Being compelled to pay attention to violent struggles doesn't sound to me like a particularly good thing. Nothing wrong with empathizing, donating, doing what you can for the causes you happen to hear about. But in my experience, people who are incapable of ever tuning out violence inevitably fall down radicalization spirals about it. There's just nothing I can meaningfully say or do about most of the violence in the world.

My argument is about restriction, not compulsion.

But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be against Israel and their continued holocaust against the Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.

In general, because school introduced me to it, I read quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-backed economic power struggles, and identifying with other oppressed people across the globe, greatly influencing my politics and turning me into the exact kind of person that my current state considers radical and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.

Can I engage you on this as someone who once shared your view? Not to say I believe my view is better now, but maybe you can learn from my experiences.

Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them.

Specifically people who have been victims of serious assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives. That is really what the restriction of content should be about if anything: helping people avoid things they want to avoid.

The people who have struggled (especially at a young age) with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But often, our community where this behavior is more normalized, is where those people come, even if they don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what violence you faced. However, even with violence, people react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their relationships).

The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily means they will encounter the material in an unsafe environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere, in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons. The world is different when you know police will generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when one has been personally been conducted against you. Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent that state of being, which can leave to bad and convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to understand this if you have children or have seen real pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can give you the empathy to understand this reaction.

It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or imagine at all how other people might be affected by some things. They will not always have your reaction to content which is extreme. I do not agree with prohibition, but do consider that others can have different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot imagine.

Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because for some group of people, at some point, it could set their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these people are already suffering more than the average person. It's about helping them avoid more pain.

Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity through history and the written word (which I believe should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs the very human, memory-provoking visual element.