Cw: discussion of common cw tags and subjects, including violence, sexual violence, animal products, and others.

Bluesky’s trust and safety (betrayal and bullshit) team is engaged in high fuckery and we’re likely going to get some new folks coming in from bksy.

Now’s probably a good time to revisit content warnings and when and how to use them.

Content warnings are just that; a warning about the content of a post or submission. They grew out of the older notion of “trigger warnings” as an acknowledgement that no one could reasonably guess what might be triggering to other people. Instead content warnings are a more general heads up that a discussion contains material that may be upsetting or unwanted by some people.

It’s a friendly warning so folks can decide whether or not they’d like to engage with the discussion.

Note on “nsfw”. When assessing if something is not safe for work ask yourself if a corporate HR rep who hated you would use it as evidence to get you fired.

Animal products - posts discussion animal products like meat or leather should have cw: animal products or cw: meat in the post title or header. Posts should usually be labelled nsfw and it’s courteous to put discussions inside a spoiler tag so people can choose if they want to open it or not.

Sexual violence or sexual assault - posts discussion sexual violence, sexual assault, intimate partner violencen, or sexual violence against kids, all need to be labelled with a cw. Sv is commomly used for sexual violence, sa for sexual assault, csa or csam for violence against children. Posts should always have a nsfw tag or be placed in a spoiler tag.

Violence - posts discussing violence, torture, and related topics should have a cw as such and use spoiler tags and nsfw tags as appropriate.

Graphic images - graphic images of violence, combat footage, severe injusry or death, should be labelled as such and should always have an appropriate cw and be placed in spoiler tags and marked with the nsfw.

Bigotry - sexism, racism, tranphobia, misogyny, ethnic bigotry, ableism, and really any structural violence generally merits a cw. If it’s graphic or upsetting putting the material in a spoiler tag is polite.

Some other things that may merit a cw

• common phobias liek spiders and clowns

• particularly awful politics

• notorious or hated political figures

• Hexbear pop culture enemies - for instance superhero movies are often semi-seriously marked with a “capeshit” warning

• topics discussing religious trauma

• sexual topics and general horniness as a courtesy to our ace and otherwise not-interested comrades

• medical trauma and topics that are frequent sites of medical violence.

If there was a “rule” it’d be; if you think someoen might find your post upsetting it’s usually wroth writing a one or two word cw and sticking it at the top of the post. It’s a courteous way to give people a heads up on what the discussion is about so if it’s content they don’t want to engage with they can skip it and keep browsing.