How to use Twitter’s content warnings when sharing sensitive images

As Russia’s conflict with Ukraine continues, horrific photographs are beginning to emerge of the civilian casualties of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Pictures of our bodies mendacity within the streets or inside shelled-out properties have been broadly shared on Twitter, along with being printed in main information shops.

When shared sensitively, such photographs can shed new gentle on the horrors of conflict and provoke help for the individuals who want it. They’ll additionally present essential contributions towards documenting what’s occurring in battle areas. However as fact-checking and open-source intelligence group Bellingcat notes, repeated publicity to such graphic imagery can contribute to a way of secondary trauma. Poynter argues these photographs must be shared with care, and the Nationwide Affiliation of Hispanic Journalists beforehand described the choice of The Related Press to share a delicate picture through its Twitter feed as “exploitative and dehumanizing.”

One compromise is to make use of a not too long ago launched Twitter function that permits you to tag delicate imagery, which hides it behind a warning about its content material. Right here’s methods to use it:

• Add a photograph or video as you’d usually.
• On cell, faucet anyplace on the photograph or video to open its enhancing menu. The paintbrush icon on the underside proper does the identical factor. On the net, you should utilize the edit button on the underside proper of a picture.
• From this enhancing menu, faucet the flag icon on the underside proper on cell or prime proper on the internet.
• Choose which content material warning finest describes the imagery: Nudity, Violence, or Delicate. Twitter permits you to choose a couple of class at a time. Choose Accomplished on cell.
• Choose Save from the highest proper of the enhancing menu.
• Publish the tweet.

There’s no easy reply for a way and when photographs depicting the horrors of conflict must be used. However content material warnings like these — which have lengthy been utilized in different mediums like TV to warn when reviews include upsetting content material — can assist viewers put together themselves for what they’re about to see.

Please observe that there’s additionally some imagery that Twitter deems too excessive to be allowed on its platform in any respect. Its help web page notes that it doesn’t allow “photographs or movies the place a fairly identifiable particular person is clearly deceased.” It additionally prohibits the sharing of photographs or movies the place persons are proven dying or the place photographs are shared for “sadistic functions.”