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

Tue May 28 13:15:09 PDT 2013

Hi Joanna,

Would you mind sending me the pdf/link with the giant list of feminist blogs? I somehow deleted it before having looked through the entire list. What a great resource!!!

Thanks,
Dom

________________________________
 From: Joanna Chiu <chiu.joanna5 at gmail.com>
To: wamvan <wamvan at lists.resist.ca> 
Sent: Saturday, May 25, 2013 10:06:38 PM
Subject: [Wamvan] Jarrah's post on Facebook Rape Campaign launched by WAM!

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! (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). 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. 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. 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 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:
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 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 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/ and tell advertisers who use Facebook that it’s time to take a principled stand. 

-- 

---
Joanna Chiu 
www.joannachiu.com      
twitter.com/joannachiu      

WAM! Vancouver 

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