I was a reluctant FB joiner at first. I have known it to cause weird, unintended social faux-pas between people innocently updating their friends' pages with manoevres that turn into clumsy - and very public - rebukes. Plus, the site owners surely love to exploit human frailty with their seductive games and doodads that cull our personal data to feed marketing engines for advertisers.
Still, I have stuck it out with this devil I know because it remains a useful tool for cheaply keeping up with scatter-shot friends and family whom I otherwise risk ignoring completely.
But when they continually allow a nasty page to propagate the damaging message that rape is a trivial, laughable matter, I can't fathom what they are thinking. I wasted no time in reporting "It isn't r.a.p.e.... It's SURPRISE SEX (:" to the FB administration through their internal reporting tool, only to look in shock at the number of people who purportedly "like" the page (currently, 42+ thousand). But wait - how does a moronic page like that get all those deluded people "liking" it without getting shut down? Turns out it has been up with that mind-blowingly offensive title for over three and a half months since it was first reported to the FB administrators!
Well, one of those people who spotted it and flagged it offensive months ago is fed up with waiting. So what action did Facebook user Yasmin Rebelle take? You guessed it: she started up a reaction group on FB called: We Demand the Deletion of "It isn't r.a.p.e.... It's SURPRISE SEX. (:"
Damn straight, Yasmin. I am with you, and I hope any readers of this blog are too. I also have committed myself to deleting my FB account if they don't smarten up and do as this new group requests by this Friday. And I hope any FB users out there are willing to join me. Because it isn't so much that some unthinking juvenile lunkhead created the page in the first place. The problem is the gatekeepers at Facebook are not doing their jobs to shut it down.
Facebook is a very powerful message propagator, and though it is rightly and wonderfully open to all who wish to express their opinions, the owners of the site have a responsibility to stop harmful attitudes like this one from spreading. Because the page creator is calling on others to view rape as something less than the revolting, violent crime that it is, and they need to be reined-in. To wit:
hat tip to Antonia for the youtube find above.
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1 comment:
hi Scott...good for you for reporting that grotesque page. And shame on them for allowing that kind of garbage. I made a conscious decision to stay off FB, and although sometimes I regret it, for all the reasons you mention, mostly I don't.
I love the internet but I don't like a lot of what I see on it, the bullying and the cruelty. So quite apart from the privacy and other issues, and the fact that I already spend too much time hunched in front of a computer. I'm quite happy in my FB-less world. I've already stopped reading any comments on YouTube, next the comments in the Globe and Mail...:)
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