I’m an administrator of a page who
addresses women’s issues all around the world with a focus on sexual violence.
Since I signed up for this position I experienced some unacceptable behaviour
from Facebook.
Some time ago, I started to report
pages and pictures on Facebook who clearly promoted rape, child abuse and
violence towards women. I was really surprised and shocked after finding out
Facebook didn’t remove some of the reported pictures and claimed they did not
have abusive content. And I was even more surprised after Facebook decided to
allow some abusive pages to exist under the name of ‘controversial humour. For
example: the page ‘raping babies is funny’.
After I started to report some
content Facebook started blocking me. At first it was a couple of hours, days
and then I was blocked the first time for one month. The reason given by
Facebook was a post that included nudity which I honestly never posted on my
page. The second time I was blocked for 30 days it was because I posted a link
to a photography project that included some nudity. I admit, I was violating
the terms of the social network that time, but 30 days seemed overrated in
contrast to the many abusive pictures I reported before and did not get removed.
Two weeks ago, half of my page was
deleted: all private messages, every post from the last 6 weeks, a great amount
of wall posts by fans, and more than 500 pictures (200 timeline pictures which
did not violate any terms and album of more than 300 pictures of women from
different cultures all around the world in traditional clothing which also
didn’t violate any terms).
I contacted Facebook. Their
response: ‘We found some posts which included URLs previously marked as abusive
which caused them to be deleted. (…),’ claiming the content was restored. But none
of the content was restored and the response suggests that everything that gets
reported gets automatically deleted. If that was the case Facebook wouldn’t be
a contribution to the growing rape culture.
I asked for a better explanation.
Their new response: ‘Nothing has been removed from the page in recent days.’ I
explained this clearly was not the case and up till now I got no real
explanation for what happened. After contacting Facebook, I was blocked again
for 30 days. This time, no reason was given.
A couple of days ago I received a
message from a supported of the page asking why he was blocked. Looking at the
ban list, I found out many pages that support us, and many people who often
comment on our posts were put on that list.
It is clear to me that Facebook
doesn’t appreciate people who actively report disturbing content, confronting
them with their policy and try to silence them by making them incapable of being
active on the social networksite.
After posting the news article &
video with Trista’s story yesterday I got a
lot of feedback from other female admins of pages about women’s issues
who experienced the same as her: death threats of bullies or trolls and being
blocked by Facebook because of reporting abusive content and exposing the
contribution of Facebook to the rape culture.
With this blog I want to make a call
to other feminist admins and collect similar stories. Are you an admin of a
page promoting women’s rights, try to diminish the large content of abusive
content towards women and children on Facebook and get censored for it by the
Facebook's head quarter? Send us your story/ experiences and we will post it on
this blogspot in order to expose Facebook’s real policy and strategy.
Or you not an admin but experiencing exactly the same? Feel also welcome to share your story.
If you receive any death threats
make sure to contact your local police office.
Stay safe & strong!
K.
No comments:
Post a Comment