Consensus
Fri 1 Nov 2024 4:45AM

CW policy and restrictions surrounding various types of posts related to self-harm

K Katja Public Seen by 36

Following from the discussions we have been having periodically about certain types of posts related to self-harm in the League Code: further minor updates topic over on Coordination, I am making a thread to discuss what appear to be the primary issues that I have seen disagreement on. For context (especially for newer Stewards who were not involved in the earlier conversations on Discord), this is to do with the Website League Code of Conduct, which sets minimum moderation requirements for all Nodes. Nodes are, in most cases, free to set stricter rules for their users.

Rough state of the discussion(s) (as far as I can tell)

Resolved issues include:

  • Posts treating self-harm as a generally "good" thing (pro-ana, pro-sui, so on): should be prohibited. Edit: more thorough discussion is needed on many sorts of discussion adjacent to these issues. Please refer to some of the comments which have been posted so far.

  • Posts which contain disinformation which is intended to, or which is likely to, amount to instructing people to engage in actions which amount to self-harm (medical disinformation or otherwise advising people to perform non-obviously dangerous actions): should be prohibited.

Unresolved issues include:

  1. What counts as "self-harm"?

  2. What sorts of posts containing self-harm should require CWs?

  3. What sorts of posts containing self-harm should be blanket prohibited?

Defining "self-harm"

While I have yet to see explicit disagreement about this, various positions taken on certain issues suggest to me that there are at least differing opinions on the subject which might need to be heard to discuss the other issues here in full.

On the "obviously counts" end, there are practices such as direct, deliberate self-injury in the absence of, say, spiritual or practical reasons, I think — and the way we are using the term, it would include suicide or attempts thereat, as far as I can tell. (Edit: which is also a terminological pattern which concerns have been raised about; see below as well.) On the extreme other end, I could imagine coherent arguments being made that even fairly normative levels of alcohol consumption count, given the current consensus in public health that no amount of alcohol is safe.

In terms of subjects and practices where I think there is a serious question, though, I have seen mentions of the following (non-exhaustive) cases in our discussions, if I recall correctly:

  • Substance use that gets into clinical "substance abuse" kind of territory.

  • Risky gambling or gambling reflecting some kind of addiction.

  • Eating disorders or behaviour patterns around eating of a disordered nature.

  • Gambling whatsoever.

I could also see there being room for discussion around other kinds of acts which are markedly reckless or apathetic toward one's own health and safety, whether immediately physically, mentally, socially, or perhaps even financially.

What sorts of self-harm related posts should require content warnings?

While this ties into broader discussions about whether the baseline for CWs on the League should be fairly loose as it is on most social media platforms (porn, gore, and other material which is highly likely to be extremely upsetting or inappropriate for certain contexts requires a click through by default) or stricter as it has been in some contexts with more flexible CW systems (for example, requiring CWs for common phobia and trauma triggers), I think this sub-issue is one that should probably be broken out into its own discussion, as I have gotten the impression it is somewhat on the controversial side.

Examples of perspectives on where mandatory CWs should kick in for self-harm-related posts which have been raised include, not exhaustively:

  • None, save for posts which fall into shocking territory (e.g. photos or extremely graphic textual descriptions).

  • ”, as well as directly inciting posts or language (e.g. "Someone Off-Site Should KYS", "Some Person should drink bleach", etcetera).

  • ”, as well as implicitly inciting posts or language (e.g. telling fascists off-site to "follow your leader", so on)

  • ”, as well as any explicit discussion of self-harm beyond passing mentions.

  • All mentions of self-harm.

What sorts of self-harm related posts should be outright prohibited across the entire Website League?

Aside from the categories mentioned above which we have already somewhat settled on positions on, at least.

Examples of perspectives which have been raised on this issue:

  • If someone's posting replies telling another user to self-harm, that's a clear indication that there's some kind of issue that needs moderation — whether it's the replying user harassing or the recipient being someone who never should've been on the League in the first place.

  • Any inciting language, direct or otherwise, should be prohibited.

  • Inciting language generally must not be subject to a League-wide prohibition.

DU

mae bubsy Fri 1 Nov 2024 5:01AM

  1. what counts as self-harm?

    i don't know. this seems like the whole "you cannot create a definition for a chair that includes all chairs but excludes all non-chairs." don't ask me.

  2. what sorts of posts containing self-harm should require cws?

    most of them, probably. if it's just a very passing mention it might be okay not to.

  3. what sorts of posts containing self-harm should be blanket prohibited?

    threats and other malicious posts of course.

    i do not believe i should be disallowed from speaking about how self-harm has helped me. it sounds like it's already been decided that's prohibited? i strongly disagree. it's my body, and if i have weighed the pros and cons and decided for myself that i want to self-harm, i want that to be respected. i already can't speak about self-harm anywhere in real life. i do not need another place where i cannot speak about self-harm.

    basically, i don't think i should be prohibited from speaking about my experiences with self-harm just because they're not the "right" ones.

    should also be noted that self-harm and suicide are not the same thing? just because i self-harm doesn't mean i'm suicidal. it seems like that distinction isn't entirely understood here

    edit: to add to that last point, project lets prefers to call it non-suicidal self-injury or nssi (please read, very important...)

WS

wenchcoat system Fri 1 Nov 2024 9:58PM

fighting a virus and don't have the energy to go point by point, so for now here are some of the core principles we go by on this.

  1. we should not under any circumstance prevent, and optimally not even mildly discourage, users from discussing their own direct experience.

  2. with only slightly less emphasis, we should not police the tone of reactions to that experience.

  3. if League users are directing deliberate invective at other League users, this is a moderation issue which will not be mitigated by content rules (at best it will be hidden and that's worse).

  4. a few users muting or blocking each other because they just don't want that vibe in their feeds is Fine Actually. trying to prevent that at a policy level is quixotic.

we have other opinions, e.g. we'd rather not see 'kys' launched over petty grudges at off-site targets either, but that's less important than making sure we don't break #1/#2.

edit: added #4

N

nora Mon 4 Nov 2024 4:24PM

My understanding, based on discussions in Discord and on the content in this thread, is that our general policy is that we should not require CWs and, where we might be tempted to require CWs, instead require tagging or the presence of particular keywords so that people can filter out posts. There are then a few exceptions, which @Shel articulated to broad agreement as things which:

If you saw it on the street or saw someone looking at it in the office, it would shock and surprise you.

I think there are problems with this policy, and this thread exposes one of them. Self-harm content, including NSSI, is shocking to a lot of people. As someone who has engaged in NSSI in the past, shock and revulsion are the main reactions I got from non-self-harmers when they learned about my NSSI. That reaction is part of the stigmatization of NSSI.

If we believe, as that article argues, that:

Seeing pictures of food may seem very disgusting when you're in the throes of anorexia, but hiding it behind a CW like violence or gore validates the idea that food should be seen as being in the same category as something vile and shocking.

we must, then, believe that the same is true for requiring a CW for NSSI and discussions of suicide. We have to choose; either requiring a CW is stigmatizing, or it's not. If it's our policy that it is almost never the responsibility of the poster to create an opt-in for content others might find upsetting, but then choose to include NSSI and discussions of suicide in the short list of topics for which it's necessary to provide an opt-in experience, we are creating exactly the stigmatization those asking us not to require CWs - or, more troublingly, to require the absence of CWs for some topics - seek to avoid.

I think this thread, and its discussion in Zulip, is evidence that we need to have an explicit conversation about the League's overall philosophy on CWs before we decide on policies like this one. I have created two threads to discuss separate issues related to this:

That said, were I asked to vote today on the idea that CWs should be required for "self harm", whether that's discussion or informational material, whether related to suicide or NSSI, I would vote no based on the principles articulated above.