posts were examined in a further step for their toxicity and the researchers came to the conclusion that only 4 percent of the posts show a toxic dynamic -the platform seems to have earned its friendly reputation.
But: The decentralization of the platform can cause some problems here, since there are many different communities on different servers. Each server can make decisions about their own rules and ban different topics. Another problem can be that every server has its own moderators, so dealing with hate speech, for example, can be very difficult.
Which warnings are used and why?
The above table shows common warnings that are often used on Mastodon but not that often seen on other platforms. But there are, of course, also the more common warnings related to racism, violence, or suicide. Another interesting point is that many people use the feature to give their posts a headline or short summary.
This shows us that the warnings on Mastodon are really set more often than we might be used to. In order to understand why this has developed on Mastodon, we should look at the groups of people from which the platform has emerged: For a long time, Mastodon was a niche platform where marginalized groups could exchange information. These people often switched to Mastodon to be able to connect with their group without experiencing hostility or insults. Over time, they have created a safe place where mental health issues are accepted, and the overall interactions are respectful. Very interesting about the handling of warnings on Mastodon is the concept of consent, since you have to actively unfold posts and agree to read them.
Criticism and possible solutions
With the many people that are leaving Twitter to join Mastodon also comes a wave of criticism about the use of content warnings – especially because those users are new to the way warnings are handled on Mastodon. One criticism that is often mentioned is that because there are so many warnings, warnings about really sensitive topics lose their value. Another point is the clarity of the timeline. If all posts contain warnings, people have to decide for each post individually whether they want to read it and then unfold it. Many people also complain that this hides important topics. If all political topics are given warnings, for example, then they may not be talked about enough.
But there are already solutions for most of these problematic aspects. Some solutions have already been implemented or have been possible for a very long time. For example, there has long been a solution to the criticism that it would be hard to open each post individually. In the feed, one can choose to see all posts without warnings. For people who feel uncomfortable with certain topics, there is the possibility to filter hashtags and words. Posts with these will then not be displayed. Furthermore, you can, of course, also mute certain users, no longer follow them, or block them.
Then there are some proposed solutions that are currently being discussed. For example, many users would like to see the Content Warnings feature renamed to Content Notice. This would mean that new users would not be surprised how the feature is used and the name would be more in line with the practical use. There is also a discussion about whether another feature should be used. The argumentation is that one could have an area for content warnings and an additional area for headlines.
So what does all of this tell us?
Content warnings are actually used very often on Mastodon, even for topics that might seem harmless at first. However, if you take a closer look at many of these warnings, you will notice that they are quite helpful for certain people. Of course, there are also warnings that objectively do not make sense. For example, when the function is used to convey jokes, like a ‚knock-knock-joke‘.
However, you get the impression that the long-time users really deal with the warnings and are very respectful to each other. You can also see that it is an evolved culture. Many users set warnings because they see them on other users‘ posts – and those other users explain why a warning is necessary.
Overall, the warnings are used as experts would recommend: The word ‘trigger’ is not mentioned, extremely alarming words are not used, but the topic of the post is stated briefly and factually, and each person is then free to decide whether they want to see the post or not.
What remains unanswered, however, is whether trigger warnings hide important issues too much. In the near future, we will see how Mastodon develops and whether it can become a replacement for Twitter in all the ways users expect and wish it to be.
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