Censorship and "NSFW" on social networks

Most social networks implement some degree of censorship. It kind of has to be there - the alternative is for the worst dregs of humanity to fill your feeds with things you really don't want to know about. The content moderator job is one of the world's worst, but so far, nobody's found a better way.

The newest social network, Ello, has just implemented the first beta of their "NSFW" filter. It's a nice start (much better than Facebook's approach of arbitrarily censoring things), but it does come with a big problem: Not everyone agrees on what they do or don't want to see in their feeds.

For example: I think nudity is perfectly OK, but I'd rather not see sexual content or drug use, and I find violence offensive. There are other people who are quite happy to see guns, gore and drugs, but will freak out at the sight of a naked couple.

May I, as an engineer and fellow software developer, offer a suggestion to any social networks looking to get this right:

When I upload an image, I'd like an option "This post contains: []nudity []drug use []violence []sexuality etc.". Offering per-post granularity would be a lot more useful than a "flag my entire profile because two posts might offend some people" option.

In my personal preferences, I'd like an option "Hide images by default if they are flagged as []nudity []drug etc."

When I'm about to log in, I'd like the option to set one of two cookies: "Hide all sensitive content for this session" and "Hide all multimedia for this session". (The former is for when I'm at the office. The latter is for when I'm on a lousy 100kbps connection that bogs down on inline images - a surprisingly common problem among my sailing and back-country friends.)

I realize that community policing of whether users are flagging their posts correctly will be an ongoing issue... but let's get the framework right up front, and save the rest for "future Ello's problem" as we say around here.

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