Why does Facebook think it’s okay to treat Violence against women as acceptable?

In case you haven’t had time to keep up with these events, here’s a quick overview of the Everyday Sexism project’s attempts to hold FaceBook to account for its explicit support of sexual violence against women as portrayed in the many permitted Facebook pages that promote rape, rape culture, and violence against women. Facebook appears to think that allowing a ‘satire’ or ‘humour’ tag for these pages somehow condones what these pages clearly reflect – a deliberate, hateful commentary. And right now there’s a major push-back against Facebook which is VERY quick to take down images of women breastfeeding but more than happy to allow ‘humour’ depicting women as victims of violence for failing to do what men ask them to do

The recent piece by Laura Bates and Soraya Chemaly in the Huffington Post details the campaign leveraging social media channels to ask why advertisers like Dove; Vistaprint and iTunes (among many others) continue to advertise on Facebook on pages that activley promote violence and hate against women.

In what can be best described as a ‘WTF?!’ moment, Facebook has started to fight back by BANNING people from linking to the article on their Facebook pages. There is outrage on Twitter with people saying that their FB page has blocked them from linking to the article. These are people across the UK and the US so the chances of it happening at random seem remote.

I’ve been given permission to create a PDF file of the article and link to that within my FB account. I’m not sure how long that will last for, but here’s a PDF Copy. If you download it and then create your own link to it and post that to your FB account, we might just by-pass FB’s apparent support for hatefilled speech