Facebook is facing public scrutiny from a coalition of over 50 women’s groups, media organizations and individuals working in prevention of gender-based violence. The group, led by Women, Action and The Media, has sent an open letter to Facebook demanding that they remove images and pages that promote or celebrate gender based violence. The letter makes three basic demands of the social media site:
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Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.
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Effectively train moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
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Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.
The letter highlights a number of Facebook pages that have gone uncensored, including, “Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus, Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich, Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs, [and] Raping your Girlfriend”, as well as images that depict “women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as ‘This bitch didn’t know when to shut up’ and ‘Next time don’t get pregnant’.”
For its part the Facebook Community Standards page states, “The conversation that happens on Facebook – and the opinions expressed here – mirror the diversity of the people using Facebook.” Facebook also says it “protects expression that meets the community standards outlined on this page.”
The site will, however, remove content that violates any of its 10 “community standards” which include violence and threats, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic content, nudity and pornography. Despite what seems to be an obvious breach of pretty much all of these standards, Facebook moderators have allowed numerous pages focused on violence against women to exist even after they have been reported by users.
Facebook also has a habit of removing content with considerably less demeaning subject matter. Such as:
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An image of two men kissing being used to promote a Spanish art project.
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Images of mothers breastfeeding.
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Images of a newborn baby with a rare birth defect.
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Images of a breast cancer survivor’s post-mastectomy tattoo.
Since Facebook doesn’t appear to take this issue seriously, the authors of this open letter are encouraging social media users to call on advertisers who appear on these pages and near these images to withdraw their advertising from Facebook until the pages are taken down. Organizers of the campaign are encouraging users to tweet at advertisers using the twitter hashtag #FBrape to notify them that their ads appear next this questionable content.
Two advertisers, Nissan UK and WebHost, agreed to pull their advertising just one day after the open letter and call to action were released. Many others, including Zipcar, American Express and Vistaprint, have responded expressing concern and indicating they would look into the issue.
[cite url=] Women, Action and the Media
image: Flickr - Jay Cameron