Does Facebook have a problem with women?

[redqueen]

Trigger warning.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/19/facebook-images-rape-domestic-violence?CMP=twt_gu

Does Facebook have a problem with women? The question has been around since 2011 when Eve Ensler and Ms Magazine drew attention to the social networking site's failure to remove misogynistic images that seemed to glorify rape and domestic violence.

Then the issue came back again with users taking to Twitter in recent weeks to express their anger at Facebook's refusal to remove images that tried to make a joke of rape. Two in particular were widely circulated. One showed a woman bound and gagged on a sofa and a caption that read: "It's not rape. If she really didn't want to, she'd have said something." The second showed a condom, beneath the words "Plan A"; an emergency contraceptive pill, "Plan B"; and then "Plan C", a man pushing a woman with a bloodied face down the stairs.

The site's community standards state: "Facebook does not permit hate speech, but distinguishes between serious and humorous speech." What is not clear, in spite of several high-profile campaigns and a Change.org petition that garnered more than 200,000 signatures, is how it makes that distinction. Over the past few years, women say they have been banned from the site and seen their pages removed for posting images of cupcakes iced like labia, pictures of breastfeeding mothers and photographs of women post-mastectomy.

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When I asked if the banned cupcake images could have been removed in error by an automated image scanner, the spokesperson said it was very unlikely. So it was a human decision to ban the image of a cupcake. Just as it is a human decision to allow pages such as "Teen SLUT pics" to continue to publish images of very young-looking girls, with no evidence they gave consent for their photographs to be used.

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It is galling that the largest social networking site is committed to removing images of feminine sexuality unless they pander to the male gaze (pornified/caricature type images and 'creepshots' type stuff is fine with facebook), but treats violence against women as if it is a joke.