A friend of mine has been reporting for weeks the use of her photos from her private FB page on random profiles that promote bullying, homophobia and in one instance paedophilia. These photos are of her, her wedding and even her son and FB have done nothing – not even responded to her.

Their censorship policies are too hit and miss and not enforced accurately but it seems they don’t want to learn from the mistakes that keep being made.

Yes, yes I do.

Facebook is a piece of slag in the Ozymandias shit-dump of history. In ten years noone will admit ever going there.

Facebook has clearly decided that they are the arbiter of their user’s behavior on many levels. Whiz in their pool and you’re out of there.

Probably better than giving them a lot of page views and ad impressions as this seems to be doing. There’s something hilarious about people protesting what facebook does by using it even more.

As a webmaster myself, I get how hard it is to deal with the sort of volume YouTube and Facebook have. It’s a systemic nightmare. But I do think there are solutions.

For instance, I would like a “flag as non-objectionable” button added. If a certain threshold of users clicked it, the video would be re-reviewed or just go back to being available. I’ve recommended this to YouTube, but naturally never got a response.

It’s ridiculous.

This seems to be yet another extension of the same to me. I agree wholeheartedly that they shouldn’t remove material (which is probably completely inoffensive to most people) at the request of one.

If you don’t like what you see…. move on. Grow up. Get over it.

Whatever the situation, FB certainly does need to improve their policy/procedure for dealing with potentially offensive material.

1. the value of good reporting, as Richard notes. The web thrives on hits and recommends, and all too often sensationalism sells at the expense of reporting. The issues were swamped by inaccurate reductions to the banal either-or “choices” our media thrives on.

2. Business expediency: yes, yes and yes, this is the issue. FB and every other media corporation seeks to eliminate sources of potential pain (in this case, the complaints of a homophobic user who they feared might spark a s**tstorm of ugly PR)as cheaply as possible rather than invest in “doing the right thing” which ultimately costs money. So instead they triggered a s**tstorm of ugly PR anyway.

3. as yahoo discovered with its once-popular Finance groups and Yelp is discovering via various lawsuits, there is no substitute for monitoring abuse with live employees. When you have 600 million users, that’s going to cost a lot if you’re actually doing it.

Yahoo’s demise as a host for once-vibrant groups reveals the pitfalls of the hands-off approach–you lose credibility fast when voluntary online associations are tarnished by spam and trolls or mindless “deletes” by the host.

It would interesting to see the metrics FB collects on the number of abuse claims and how they’re resolved.

4. the amazing power of social networking quickly scaled up Richard’s commentary in uncontrolled ways. In a way, we “lose control” of the content when it goes viral and others have the opportunity to make of it what suits their agenda.

Excellent essay, Richard, thank you for using your own experience to critique some of the major open issues in social media.

Best guess? Policy is ‘Auto-delete first, investigate later’.

Assuming that most walls are private – which is what most people want – it is clearly the individual’s business, not facebook.

Eh, whatever. I still have a facebook account, but I don’t use it much anymore. They’re scumbags.

That’s not homophobia. It’s indifference.

The root problem here isn’t Facebook’s scumminess as an entity, it is that people somehow expect better from them. They are bad citizens of society, there are few laws against their negative behaviours, there’s a strong financial incentive for them to behave badly, etc. Why are people surprised at what evolved in that environment? Facebook will do what it can, not what it should – they’re no Google.

I’m satisfied that if the results are homophobic, the company may fairly be called homophobic. That’s kinda stern I known, but shaming bigoted outcomes is the only way to force companies to root out the non-bigoted policies that may produce them.

I’m the person who started the Kissing is cool event on Facebook. Over 200k people have been invited. The event has over 40k people pledging to change their profile picture to two people of the same sex kissing. I got confused by the story about Facebook maybe deleting the snogging event in England. That is probably my fault. I have posted all the articles as more information came out during the past two days in the event information.

One of the other things I asked people to do, besides change their picture, was to post a comment on Chris Hughes wall asking for an explanation. I gave an example of what they could post. I gave a few reasons of why Facebook had removed the photo. Malicious worker auto delete or acceptance of homophobia.

I totally agree with Richard. I don’t believe Facebook is homophobic but by deleting the article from Richards wall they appear to be accepting of it.

I’m being pressured by some members of the media to shut down my event. They claim it is based on false pretenses. I disagree. I have updated people, without sending them offending emails, through out the story. People have shared updates on the story on the wall of the event as they came out. There is yet to be a news story that proves the claim is entirely false.

I support Richard in taking a stand against censorship and homophobia. One of the claims to come out of this is that Facebook has to censor based on the most conservative person to use the internet. I believe this to be false. The picture was in regards to a political event that took place in England. While Miller v California does say that Facebook has to censor based on “the average person, applying contemporary community standards (not national standards, as some prior tests required), would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest”. Facebook also has to take into account “whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, POLITICAL, or scientific value.” Based on that third part of the decision Facebook had no reason to take down the picture for obscenity. All three parts of the decision have to be met for something to be declared obscene.

Thank you Richard for taking a stand!

You know where such people also belong:
http://poorlydressed.failblog.org/

We all have to fight this kind of fundamentalist censorship, every single time. They’re trying to take over our schools, our government, and even the internet…and they’re banking on the fact that it is frustrating and time-consuming to defend basic human and civil rights every moment of the day.