trigger: rape culture

[alexseanchai]

Dear Facebook:

Your Terms of Service (accessed 12 Nov 2011) say:

You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Pages that promote rape culture? They bully, intimidate, and harass every female Facebook user, most if not all the non-binary Facebook users, and some of the male Facebook users. They are hateful and threatening, and some of them are pornographic. They incite violence.

GET THEM THE FUCK OFF YOUR SERVERS.

Comments

[timeasmymeasure]

Yeah, I've seen enough pages like the Occupy Vaginas and No Means Yes pages to not have any trust in Facebook. I don't know if these groups/pages are still active, hopefully the blogosphere's occasional specific outrage gets them offline. Point is, it usually takes our very pointed offense rather than them doing the job outlined in their TOS.

[alexseanchai]

They deleted some of the ones we threw a fit about but not all of them. And according to Facebook as relayed by the BBC, tag it 'humorous' or 'satire' and it's clear to stay.

I just can't even.

[synecdochic]

It's really, really, really hard to draw the line between what's just tasteless and what's a ToS violation, and it takes a lot of careful reading, thinking, and cultural context. With a site like FB, with hundreds of millions of users and less than a dozen (last time I heard, which was like four years ago, which is a lifetime and they've probably expanded) ToS people, they aren't going to be able to spend more than a minute and a half making a decision on any one particular report.

There's a reason DW's abuse policy is literally "if we don't have a court order or a DMCA complaint it doesn't come down" (with a few exceptions for "okay, no, this is blatant enough, directed at a single person, and exists only for harassment") -- it's the only way a small abuse desk can stay sane. FB goes a lot further than that, and their abuse policy is weirdly inconsistent from the outside, but having been there done that, I'm guessing the worst of the inconsistency comes from the sheer volume.

(There's also a very complex set of legal issues to consider when it comes to removing user-generated material on a site. FB is big enough to buy legislation, but we-at-LJ always had to worry; we were big enough to get attention for it but too small to have the resources to fight a lawsuit.)

I think stuff like that is a sad, awful commentary on humanity and contemporary first-world culture, but I don't blame Facebook for it.

[alexseanchai]

Points conceded. I still don't like it and I'm not going to figure out how to unsign the petition to take the pages down, but your points are well made.

[synecdochic]

Oh, no, I don't like it either (and if FB is anything like every other abuse desk I've ever seen ever, petitions are preferred to individual complaints, because they can be dealt with en masse instead of using time to reply to each person who writes in directly).

But honestly, I will never, ever, ever fault an online service provider's abuse desk for defaulting on the side of not removing something legal-but-awful, no matter how awful it is, as long as it's not awful towards a specific person. Awfulness-in-general is, well, awful, but once you start making those judgement calls, you have to work out a way to be consistent on them -- inconsistency is the worst, both because it sends a mixed message to the people who are using the service and because it is impossible to train your people for. If you don't have a bright line test, you're going to be fucked down the road.

(I also think that unless you get a howling screaming mob of people yelling at you for taking something down and for not taking something down at least once a year, your policies are not good enough.)

[alexseanchai]

*nods*