Facebook's attempts to regulate the content on its site to make it the Disneyland of the Internet -- a pleasant and civil destination to while away the day while hopefully dropping some cash -- are almost always controversial. When it bans breast-feeding photos because they include nudity, people get upset. When it fails to ban photos of women beaten up or lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs with "humorous" captions such as, "Next time, don't get pregnant," people also get upset.
Welcome to the Internet, where, much like the real world, people say and do horrible things that some people find funny and others want eradicated from existence. Facebook as a host of some of that content has the unenviable role of deciding what stays and what doesn't. Facebook has long argued that its policy of real names and identities will have a "civilizing" effect on the content found on its site. However, that doesn't always work, so it has back-up systems including users flagging content as objectionable and an outsourced team of people who go through that flagged content to remove it when appropriate. That doesn't always satisfy users either, though.
The latest dust-up for Facebook is over "gender-based hate speech," or, in layman's terms, rape jokes, raising the question once again, who gets to decide what we see on the Internet?
Activist group Women, Action, & The Media [WAM] found many examples of nasty visual jokes on Facebook that it wanted removed. When members of the group flagged some of them, such as a photo of a woman bleeding from the head with the caption, "I like her for her brains," it got reports back from Facebook that the photo had been reviewed and okayed. Rather than continue to harass Facebook -- as has been done with effort but success in the past -- the group turned on Facebook advertisers.
WAM organized an #FBrape-hashtagged protest against the companies whose ads were appearing next to the photos around Facebook, including Dove, Audible, Nissan and others. This involved numerous comments on those companies' Facebook pages first asking them to pull their Facebook ad campaigns and then, if they failed to do so, accusing them of supporting rape. Comments on Dove's page are typical, with the majority lashing out at the "Inner Beauty"-promoting company for not pulling its ad dollars from Facebook as a result of the objectionable content on the site. There were a few dissenters such as this one, "I will continue to purchase Dove products as I fail to see how dove is supporting rape as so many people are claiming," she wrote. "[A]s a blogger owner, I know that once you buy advertising space, you can not pull it if you prepaid for it, and the ads on the side sometimes aren't even something you paid for."
Still, as documented by the New York Times, some companies caved. Nissan, which targets men in the 30-34 age range group, had ads juxtaposed with the rape jokes which apparently target the same group. A spokesperson told the NYT that it was pulling its ads until Facebook was able to resolve the problem:
While more than a dozen smaller advertisers like Down Easy Brewing and eReader Utopia had agreed by Tuesday to remove their ads from Facebook, other major advertisers, including Zappos, Dove and American Express stopped short of withdrawing their ads. Those companies did, however, issue responses through Facebook, e-mail or Twitter that they did not condone violence against women.
Ironically, WAM now offers the easiest way to find the jokes and photos it was offended by. They've posted them all as documentation on their website.
Facebook caved to the pressure and posted a mea culpa on Tuesday that addresses the difficult task the company faces in regulating speech while still supporting open dialogue. What one person finds offensive, another finds funny. "We’ve also found that posting insensitive or cruel content often results in many more people denouncing it than supporting it on Facebook," write Marne Levine, VP of Public Policy at Facebook. "That being said, we realize that our defense of freedom of expression should never be interpreted as license to bully, harass, abuse or threaten violence."
As Sam Biddle at Valley Wag notes, Facebook doesn't actually say it's going to ban rape jokes, but does imply it's going to revisit training for its censorship team and that it will invite "representatives of the women Everyday Sexism to join the less formal communication channels" about what's allowed and not allowed on the site.
Not everyone is cheering about Facebook's new commitment to crack down on rape jokes. Asking corporate behemoths to make decisions about what kind of speech should and shouldn't be allowed on their sites is difficult territory; the same people asking Facebook to get rid of rape jokes would likely be on the bandwagon for getting Facebook to open the floodgates for breastfeeding photos, after all.
Jillian York, director of free expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says she understands the movement to make Facebook anti-hate speech policies apply to different groups equally, but doesn't think Facebook should be in the role of setting those policies at all.
"[B]ut ultimately, I have a problem with those policies on the whole," she says by email. " I think that Facebook does an incredibly poor job of moderating content as it is (for example, they require 'real names' yet there are thousands of Santa Clauses on any given day), and I'd much rather see them arbitrate speech only when required to do so by law."
(I actually found fewer than 100 Santa Clauses, but it is May after all.)
I asked York if there are any easy lines to be drawn here as to when FB should be intervening and when it shouldn't.
"So no - there are no easy lines to draw, which is why Facebook is the wrong people to try to draw them. At the very least, if they are going to draw those lines, they should be completely transparent about what their procedures actually are," says York.
From this recent exercise, the procedure appears to be that they will draw the line when advertisers start complaining to them.
