WAM - Guide to reporting gender-based hate speech to Facebook

A while back I shared the result of Women, Action and Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and author Soraya Chemaly's activist coalition to change gender-based hate speech on Facebook.

And now there are some guidelines for us, courtesy of Women, Action and Media:___

For content that glorifies, promotes or makes light of gendered violence:

• First, report it to Facebook using their standard reporting system.
• If the content has been reported and Facebook has declined to remove it, email WAM, and we’ll take further action. Please include any information you have about when and how you reported the content, and what response(s) you’ve received from Facebook.

For content that sexualizes women’s naked bodies, or for content that has been removed that depicts non-sexualized images of women’s breasts:

•  Send your examples to WAM, along with all the information you can provide about when and if you reported the content, and what response(s) you’ve received from Facebook. We won’t be taking further action on these examples immediately, but will be collecting them to show to Facebook as we engage them on this issue of their hypocrisy.

I'd be interested to hear from any Hand Mirror readers that try this out, especially on homegrown misogyny.  WAM's website makes it very clear they are interested in challenging gendered violence, rape and domestic violence apologists - and not at all interested in content promoting consensual BDSM.

It's Time to Change Your (Facebook) Gender

Feminists were pretty pleased when Facebook bowed to user – well, OK, advertiser – pressure last month and promised it would do more to keep violent and misogynistic ads off its pages. According to The New York Times, activists sent more than 5,000 emails to FB’s advertisers and sparked more than 60,000 Tweets. (Or “posts on Twitter” as the NYT calls them). Of course, it’s early days and we’ll have to see what action is taken and how effective it will be.

Now, with that campaign checked off, I have a suggestion for another one. This one takes aim at something possibly just as pernicious, but definitely way more insidious.

Those of you FB users out who are either “FB-Female” or “FB-Male” will almost certainly have noticed it. (NB. I’m treating FB genders as just that, FB genders, not real-world genders; and, yes, FB only offers the binary, but wait up, I'll get to that -- and how to get around it -- at the end.) What I'm talking about are those targeted ads that, once you start paying attention, reinforce some of the most noxious  stereotypes around.

This all started back in May, when one add in particularly really started to bug me.
  

I bitched about it on FB, of course, and was advised to instal an ad blocker, which I did. But that only blocks (most not all) ads in your News Feed, and does nothing about the sponsored ads down the right-panel. Still, I didn’t mind those so much; they’re easier to avert the eyes from and occasionally even slightly relevant. Skinny Spotlight Woman, on the other hand, was always there, front, centre and right at the very top, her torso looking suspiciously like it's about to spawn an alien. Is it supposed to be a rib? (And no, I never ever click, so I did not bring this on myself!)

After Skinny Spotlight Woman disappeared from my Feed, though, I started to pay more attention to the right-hand panel. Yes, there she was again. Just smaller this time. As were myriad other ads telling me what I could do to make myself thinner, sexier, leaner, better dressed. I started tracking them by taking screen shots, and one day, it hit me: wow targeted stereotyping is really quite nasty and insidious. Out in the real world, we might be doing all we can to challenge all those restrictive -isms, we might be turning our eyes from the celebrity diet gossip mag covers at the checkout stand (to the candy), but on FB and elsewhere, the tide is pushing relentlessly in the other direction. 

I got to wondering what kind of crap the “male” version of me might be told to be, to buy, to look like, to aspire to; what kind of things "he" would be gently advised should inspire self-loathing?  And I decided it might be interesting to find out. There are, I know, myriad other things that factor into what kind of person FB’s ads think I am and should be: age, education, location, other stuff I’ve "liked", crap my friends "like" (you know who you are), relationship status and so on. The list is endless and endlessly spooky, and the people who keep warning us about cyber-Big Brother know way more about it than I do. But just so you know: for the purposes of my research, I’m in my early 30s and live in the Bay of Plenty and obviously tend politically feminist/progressive. (Because FB’s terms and conditions state that “you will not provide any false personal information on Facebook”, I’ll neither confirm nor deny any of this, particularly the age part, but I'll just say this: “you are only as old as you feel”. When I signed up, I only gave FB the info I had to give it, so my profile is free of everything that's not mandatory, like "religion", "political views", education, and so on. )

Bottom line, nothing changed for the purposes of this experiment but my "FB gender". (Oh, and I did remove the ad blocker). So, if you're interested, here are the illustrated results of my research, followed at the end by a conclusion with some recommendations.

The DISLIKE button

Content warning: features explicit naming of violent misogyny and rape culture.

Anyone who's spent any time on Facebook knows it's both a great tool for organising and home to revolting displays of rape culture, racism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, disability hate speech....you name the kind of discrimination, Facebook will have it.

Women, Action and Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and author Soraya Chemaly led a coalition which took this on last week, specifically around violence against women and girls, in an open letter to Facebook which encouraged advertisers to pull their content.

Specifically, we are referring to groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about. Pages currently appearing on Facebook include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus, Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich, Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs, Raping your Girlfriend and many, many more.  Images appearing on Facebook include photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up” and “Next time don’t get pregnant."

Within a week, 15 companies had taken up the challenge and fled Facebook. Now Facebook has responded in what looks like a considerable shift from their earlier stance:

In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want.  In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.

The proof will be, as always, in the implementation.  Facebook seem to be saying they will privilege engaging with the large feminist groups in the US around this, which makes me wonder about gender-based hate coming out of other places.  Of course it's all online, but it seems to me that we need good process around reporting and removing any kind of gender-based hate (and other kinds of oppressive hate) for anyone who wants to raise concerns.

Nonetheless, it's a huge coup from the groups involved, and I'd personally love not to feel physically sick at some of the revolting rape culture up on Facebook.  

LIKE.