A Database for Trigger Warnings

In reading Holly Wood’s argument that Netflix ought to offer trigger warnings on “Jessica Jones”, I’m reminded of a quote from a recent editorial by Katherine Byron, about the current culture of college campuses:

Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago.

When Ms. Wood says that Netflix should have included “a note on the synopsis screen warning viewers that the show is literally entirely about abuse”, she calls for a similar kind of top-down supervision.

This is a wrong-headed approach to the problem of publishing and sharing trigger warnings. It’s not just a “Jessica Jones” problem or a Netflix problem. It’s also a Hulu, Amazon, NBC, Time Warner, Dreamworks, Penguin and Harper Collins problem.

To responsibly implement a trigger warning system, you’d need to develop a federated, medically-sound approach among TV and movie studios and book publishers. That promises to be an expensive, frustrating multi-year endeavor with — judging by the MPAA’s dubious rating system — no guarantee of a satisfying outcome. This is particularly true given that there’s apparently no business case for media companies to get on board.

Plus, history also shows that we can rarely rely on media companies to Do the Right Thing.

Bottom Up, Not Top-Down

Instead, the more practical solution is to go bottom-up. Create a robust crowd-sourced database of trigger warnings for any piece of media content. Each entry can be as long and detailed as the users desire. More importantly, the viewers don’t cede control of decisions around trigger warnings to the media producers. They keep that power for themselves.

There’s a rich precedent for this in the many Christian movie review sites which provide detailed reviews of movies from a Christian perspective. Here’s 1500 words on Interstellar (“One f-word, six s-words and a dribble of other profanities”).

Having largely failed to influence what’s shown on TV, an audience subset created their own lenses through which to see that television. Isn’t that the role we want trigger warnings to play?

This isn’t an original idea. There’s a kind of prototype for this database on Tumblr. It’s willy-nilly and Tumblr probably isn’t the right tool, but you get the idea. Assuming there’s enough interest, a responsibly-run trigger warning site could probably become a hobby side business for somebody. This approach also has the important virtue of being immediately doable, with a clear and convincing outcome.

One problem with this approach is that the people who wish to take heed of trigger warnings are also the people most likely to contribute to the database. So they would have to watch the very content they wish to avoid in order to add it to the database. I’d imagine there would be allies willing to help out here — I’d be happy to contribute.. I could also see an informal role for content producers who might contribute a draft warning to the database, for users to amend and publish.

Nonetheless, if the goal is to get the most useful information to the right audience members, then the bottom-up solution is the way to go.