Content Warnings

[etautresremords]

Resolved: Media ought to be presented with content warnings.


Aff:
V: Virtue Ethics
VC: Neg Util + theory of rights (Rawles)

Definition: University of Michigan, content warnings are "verbal or written notices that precede potentially sensitive content. These notices flag the contents of the material that follows, so readers, listeners, or viewers can prepare themselves to adequately engage or, if necessary, disengage for their own wellbeing."
Merriam-Webster
Content: "the topics or matter treated in a written work" / "the principal substance (such as written matter, illustrations, or music) offered by a website"
Warning: "serving as an alarm, signal, summons, or admonition"
Ought: moral obligation
Media: "the main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the internet) regarded collectively."

C1: content warnings reduce aggregate suffering
SpA: content warnings do not affect those who do not need them
SpB: content warnings allow content to exist while helping those who find them necessary
SpC: resolve frustrated preferences
C2: content warnings contextualize media (?)
SpA: media has positionality
SpB: moral standards change
SpC: moral relativism exists laterally
C3: [be nice to people? -- honestly this whole case is dependent on the actor. What's the issue if the content warnings don't impact authors? and if they do, isn't the publishing industry already biased?]

Neg
V: Individual Autonomy
VC: Freedom of Thought (anticensorship?? swap v and vc?)
flow definitions over
C1: content warnings provide a pathway towards censorship
SpA: content warnings restrict recommendations and publishing
SpB: organizations would gain further control over the publishing industry
SpC:
C2: content warnings prevent nuance
SpA: who provides the warnings, and how do we know that they have no ulterior motive?
SpB: how do we know how audiences will react to broad categories of warnings?
SpC: how do content warnings explicate the difference between glorification and condemnation?
C3: content warnings are context-dependent
SpA: what is potentially sensitive?
SpB: at what point is content just "content" and not something to be warned for? who creates the norm?
SpC: content warnings will shift understanding of sensitive topics and prevent conversation



How do we know that these "verbal or written notices" are actually being noticed?
What dictates whether something is "potentially sensitive"?
-- Are there situations where something may not be considered sensitive, or a blanket warning should be provided instead?
-- What happens in the situation that someone not privy to the blanket warning is there and is affected by the media?
What happens if a content warning is not available?
-- Do presenters have a moral obligation to provide a notice?
-- What happens if the presenter does not believe the content is "potentially sensitive"?

gap (existential?) inherency: why are content warnings so important for literature that an organization linked to the publishing industry will retroactively apply them to the [unknown number of] books when not even all films are rated...

[nervous laughter] show up next time for the kritik you wish you had never heard of! Or: "how can there be a moral obligation to the presentation of media when media itself is amoral?" technically topical but you have NEVER wanted to read this theory

Comments

[tei]

this is a Good List. I don't think I could say I am uniformly for or against content warnings in all situations, but... at least in fandom, the ideas that there are real, significant drawbacks doesn't seem to get a ton of airtime in the face of the automatic assumption that content warnings a) make people safer and b) don't and can't possibly ever do any harm.

[etautresremords]

It's an interesting situation because my initial judgement was firmly on the side of 'content warnings are good and there's no reason to have them' but recently I rediscovered the author Ken Liu (you may know him from the short story 'The Paper Menagerie') and his recently published series 'The Dandelion Dynasty' was described in his blurb as the first work in the silkpunk genre. He's the one who created the term, and it's really evocative! But at the same time, the associations attached to that inevitably affect (to different degrees of course) authorial intent and audience reaction, so I think content warnings do the same, especially when they're not very descriptive ('sexual assault' vs 'explicit discussion of sexual assault and the aftermath').

I will also say though! I think content warnings as a uniform good gets a lot of airtime specifically because of how Ao3 is constructed -- that's not a bad thing, but I think the tagging system has really influenced the idea of needing to describe what's in something + being specific + readily accessible, because I can't say I remember this being such a large conversation pre-Ao3.

[tei]

Yeah, I think AO3’s unintended-by-it’s-founders omnipresence has really changed the expectations. This is more specifically about the practice of choosing not to warn on AO3, but road_rhythm wrote a really good essay about the downsides of the general expectation that content should be described in advance in order to be made more “safe”: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22491910 particularly the bits that point out that there’s a kind of side conversation about “importance” going on in a lot of tagging and warning debates: i.e. is “artistic intent” a good enough reason to choose not to provide warnings that prepare readers for the story in ways that maybe you’d prefer they actually not be prepared? And if so, what kind of art is “important” enough for that?

[etautresremords]

tysm for linking that essay!! I looked over it pretty quickly but it makes fantastic points, and I think that the fact we already have CNtW and authors can and will choose to "positively act" in terms of doing more than the default to add other content tags is a really interesting aspect of this discussion. When I was initially talking about this, I was mostly thinking about an audience-side warning system where it was readers who added the warnings -- expanding my perspective a little dhdhdh I think it's really kind of awkward to impose on authors this - I'm not sure about the word - analysis, or 'pinpointing' of certain things maybe?

This is a weird example but I suddenly thought about 'A Modest Proposal' and whether you should say Swift writes about cannibalism or advocates for cannibalism. While he does provide actual options for change, it's through paralipsis. The average reader is likely to know that it's meant to be ironic, but technically you could read the entire thing and come away believing children are a great food source. Do you need to warn people that it's satire?

WRT artistic intent, I think people need to recognize framing, or that media doesn't start only when you press play. The cover of a book and the blurb if you read it are just as important to the experience as the cute OP and ED of a show where they do fancy animation with letters, even though one is on the "outside" of a book while the other is sandwiched into the actual video. To add or change what you see when you're about to metaphorically open a piece of writing online inherently changes the whole thing in your mind. So are there things you're okay doing that to?

[tei]

technically you could read the entire thing and come away believing children are a great food source You can and many people in my English class this summer did! 😵‍💫 And yes, I completely agree that it’s awkward to impose on authors the requirement that not only do they say what they wanted to say in the format they wanted to say it in, but they also decide how to sum up what things in it are in some way crossing a threshold of “warnable.” And having readers do it for each other makes sense, and obviously I thin readers talking about books or whatever is great and a good way to get a sense of something before you engage with it— but when warnings are expected there tends to be a kind of gradual creep of what content is considered potentially “dangerous,” to the point that people can be scared off of things that maybe they would have enjoyed (or, to your point about prejudice, maybe they would at least have benefitted from.)