What Does Facebook Owe Us?

Is this porn?

Artwork by Jay Aheer - Simply Defined Art

What about this?

Michael Stokes image cropped from Facebook. Here's a link to his website.

The artist who created the first image, Jay Aheer, got a take-down notice from Facebook, on the grounds that the image violated community standards for nudity. The artist who created the second image, Michael Stokes, is currently on a 30-day suspension from Facebook, because apparently his work doesn't meet Facebook Community Standards, either.

Screenshot from 1/26/15

Lately, there's been a lot of chatter on my Facebook stream about people having their work taken down or their accounts suspended because they've run afoul of the Community Standards police. However, that police force is primarily made up of other Facebook users, who report images they find offensive.

And one person's pornography is another person's art.

In the discussions on my Facebook stream, words like censorship, harassment, and homophobia get tossed around. Digging a little deeper, I learned that if I knew where to find them, I could see pages dedicated to antisemitism, violence against women, child pornography, and animal abuse.

What do Facebook's Community Standards have to say about that?

Here's a link to the Facebook Community Standards page. According to the opening statement on the page, the goal is to...

"...help you understand what type of expression is acceptable, and what type of content may be reported and removed."

The list of standards include statements about violence and; threats, self-harm, bullying and harassment, hate speech, graphic content, and nudity, among other things. It all makes perfect sense, until you consider that it's possible for someone with a set  political agenda to target specific users by reporting images or content that doesn't fit their ideology. Here's are some excerpts from an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, written by author Sara York regarding the Michael Stokes suspension:

Michael Stokes, a photographer out of Los Angeles, California, was targeted by an individual and told that she would “ruin him” because he posts artistic photos of male models. 

Yes, we all know Facebook has community standards, however Facebook’s standards are double standards, allowing abusive photographs of women, pornography of women, images depicting women in demeaning situations, and other abuses to stay on the site and yet photos of two men fully dressed but kissing are deleted. Do you really want to be known as the company that supports abuse towards women and gay men? 

Stop allowing people who habitually report clean gay images and images of the male form from trying to “ruin” good people who are working to foster equality.

(You can find the full letter HERE.)

I've recently read a number of news articles and blog posts from people who have had images or other content taken down by Facebook, and the process appears to go something like this: a user posts something, another user sees it, takes offense, and reports it, FB takes it down, and then FB researches the content to see if it really does fail to meet their standards. Sometimes content is restored. Sometimes it isn't. And not all take-downs get researched, because the number of reports exceeds the capacity of FB to handle them all.

So one user with an bee in their blister really could make a lot of trouble. Which had me asking myself a question.

Why does it matter?

Because really, Facebook is a business, and businesses are allowed to make their own rules about how their business is conducted. Facebook doesn't charge users for it's service, so if their business model doesn't allow for woman's nipples or two men kissing. it's their prerogative to limit that kind of content.

Right?

Except Facebook isn't like any other business. This quote from the post Fascist Facebook attempts to explain why...

Facebook is a not just a private corporation; Facebook is a crucial component of contemporary popular culture. Facebook is a place and an activity that large portions of the world use today. According to a 2013 Pew study on the social networking practices of Americans, as of September 2013, 71% of online adults use Facebook (the numbers for young adults are even higher). For many people, Facebook is essentially a required social activity. ..

...When such a critical part of global human culture, when the world’s de facto social media platform, is privatized, monetized, owned by a private company whose primary concern is not creating a safe, non-oppressive environment in which individuals can share their experiences, interests, and ideas with one another without fear of harassment or attack, but rather extracting profit from every possible social interaction, there is great reason to be concerned. 

Now that's the rub, isn't it? Almost every single person I know has at least some interaction with Facebook. My kids have FB accounts, as does my mother. And Facebook is making money off of every single one of it's users. They make billions (yep, that's a B) of dollars from advertising revenue off their 1.35 billion (yep, another B) active users.

I figure if they're going to make money off the time I spend on their site, they better treat me the same as every other user.

That's why FB should work to prevent an individual or small group with an agenda from interfering with other users. While there's a place for standards, most questionable content can be handled with the "hide this post" feature, and I think Facebook should do more to keep targeted harassment from happening.

There are several concrete suggestion for how to limit abuse in this petition created by Taylor Law, found on Change.org - Change the Reporting Policy to Prevent Harassment and Bullying. Among other things, the petition suggests flagging users who report more than five posts in a one-week period to help identify users with an agenda. There are over 13,000 signatures on this petition, and it'll eventually be sent to Mr. Zuckerberg.

Because all we want is a level playing field.

What do you think about Facebook's standards? Have you had your content reported? Thanks for reading along.
Liv


UPDATE
This appeared in my Facebook stream a little while ago...

Facebook has reinstated the Michael Stokes Photography page, the one under suspension when I first wrote this post. I'm encouraged that their process of investigating reported posts does work, though it's still not perfect. Mr. Stokes history of take-downs & suspensions speaks to that. At any rate, thought I'd share...
Liv