I understand the idea of shielding people from content that would be upsetting, but my own experience is, that I feel a little anxious as soon as I read Trigger Warning […].
How is your experience with it? Are you happy with it, or do you thing there are better ways to address dark topics?
I grew up in the 90’s. The wild West of the Internet. I’ve accidentally seen things so beyond fucked up. I had a friend back then that I’ve lost contact with and she used to email me fucked up images that just opening the email, there it was. But she’d also send high quality jokes or nudes of herself so it was kinda all or nothing. I think at that time my email was @rammstein.com lol. But were talking fatal crash pictures, one was a woman fucking a cactus, stuff seared into my memory that I wish I could get rid of. So yeah, if you think trigger warnings are excessive, you are probably too young to have experienced the 90’s and early 00’s. Even going to picture sites like imgur today, back then nothing was categorized so you’d get everything. Nsfw sites back then included EVERYTHING nsfw, from people smoking pot to stills of decapitations.
The traumatizing shit I saw on the Internet in those days, I’d compare to my experience in Iraq. That’s not to say that visual imagery is as bad as IRL, with the sights, sounds… And smells, but when you’re not expecting that sort of thing, it can be a big deal. Honestly those things probably jaded me to a point where I could more adequately handle war, but in ANY other scenario I’d say those days of no rules Internet were very harmful to a lot of people.