Several months ago, you may recall, feminist activists got Facebook to agree to remove blatant sexist hate speech from its site — much to the chagrin of many Men’s Rights Activists, like Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who declared, in a post filled with alarmist rhetoric, that “feminist ideologues are co-opting Facebook, and they will root out any and all opposition to their worldview.” AVFM’s John Hembling, meanwhile, denounced the feminist activists as “fascists.”
Ever since then, Men’s Rights activists have been playing a game of “gotcha” with Facebook, trying to prove that the hate-speech monitors there only care about misogynist hate speech, and don’t actually care about hate speech directed at men. Every few days, it seems, there is a new thread in the Men’s Rights subreddit purporting to document this alleged “double standard.”
Ten days ago, for example, a Men’s Rights Redditor called dizzy_j got nearly 400 upvotes for a post complaining that “I reported three anti-men Facebook pages for gender-based hate speech today. Only one was removed.” Six days ago, DerDietrich got 580 upvotes for submitting this supposed evidence of a double standard. Trouble is, you can’t actually prove a double standard with a handful of examples.
But I would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis, which also fits the anecdotal data provided thus far by the MRAs, and provide an additional piece of anecdotal evidence that supports my theory and undercuts theirs.
My hypothesis is that Facebook is shitty at recognizing and dealing with hate speech and harassment, no matter whom it’s aimed at.
My evidence for this? Well, yesterday bloggers at Skepchick noticed a Facebook page targeting a specific feminist/skeptic blogger and asking if she “should … be murdered.” The anonymous poster — who identified her by name and posted pictures of her on the page — coyly avoided a literal call for murder, writing instead:
We should not ever break the law. Rather, we should advocate , through lawful land constitutional processes, to have the law changed so that it is legal to kill [name redacted by DF]. Alternatively, we should, where legal, request that [name redacted by DF] kill herself. Relevant laws should be changed so that suicide, and advocating suicide, is legal.
The Skepchick bloggers reported the page to Facebook for its obvious violations of the site’s harassment policies.
And they received this reply from Facebook (I’ve covered up the blogger’s name):
I think it’s fair to say that if Facebook can’t recognize a page calling for the literal murder of someone as harassment there is something very wrong with its system for dealing with harassment and hate speech.
The page has since been taken down, though it’s not clear if it was removed by Facebook or by the original anonymous Facebooker.
Get your act together, Facebook.
sarahliz – how cool does it get where you live?
<3 cories!
Yo, Argenti, guess what we dug up while we were trying to dig a cactus garden?
The exact opposite: A small but functional fish pond. It is about 225 gallons, 1.5 feet deep. What should we put in it?
The page may have been removed from people giving feedback on the report when they were told that it didn’t violate standards. This would be the best way (In my experience anyway)to get something removed after hundreds of failed attempts at getting bad stuff removed. I encountered a photo of a fully nude, legs wide open female that Face Book kept saying didn’t violate their standards on pornography ( It was all nipples and vagina-pornographic) I had contacted all of the anti- porn pages and my friends and hundreds of reports later, the photo remained. I called tech support about it and was told that there are not real people reviewing the reports. They use computers. They only review with real people when there are feedback messages left through the report results. Finally after a while ( too long for me) they revised their decision. We should all create a folder in our bookmarks for report pages of harassing, hate speech and whatever else you may be fighting, bookmark, report and check back. Always leave feedback when they come back with that response and tell them to use humans instead of computers!!
Frogs!! I love frogs!
You’ll need some fish I presume to maintain water quality, but Frogs!
Where are you? Outdoor cactī means it won’t freeze the pond? Koi are the standard of course, if you do anything else you’ll want a fountian or such to break the surface and keep to oxygen carbon dioxide exchange going, but if it’ll stay 65~85 and no predators, you can put in just about anything that isn’t particularly fussy
As far as frogs go, the usual approach is very “if you build it, they will come” (and, as I am listening to the frogs in my neighbors was once a pool…it’s true, they will) I’d be very careful about introducing them because of the risk of them getting bored and going elsewhere, pick ones that can’ the come invasive.
And my first thought for “guess what we found”? “Bricks”, because pecunoum’s backyard garden is full of them.
Also, the evaporation rate in cactus country…well, I’m guessing the cost of keeping it full is why it was buried in the first place.
Frogs!!
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e9/36/ad/e936adadf4281ac2682bea2210fea8c2.jpg
Creating more frogs!!
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/38/b5/d8/38b5d8bdc88f3ae59f548cc6a4018143.jpg
katz, Are you in the area around Pasadena? A friend of mine there had an outside fish pond and gave up on it because it turned into a fast food restaurant for raccoons.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Yep.
I was actually a moderator on Gaia Online for several years. We were largely unpaid, except for gifts at Christmas, and on site gold that was paid in response to what we did (and now and then a contest for an extremely rare item). After about a year, it seriously didn’t take me more than a minute to judge 90% of what I saw – but the disgusting images (the trolls would post fifty gross images in a row, and we’d have to clean them all up) took it’s toll. There are times I miss feeling that involved in a community, but I don’t miss the grossosity.
What does confuse me is even if we resign ourselves to the they’re-companies-they’re-only-there-to-make-money-for-their-owners attitude, wouldn’t it make more sense to be a little more focused on deleting things that could get them sued or in papers (discussions of whether someone should be killed) and a little less on things that couldn’t (nipples and such)?
The bans on maps of Turkish Kurdistan/criticism of Ataturk show that they’re very willing to co-operate with stupid laws to stay in the clear, so why not take a delete-first-ask-questions-later policy on things that look like they could be about killing or harassing a person or group of people? It’s not as if any real bad publicity could come out of it – who is going to complain to the media that their page calling for race war or discussing whether a writer should be killed was suppressed by a private organisation?
Having a particularly inarticulate day today – was not trying to imply that laws against death threats are stupid, was trying to point out that if you’re going to instadelete something as arguable-for as Ataturk criticism you may as well be as quick on the delete button trying to avoid having Facey break far more sensible laws about not harassing people and such.
Interesting article, lowquacks – thanks for the link!
So apparently, Facebook will allow hate speech in the context of a joke. Great. That pretty much allows every dirtbag and abuser to post horrifying crap, slut pages and rape how-tos and photos of battered women, as long as they’re presented as cutesy memes. Some of these pages have hundreds of thousands of likes. For the fuck of shit, what is wrong with these people, that they can view rape and misogyny so casually and even laugh at it? Why is there such an empathy deficit?
I guess it’s not surprising, given that Zuckerberg’s first idea for a social networking site was to post photos of women next to farm animals and have his friends rate them. Friendster also got started as a way for its founder, Jonathan Abrams, to scroll through his friends’ address books looking for hot women. It seems like the dots connect pretty directly between social network sites and objectification of women. The problem is that these sites make it so easy to garner widespread support for shitty, horrendous thoughts, and then it starts to seem like the norm.
On any given issue, it can be generally assumed that Facebook is incompetent.
Unfortunately police don’t tend to take these things very seriously either. I’m so tired of the internet not be regulated when it comes to threats and harassment. Those things are not protected speech, you do not have this right, you should get in actual trouble for it.
A dummy account of mine was banned within a few hours with maybe one or two users reporting it for calling out the misogyny of a user who created a page that posted women’s photos and names, calling them sluts, and mocking them mercilessly. The page they created took an actual army of tumblr feminists reporting it to get it taken down. Apparently calling someone a slut isn’t a big deal but you better not call them a misogynist or your account will get banned! An online friend who knows the person just alerted me today that the same woman was just arrested for the creation of child porn. I know that getting her in trouble on FB would not have prevented it and that none of us could have known she would do this because she was just a gross slut shamer and harasser, but it is just like, “I told you this person was awful and you banned me for it.” I wish people would start taking warning signs of disgusting, unempathetic behavior more seriously.
I think this is complete bullshit to be honest. Not the part that they mistreat underpaid workers, I don’t doubt that for a second, but that you have to pick and choose what is worth reporting because facebook can’t be assed to hire enough people. That’s such nonsense. I can’t stand these companies that want to reap all this profit while taking no responsibility. I really wish these laws that protect companies like facebook would have stricter rules regarding thie responsibility to take reports of law violations, threats, and harassment seriously, removing them and reporting them to the police. I understand that they cannot be held accountable for individually approving each post (and I’m livid at abusive websites who protect themselves using that defense when they actually do approve each post), but when it’s being reported it needs to be actually considered for more than a split second and people need to start being penalized for violating what would be against the law if people witnessed it happening on the street.
Urgh. I reported a very, very inappropriate picture (IE: not legal) image that was being spamposted by various pages. Facebook also decided it didn’t violate community standards. Good to know that implied child rape doesn’t rustle your jimmies, Facebook.
I completely agree that it has nothing to do with any feminist “double standard” conspiracy.
Thought you were talking about Reddit for a moment there…
Reminds me of the working bee daughter#2 organised for her backyard. Wanted a couple of small garden beds and to “do something” about her horrible lawn. We soon found out the reason for the horrible lawn. Every time we put a spade or a fork in when creating her garden beds, we came up with huge chunks of concrete or bricks or building debris of various kinds.
The lawn had about 2 inches of real live soil to grow in. Most of it was rubble.
Sounds like the back yard of every place I’ve lived in, mildlymagnificent. Though here it’s less building rubble than solid clay.
It was taken down after there were enough reports to elevate to an actual human reading the problem. There are simply too many people using Facebook and too many people submitting complaints (the vast majority of which are trivial) for anything other than a computer algorithm to handle it in the first instance. To say that Facebook thought it was fine or somehow endorses it purely because it slipped passed their automated system for 24 hours is just wrong, and total misinformation.
This is one of the reasons that it enrages me that the report tool is so often used just to silence discussion. As if the really horrific things aren’t bad enough, they then have to waste time reading through someone saying “maybe Jesus didn’t exist at all?” because, hey, that’s the real abuse here! I mean, sure, it provides jobs and that’s great, jobs are a good thing, but what a job… switching between absolute horror, and the very definition of first world problems.
I wonder what the derogatory term is for someone who oppresses rich first worlders by thinking that it’s appalling to pay someone $1 an hour? Is it just communist?
The MRM? They managed to get enough people whining about feminazi fascism that some of them would probably try to get media attention for it.
“They tried to stop me threatening to murder teenagers for rejecting my advances! What has the world come to that such fascism is the norm!?”
And fox news would publish, favourably.
Katz — you can screen over the pond to prevent raccoon buffet. Except I’m sure raccoons would find a way around it. If they’re a serious risk, I’d just fill it and plant it and see what shows up (e.g. frogs!)
What gets me? FB used to be useful. I had a college account when they first launched and by all the gods was it lovely to select which courses you were in and be able to go “hey, I missed the homework, what was it?”
When was this? I remember it being less useless when I first made my account there, back in the mists of 2007, but useful? I don’t remember that.
Luckily we have sites like coursera now… ok, they don’t let you get the homework for your realworld classes, but they’re good for onlineworld class homeworks.
2003-2004, I don’t remember if it was before or after Christmas break, but it was my freshman year.