this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Any kind of tag you use to convey "sensitive content that may be offensive" will always become a meme. That's how human nature works and history proves it over and over.
Examples abound. Skulls and cross bones, the nuclear / atomic symbol, X ratings becoming XXX tags in porno titles, Parental Advisory Explicit Content .... this list keeps going on the closer you look. If a symbol, or a meme, is used to denote a warning, it will be co-opted by a subset of folks who will use it in ironic fashion. NSFW tags, "trigger warning" - all of these in the end are doomed from the very start to, at least in part, fail and have the exact opposite effect.
There's an interesting problem for nuclear researchers these days: how do you label a thing as dangerous in such a way that societies in ten thousand years will still recognize what it means? Because some of the shit they're toying with will be. They gotta think about it. Like even today the image of a skull means something very different depending on the culture that image is from.