I don't mind the warnings so much. I put content warnings on the top of my articles when my articles deal with violence or trauma. I think that's just an okay courtesy.

What I object to is when content warnings turn into censorship.

Recently, for example, Prism & Pen established a presence on the Mastodon social media platform, and then I started promoting all my Medium stories there too.

Since I primarily editorialize about LGBTQ equality issues, I often comment on unpleasant news stories.

I was quite surprised to find that a small minority of Mastodon users became furious with me because I refused to use Mastodon's trigger-warning tool.

Apparently, if you flag a post with that tool, then the post appears greyed-out, unreadable unless someone explicitly opts in to see it sight unseen.

A small minority of users on Mastodon became fiercely angry with me because they had to see the titles of my stories in their feeds. I explained that if they actually went to read my stories, they would find appropriate content warning at the top of every story that needs a content warning.

But that wasn't enough for them. They don't even want to see the titles of the stories.

Their reaction is, of course, absurd — counterproductive to any kind of serious public discourse.

Some of them continue to scream at me when I post, in a sort of shoot-the-messenger madness.

They could simply block my account, and then they would never see another one of my posts, but they seem to be on a crusade to sanitize public discourse to their milquetoast preference. It's very very very very weird.

It's like they're misdirecting their anger from people who do terrible things to people who write about those things in an attempt to foster positive change.