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

Tue May 28 14:10:24 PDT 2013

Hi yes, here you go!
http://www.womenactionmedia.org/2013/05/03/new-research-on-canadian-feminist-blogosphere/

I'm back in Vancouver by the way! Will be announcing our next even soon.
Stay tuned.

Joanna

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 4:15 AM, Dom Nasilowski <stompingdom at yahoo.ca>wrote:

> 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! <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>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
---
 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>
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