[Wamvan] Jarrah's post on Facebook Rape Campaign launched by WAM!

Sat May 25 22:06:38 PDT 2013

Thanks for this, Jarrah.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this campaign. Jarrah
answers a lot of possible questions in her post for Gender Focus blog:
http://www.gender-focus.com/2013/05/25/why-im-supporting-the-fbrape-campaign/

Why I'm Supporting the #FBRape Campaign

*by Jarrah Hodge*

*Trigger-Warning for rape jokes, rape threats, misogyny
*

Over the past week there’s been a lot of buzz around the campaign launched
by WAM! <http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/> (Women, Action, &
the Media) to call on prominent companies like Dove and Audible.com to pull
ads from Facebook until the social networking site implements new policies
and enforcement to ban gender-based hate speech. If you weren’t aware just
how big the problem is, WAM! has cataloged some examples of what kind of
content Facebook lets slide (serious trigger-warning for this
link<http://www.womenactionmedia.org/examples-of-gender-based-hate-speech-on-facebook/>).
When I posted the link to examples on Facebook most people commented that
they were shocked and couldn’t even make it through reading all the
horrible examples. The sad thing is that they were not hard to find.

But there is hope, and if we keep pushing, together we can show we are
stronger than Facebook. In the first three days of the campaign over 22,000
tweets (using the #FBrape hashtag) and almost 2000 emails were sent to
advertisers and the message is getting
through<http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/campaign-wins-updates/>.
I’m feeling so motivated and inspired by this campaign and have been
tweeting up a storm myself because I am so tired of having to try and keep
reporting these types of posts individually, with often limited
success<https://twitter.com/sarclarke/status/337954038551298048/photo/1>.
They offend me deeply but they also frighten me. The fact that anyone
thought it was okay to create a Facebook page called “This is Why Indian
Girls are Raped” or joke about “roundhouse kick[ing]” and “chokeslamm[ing]”
a little girl is just horrifying. The fact that Facebook leaps all over
requests to ban pictures of breastfeeding
mothers<http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57578305-71/facebook-actually-sorry-for-banning-breastfeeding-pic/>but
somehow thinks rape jokes don’t violate their community standards is
appalling.

For me, though, this campaign is also personal.

Earlier this year someone on Twitter alerted me to the fact that a
practically-professional Facebook troll was using my headshot as the
profile picture for a really stupid and unsophisticated attempt at satire:
a page supposedly created by a “Christian grad student” (represented by my
picture) warning people against marijuana. The page owner, who had at least
10 accounts I could find under different fake names, had made my picture a
target by posting incendiary information and graphics on the page.

When I found my picture on that page, there were more than 100 vicious,
misogynistic comments on it. Here is just a small selection of the gems:

   - “I’d fuck her in the mouth”
   - “I’d pee in her butt”
   - “I can break the back of your throat”
   - “Honestly, I think she just needs a good fuck”
   - “I agree someone needs to take this bitch to pound town”
   - “Your a fat ugly bitch ;))”
   - “pig face. make up will never cover the shame of your diet”
   - “Virgin! U is ugly if that’s your…regardless your still ugly and I
   want to puke all over your face”
   - “make this bitch fuck some produce…she looks like she can take a
   watermelon straight in the ass…the farmers market the farm and the animals
   all in this bitches ass”
   - “I most smoke allot of pot if I want to fuck this ugly piglet!”
   - “Bitch if that’s your real face please hit the other side with a
   shovel to even yourself out..Thanks oh and go die”

So, this had absolutely nothing to do with me. The commenters didn’t know
who I really was, but it still is hard for me to look at all those
comments  because those people still somehow felt entitled to threaten to
rape the person in that picture, or at least thought that it would be funny
to joke about it.

If you’ve been watching the #FBrape discussion closely you’ll see that some
advertisers have basically responded saying they have nothing to do with
what content Facebook allows and we should all just be reporting things
more. Of course I reported this and a bunch of my friends also helped by
filing their own reports. I was lucky (I guess?) that he had used a photo
that belonged to me so I could claim copyright infringement as well as
harassment. Facebook’s process when I filed a report encouraged me to send
a message to the page owner asking them to take down the picture
voluntarily. I should have known better, but here’s how that exchange went:

Me: This photo is of me and you’re using it without permission. Would you
please take it down? Thanks. Also the headshot that you used initially and
the one of me made to look like the devil.

Troll: But your face is the epitome of an annoying bitch. It wouldn’t have
come up on the google search of ‘feminist bitch’ otherwise.

That was a bit of a scary moment because it became clear I wasn’t a totally
random choice: this guy singled me out because I was a feminist. Facebook
did take the pictures down, thank god, but after that the guy posted this
message from one of his other accounts:

[image: youtube]<http://www.gender-focus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/youtube.jpg>

Yup, that’s a link to my YouTube, and that post did cause a huge influx of
yet more horrible troll-y comments there. I reported it pretty quickly,
again for harassment, and I laid out the whole story in my complaint. That
was three months ago and according to my Facebook support dashboard, my
report is still being reviewed. I also got a direct message from another
(presumably) fake account saying “we coming for you girl. marijuana kills
yo!”

Luckily even the minor level of fight I was putting up seemed to discourage
these guys and I haven’t been their target in that way for a couple of
months, that I know of. But I don’t feel like I have closure. For one, I
know the person or people behind the page are still at it and they’ve used
pictures of different random women to represent themselves. Those women’s
faces are being subjected to the same kind of comments I got and they
probably don’t even know it. As well, I know the problem extends far beyond
this specific case, far beyond me and the other feminist bloggers who’ve
experienced Facebook harassment and silencing tactics (the Facebook Sexism
Tumblr <http://facebooksexism.tumblr.com/> is another great collection of
some of the stuff that’s being put out there every single day).

It makes me really angry. When I found my picture on that Facebook page I
wanted so badly to be able to do something more effective than just
reporting my incident, something that would stop this problem once and for
all. I didn’t have a good solution, but now I believe we can win, with this
strategic, targeted, smart and inspiring campaign from WAM!

Please join me in speaking out against gender-based hate speech on
Facebook. In the open
letter<http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/open-letter-to-facebook/>now
signed on to by organizations and individuals from around the world,
it
states:

In a world in which hundreds of thousands of women are assaulted daily and
where intimate partner violence  remains one of the leading causes of death
for women around the world, it is not possible to sit on the fence.

Visit womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/<http://www.womenactionmedia.org/facebookaction/>and
tell advertisers who use Facebook that it’s time to take a principled
stand.

-- 
---
 Joanna Chiu
www.joannachiu.com <http://www.joannachiu.com%20/>
twitter.com/joannachiu
WAM! Vancouver <http://www.womenactionmedia.org/chapters/vancouver/>
<http://twitter.com/joannachiu>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/wamvan/attachments/20130526/bf2233ff/attachment.html>