How To Use Twitter's New 'Content Warning' Feature And All The (Almost) NSFW Memes Being Blurred Ironically

By Owen
4283 views
• Published 3 years ago

Published 3 years ago

This week, Twitter unveiled a new feature that helps its users flag NSFW content. Users are now able to give a "Content Warning" on pieces of media in their tweets, marking photos and videos as either "Violence," "Nudity" or "Sensitive." However, trolls and meme creators are now using it not to censor raunchy content, but instead are using the feature for bait-and-switch purposes, blurring trivial image macros in hopes that people will be gullible enough to click the "Show" button.


The Twitter content warning was first hinted at on December 7th last year. The official account of Twitter Safety posted a tweet (shown above) that detailed the feature and how to use it. How does one mark a photo or video as sensitive on Twitter? All you have to do when adding a photo or video to a tweet is click the "Edit" button in the bottom right corner. From there, click the "Flag" button that's a symbol of a waving flag, and then, you can either mark it as "Violence," "Nudity" or "Sensetive." After sending the tweet, the meme or video will be blurred, and the viewer can only click "Show" and hope for the best.

It took a little while for Twitter users to notice the content warning option, as it wasn't until earlier this week that they started using it after one or two of them discovered the buried option when they hit the "Edit" button. Exponentially over the course of a day, users started blurring NSFW content. Most of it, however, wasn't edgy at all. Instead, Twitter users took the opportunity to troll their unsuspecting followers. Over the course of this week, the average Twitter user's timeline was flooded with blurred imagery.


The average timeline scroll continued to be bombarded with censored media. As a result, meta iterations began to blend into the mix. Quickly, Twitter's content warning has become its own form of memeing — as users clicked on more of them, they got used to not actually seeing NSFW content. So when they actually clicked on one and it was sensitive content, they were shocked. This created a whole new problem, and funny tweet posters didn't hesitate to reference this conflict of interest.


As the content warning feature becomes more mainstream, it'll be interesting to see how meme creators evolve it. For some, it's definitely helpful because it aims to eliminate triggers and unwanted nudity. But for now, it's largely a bait-and-switch prank that follows all the rules of classics. The real question is if Twitter will back out of this decision as it's done with so many of their features in the past. However, something like Fleets was mostly used for nudes anyway.

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