What is NSFW?
NSFW stands for "Not Safe For Work." It's a misleading slang used around the Internet to indicate that a post or link contains something sexual that your boss wouldn't like to catch you seeing in your workplace. The opposite label is SFW (Safe For Work).
Reddit is a social media that officially uses the term in its user interface.
NSFW doesn't mean something isn't safe for children. For example, gambling, drug abuse, and even swear words may be considered unsafe for children, but not NSFW. It's also unclear where violence enters in this scheme. For the record, Tumblr lets you flag violent and sexual content with separate labels, and Bluesky has 3 different levels of "adult content." I'm not sure, but I think it's only Reddit that sponsors this term.
Beyond NSFW, NSFL (Not Safe For Life) refers to content that may be traumatizing for life, such as videos that depict [redacted] and [redacted].
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