One of the biggest buzzes these days is the campaign against the retention of content on Facebook that trivializes and makes light of hate speech, domestic violence, sexual assault and similar offenses, that have feminists, activists, advertisers and general conscientious objectors all over the Internet up in arms.
Activists started a weeklong campaign that eventually goaded Facebook into action, ramping up its security measures against that kind of content. Some 15 advertisers have withdrawn their business from the site, disgusted with some of the content Facebook allows to stay up on their website, masquerading as “humour.”
At first, when I heard about the campaign, I thought little of it. After all, for every misogynistic “funny” picture trivializing domestic abuse you can find on the “social” network, there’s an equivalent anti-male “joke” picture condoning violence against males floating around on there too – and nobody seemed to have too much of a problem with that.
I’m loath to sound callous, but if I ever see something that offends me, I just click the little “X” in upper right-hand corner of the screen. Nobody was forcing me to look at whatever it was that offended me, and to be honest it’s not like I go around looking for crude, sexist humor when I’m on the internet. If it was really egregious (which in some cases it was), I’d report it, and before too long it’d be taken down – no big deal.
However, Facebook was, and in my opinion still is, open season as far as offensive content goes – even after their purported policy revisions.
I condone and congratulate its administrators for removing some genuinely disgusting material, but they’ve got a long way to go before they’re free of the hateful material it allowed, and continues to allow to proliferate.
Even now, after their policy revision and summary takedown of all kinds of pictures making light of spousal abuse and sexual assault, there’s a mother load of hate speech, and discriminatory trash that’s still up.
Sure, those pictures that everyone’s talking about were taken down, but how effective can this new content policy of theirs be, when a multitude of common interest groups with names like “I hate men” with a slogan that reads: “Men are the devil and need to be purged,” and “#%*& You, Israel” with a representative thumbnail pictures depicting a burning Israeli flag are still up?
How effective are the new policies when Facebook’s response to me flagging the above groups as inappropriate is a polite e-mail telling me they didn’t do anything, because apparently racism and sexism against particular groups is okay and for some strange reason, doesn’t constitute as a violation of policy?
I guess taste and the definition of “hate speech” are still matters of discretion on Facebook.
