Accessibility Filters
Acessibility has always been one of Teia's core values: Our goal is to make Teia a safe and comfortable place for everyone. On the other hand, artistic freedom is extremely important for any artist platform, of course. While Teia wants to be a platform for all art forms, including ones that incorporate flashing animations, sexual depictions and violence, we want to give users the option to hide these kinds of content that can cause harm and distress to some people.
Here is what we came up with:
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While minting, artists are asked to use the options for NSFW and Photosensitive content properly. Per default, pieces classified as NSFW will be displayed with a blur filter applied, PHOTOSENSITIVE pieces additionally get dimmed to counter the flickering animation.
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Users can turn the filtering of NSFW and/or PHOTOSENSITIVE on or off in the user config page. These settings will be stored locally in your browser, so your browser will remember your choice.
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Additionally, Teia's copyminting Team will be able to manually add pieces to both categories if needed. Pieces with the tag "nsfw" are also be automatically added to the NSFW category and can be removed from that classification if needed.
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If you are unsure how to classify your pieces or want to add an old piece of yours to one of the accessibility categories, get in touch with the content team on Teia's discord!
We are aware that blurring pieces in Teia's feeds and overview pages reduces the visibility of said pieces and we will try to counter this by offering dedicated NSFW/PHOTOSENSITIVE feeds, dedicated shill channels on discord and we will keep on looking for more ways to promote them.
- NSFW (=Not Safe for work) for our purposes means crass and very (!) sexual imagery and depictions of violence or gore, especially content that can be considered trauma-triggering. While of course these topics are an important part of the human experience and therefore important to artistic expression, we want to make sure that people who have experienced trauma can use Teia safely.
- PHOTOSENSITIVE means artworks that that are rapidly flashing, high contrast with vibrant colouration, pieces with rhythmic or unsettling movement, and vibrating or undulating visuals. These types of animations can potentially cause pain, disorientation, injury, even death for those with conditions aggravated by certain visual stimuli. Conditions include Epilepsy, Migraine, Sensory Processing, Acquired or Traumatic Brain Injury (ABI/TBI), and Vertigo.
For Artists whose main pages get heavily blurred by this policy, we implemented a way to create more user friendly profile links that don't blur your pieces per default but will first ask the visitor to confirm that they are fine with viewing your profile without blur. For example NSFW artists can use this modified link in their linktree or whenever linking to their Teia profile.
Simply put "?yolo" at the end of your profile link like this: https://teia.art/elbi?yolo
Whenever artworks are removed or obscured from view there should be the ability to appeal and discuss the reasons a decision was applied. Censoring in any fashion is inexact, no matter how detailed the clarifications have been made. The mods in Teia are very aware of their power in these respects and attempt to discuss any cases that are tricky, both with this accessibility filtering and with copyright issues. The criteria for applying filters is in constant discussion. Some things are relatively easy, especially when laws dictate it - we don't tolerate the depiction or strong implication of underage sexual behaviour. This will result in an account ban, as will depictions of overt racism and bigotry. At the same time, we don't want to reject artists whose work is of a sexual nature, or delves into areas of violence, horror and dark elements of life. If you are creating work like this, you probably have some idea of when it might raise the eyebrows of moderators. We generally like to consider what a shoulder-surfer in a public space would think (bus, library, workplace, school for example). Some examples where we would apply filtering might include graphic depictions of violence with death, severe mutilation etc, especially if (but not constrained to) realistic. Overt displays of sexual acts and graphic depictions of genitals also may warrant filtering. Nudity itself is not considered nsfw. In the case of deciding on photosensitive filtering, we initially looked to 3rd party research that shows the various types of movement, flashing etc that can cause distress. This includes certain ranges of frequency of flashing along with movement of high contrast shapes - gifs and movies being the main types of works that would include these elements.