Content Warnings Anonymous Poll

I'm curious as to why this is an anonymous poll on a separate service? Can Loomio not handle anon polls? Is this a topic that is likely to lead to reprisal if opinions differ? I like how we use Loomio to integrate our decision making, and I don't know how much I can trust this other site. :/

I made it anonymous and on a different service to precisely avoid it being exclusively seen by the small subset of people who are active on the Social.coop Loomio. I hope users of other instances will participate, too. It's not necessarily meant to be a deciding factor in any of our decision making, more as an experiment to judge wider opinion. We aren't completely isolated from the rest of the fediverse so I think it's important that we listen to other people's views, even if we think they're wrong.

Loomio can do anonymized polls, and I think it would likely be more useful to us at this point to poll what topics the active members of our community like to se cw'd, vs. throwing it out to the wider fediverse, since it's an inherently subjective question and different communities will inevitably have different standards.

Not to say you shouldn't do this poll, as it might yield some more broad insights, but I think a separate poll that exclusively polls social.coop on Loomio should also be done.

@mattcropp Sure, that sounds good to me. I'm quite aware that I don't follow only other social.coop users, they come from a variety of instances. I guess the rest of us are the same... If we use policy that is blatantly at odds with other instances or general consensus in the fediverse then we should at least be aware. It'll be useful to poll our members and interesting to compare results.

@samtoland I didn't realise Loomio could do an anonymous poll, I assumed it would be closed to the social.coop Group members. Will happily use that next time if this is important to other members.

However, I think using a different service does help to emphasise that this has nothing to do with an actual Social.coop decision. I'd have probably needed to make a proposal to the whole group before going ahead with publishing something like this using the Social.coop Loomio Group (?). This ferendum poll seems more throwaway-ish, and points only to me personally as the creator.

EDIT: consolidating three seperate comments together

Great! I can't wait to ask liberal-arts students their opinion on Riemann's fields.

Content Warnings exist because we consensually trust social groups who say that online contents may harm them. People who stand against them are simply not knowledgeable about this topic (or maybe they're careless monsters, who knows). I saw people having meltdowns and, at these moments, I'd have done anything to help them relieve their pain. This regularly happens because people just don't care to use content warnings.

(Just so everyone knows, if someone is starting hurting themselves in front of you, I've been given the trick of doing something ritualized, like rolling a cigarette, or something similar.)

Whatever the mstdn.io or mamot.fr instances think about content warnings doesn't matter, and this material is only good to be raided by these centrists (I'm embarrassed to share a computer hobby with most of them) and the alt-right. If anything, it will just create drama on the Fediverse.

Of course, my opinion is partial and although I believe this poll is a mistake, I don't mean to offend anyone. If such a thing happened, it proves the need for some content warnings.

I'm not trying to communicate any aversion to Content Warnings I might have. I just know that there are wildly varying opinions, and plenty to learn.

People who stand against them are simply not knowledgeable about this topic

I'd like for social.coop to come up with a guide (or an existing one) to help new users (and others) to use CW's appropriately and sensitively.

Can I ask why you think the poll's a mistake? I don't think anonymous polling is the best/only way of judging opinion, but it is easy to engage with

The question of whether to have cws is very different than the question of which topics there's a broad community consensus around cw'ing. I don't think there's any significant trend within s.c to abandon cws, but any answer to the latter question is always going to be partial, contestable, and evolving, so I see use in temp-checking the community on the question in a non-binding manner simply to see where folks are at.

Oh, well, sorry for the mistake. I don't see the point of asking if CWs should be used, but I was totally out-of-topic then.

Well, I'm still not clear on why this was anonymous because I think it discourages conversation on the subject. But FWIW:

I think "Content Warnings" should be generally used when reading or viewing the contents can carry a consequence for a reasonable reader, including those who may suffer from some pretty common forms of trauma. So obviously, things like NSFW, abuse, and the more evocative parts of history (genocide).

I think it's up to the individual whether to CW less sensitive things that might simply cause "upset" in narrow bands of the possible viewership. Sometimes, that "upset" is hecking well necessary to make people address serious things: racists or sexists, for example, will feel or "upset" at being made aware of things that challenge their complacency. People who are complicit with wrongdoing will feel "upset" at seeing it called out in their presence. So if some people choose to CW things that "upset" others, I respect that. But I don't think it should be under any circumstances a mandatory thing.

This also suffers from a ratcheting effect, where if you encourage atomic CWs and punish people who fail to make them atomic enough, you end up pandering to the lowest demoninator. The effect is similar to one of the issues we're discussing over at the CoC thread, where you can't really enumerate all the things that will bother people and trying to do so is a fool's errand. Also, subjectivity: if I post about a (MH (+)) breakthrough I had, where I faced something difficult but came out with more self-knowledge, someone else might view it as being negative because of the stuff I had to consider, and berate me for not making it (MH (-)).

Given some good norms that people will generally agree on, and leaving people to their own devices otherwise, I think that muting/blocking and custom filtering will backfill people's specific needs most of the time. I think CWs are really valuable, and I am glad they are used on Mastodon, but I think the drive for ever-more-atomic CWs is pointless and often silly, I think demanding CWs for things like "politics" is often more harmful than good, and I think that making them mandatory would be chilling to normal conversation. So I voted "NSFW, Anxiety-Inducing, Never Required".

You can make Loomio polls public and share a link that anyone (even people not registered on social.coop loomio) can access.

I think this poll is missing some of the reasons content warnings are used. That being said, part of the reason this is such a point of contention (and that they are useless when there's disagreement) is that mastodon's implementation of them is fundamentally lacking, so I'm uncertain where to take that.

The underlying social problem is that content authors are never going to be able to predict what any given person who might see the content will have wanted or needed to be warned about. Short of putting everything under one (which some real usability issues) or major software changes, at best you can come to a vague sort of compromise, and actors who are actively malicious can intentionally use the ambiguities and lack of consensus to cause harm.

Yea, this basically. I've had people get surprisingly upset with me for talking publicly about crop genetic science on Mastodon, for example, because the things I'm sharing challenge beliefs they hold very dear and identify with. Like, crops. Farming. If it were my duty to CW anything that could upset a reader, I'd still not have considered that discussing the science of crops would cause so much distress. 😕

I think this poll is missing some of the reasons content warnings are used

@meltheadorable @cathalgarvey
Then please do add them. I made sure to put 'Feel free to choose multiple options and to add your own' to the description. I see the contention around this but don't think that's a reason to rely on implicit understanding. I don't think it should necessarily be compulsory to CW an arbitrary list of subjects.

Though we've got Loomio for social.coop members to talk amongst themselves I'm kinda curious what the other people I follow and my followers think too, as well as all the other users out there, on other instances. When I toot, it's not only social.coop that hears it. So I want to know when I toot if I'm inadvertently causing distress – some might be able to reply and explain themselves, others might rather anonymity. Others might just unfollow/block. Either way, fair enough. I think the more methods of communication, the better.

Going by your example @cathalgarvey , if your reader had already anonymously added 'crop genetic science' to a list that wasn't difficult for us all to search, you might not have caused distress.

Not that I'm trying to say it should necessarily be the tooter's responsibility to CW the most obscure of distressing topics – but I'd rather know beforehand than inadvertently offend or distress someone.

Added the option:
"Niche interest content (toot includes acronyms not widely known)".

There seems to be people who have already voted and didn't have this option offered to them: the vote results will be very useful, but I hope that this is taken into consideration.

Thanks for taking things forward @jakebeamish !

A quick update on the poll – there's been 26 participants, voting as follows:

1. NSFW (23/26) 88%
2. Content considered inflammatory (16/26) 62%
3. Content considered insensitive (15/26) 58%
4. Contents that may trigger anxiety crises and/or meltdowns (15/26) 58%
5. Optionally: topics that may be sensitive for some people (eg. food) (12/26) 46%
6. Politics (11/26) 42%
7. Content Warnings are always optional (9/26) 35%
8. Profanity (5/26) 19%
9. Highly personal topics (5/26) 19%
10. Content Warnings should always be used (3/26) 12%
11. Hate speech (1/26) 4%
12. Niche interest content (toot includes acronyms not widely known (0/26) 0%
13. Content Warnings should never be used (0/26) 0%

The percentages in the screen shot look to be calculated as a proportion of total votes cast, which isn't that helpful as there wasn't a set amount of votes per voter. I've rounded to the nearest percent in the figures above.

Again I just want to reiterate that I don't think this kind of research will yield a hard and fast result upon which we base any kind of proposal here. However I think there is value in regularly testing the waters and being open to take on board the opinions of others, especially those who interact in any way with the instance (and have us populating their federated timelines).

The reaction to this particular poll has been a bit mixed here on Loomio, and participation is pretty low – but then again, it wasn't shared very widely at all. I suspect a poll with higher participation would be more useful. If the group agrees it would be productive, can I informally propose:

• A poll of the membership, as @matthewcropp has suggested. (We should of course use Loomio for this)
• Another wider poll (anonymous again? Or not? Or both? Perhaps include a link to somewhere that discussion can take place, @cathalgarvey – what do you reckon? Is Mastodon is a good place for that?) targeted at members and users of other instances who federate with social.coop or otherwise interact with our members. (@samtoland thanks for pointing out that Loomio can do this too)
• Implementation of some kind of (anon?) comment box we can publicize for requests/complaints about bad CWing – CWG could periodically review this?

I populated this poll with some answers to start with – in an effort to represent a variety of positions, and to test out opinion on some of the phrasing currently used in the CoC. Results however are pretty skewy, as though a voter can add options, those who have already voted cannot change their vote(s). A poll without any initial options might be better, maybe. @meltheadorable, @cathalgarvey, @leosammallahti and everyone else too, do you folks have suggestions for how we can get around some of these problems? Is there value in this kind of thing?