Community standards
Trish Bendix at Slate also writes about Facebook’s tendency to recoil at the word “dyke,” though as an aside in a longer piece on dyke marches under threat.
[M]uch like the larger community has done with “queer,” lesbians have been working to reclaim the word for their own use and identification for decades.
“Lesbians have long been the object of vicious ‘name-calling’ designed to intimidate us into silence and invisibility,” wrote J.R. Roberts in the 1979 essay “In America They Call Us Dykes.” “In the Lesbian/feminist 1970s, we broke the silence on this tabooed word, reclaiming it for ourselves, assigning it to positive, political values.”
Since then, dyke has been a political identity for many young lesbians, its meaning expanding to, as Roberts detailed, “a strong independent lesbian who can take care of herself.” The word was used for a feminist lesbian magazine (DYKE: A Quarterly), Alison Bechdel’s famous long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For[,] and perhaps most famously, the all-women’s motorcycle crew Dykes on Bikes. And when the political activist group Lesbian Avengers decided to pull thousands of women together as part of the LGBT March on Washington in 1993, they did it under the name the Dyke March. Its success spawned siblings in several other cities, many of which are annual parts of Pride celebrations taking place this month.
…
Yet even within cities that hold dyke marches every year, some women find it hard to locate any positivity or power in the word’s meaning. And this, along with a lack of organizational support (some of which stems from queer women’s [in?]ability to volunteer free time and labor) and external logistical pressures, has placed the institution of the dyke march under threat.
And other pressures I can think of.
In May, Facebook removed a popular group out of New York called Dyke Bar Takeover, citing “hate speech” in the use of dyke in their name. Group creator Alana In says this happened after having been on the social media site for about a year; she noted that the group is a response to the shuttering of many lesbian spaces. DBT wants to create opportunities for queer women to gather together in bars that support their mission and help with their fundraising efforts, all of which goes to local relevant charities and organizations.
“Since I posted about it, I’ve heard not only in dyke spaces but also in other activist communities where they get backlash from Facebook on trying to reclaim language,” In said, “and it says a lot because you wonder how many people are being silenced for trying use words from an activist vantage point. It just shows Facebook is not reviewing any of the information that is being put out there—it’s an algorithm. They just shut things down.”
The group has since been reinstated (after making several complaints), and a rep from Facebook, Ruchika Budhraja, told me that “community standards make it clear that we do not allow hate speech on Facebook … However, certain words or terms are used self-referentially and/or in an empowering way … In those instances, we permit use, but we ask our users to clearly indicate their purpose so that we have the context we need to understand why a word was used or an image/video shared.”
Well that’s bullshit. “Community standards” absolutely do not make it clear that they don’t allow hate speech on Facebook, given all the experiences women have had reporting misogynist hate speech on Facebook and being told sorry this doesn’t violate our precious community standards.
If they are relying on complaints for picking up potential/alleged violations, then the LGBT pages may well be getting hit more than the abusive ones just because the misogynists are on the lookout and are eager to use Facebook against them, moreso than feminist sorts can or want to keep up with the misogynist torrents and lodge complaints.
Also, event pages are out there for people to find – it’s their point – which will generate exposure for them even for people hostile to them, where the misogynist screeds may not be trafficked so much by people who would disagree and generate complaints.
Against this, Facebook has to respond to standards violations either with algorithms that are surely going to be tone-deaf and context-insensitive, or overworked, underpaid, and likely overwhelmed employees that are, in practice, going to be making fast, poorly educated judgment calls that are little better than that algorithm.
I’m not going to claim that Facebook’s got some ideal editorial stance or could not do better; I’m just saying that we should acknowledge that much of this problem really is going to be beyond their practical ability to stay on top of well enough not to perpetuate damage.
Jeff – the main problem with that argument is that women (and others) are reporting those misogynist sites and also death threats against themselves, and Facebook responds with a yawn. It isn’t lack of reporting,it’s lack of basic humanity on the part of Facebook.
Also, individual women are being banned, many of them without warning and without prior infraction – one use of the word “dyke” and wham she’s banned for a day or week or month.
It’s extremely bizarre, and just about impossible to explain as anything but deliberate targeting, but deliberate targeting is itself quite difficult to explain. A whole bunch of my friends are discussing and trying to make sense of it.
Do you suppose it’s a combination of deliberate targeting of women on the part of misogynist complainers who drown Facebook in accusations of ToS violations, combined with a certain cluelessness, rote rule application, and context unawareness on the part of Facebook? I have to think that fecklessness still has to be more likely on Facebook’s end than malice, that malice on the haters’ end is nothing hard to believe, and that that combination is plausibly sufficient.
No. Some of the posts have been friends-only, so those can’t be mass targeted by mobs of misogynists. And no, cluelessness on that scale would just ask the question all over again. It’s not that I have a belief that it’s malice; it’s that I don’t know what the fuck it is. It makes no sense.
No, it’s not “an algorithm.” Facebook is clearly employing humans who are making conscious choices to silence women and lesbians, and NOT to silence men who use “dyke” as a slur, a threat, or as part of a rape or porn “joke.”
We need to face this and call it what it is. It’s not an unfortunate byproduct of technology. It’s a conscious choice that reflects a culture of male dominance in Facebook.
I wonder if it isn’t simply that it is easier to focus on “bad words” than on content and context? You can easily program a bot to identify posts that use the word “dyke,” but distinguishing between those who are “reclaiming” the word and those who are using it maliciously is much harder. For that matter, the same is true for human employees: training your minimum-wage (or outsourced to countries without minimum wage) “community managers” to hunt for uses of naughty words is easier than training them to identify homophobia or other hateful content.
That would also be consistent with other complaints I’ve heard about Facebook and Twitter: that if person A reports a conversation with person B, often the response is something like “well, user B may have written elaborate descriptions of the manner in which he would like user A to be raped. But user A told B to “fuck off,” so A is suspended.”
And if commenters don’t believe me, then go solicit some information from women who’ve experienced it. I’ve been in the thick of this kind of controversy for almost two years now, and I’ve seen thousands of examples of this kind of thing. Yes, thousands of examples of women deliberately and systematically silenced by Facebook.
I’m not going to defend this or argue it to anyone who wants to “school” me or anyone else on how algorithms work. I already understand all of that. If what I’m saying strikes you as that implausible on its face, and if you think the experiences I’ve related are just as likely to be false as they are true, you and I aren’t going to talk it out here, so don’t bother.
Screechy Monkey—-Good insight. I call that phenomenon “kindergarten teacher morality.” The kind that says, “I don’t care who started it, you both were being mean to each other.” It’s a way to appear to onlookers to care about behavioral standards while allowing you to treat the victim as equally responsible.
I came across this fascinating article about Facebook’s rules for censorship. Well worth reading. They do employ humans, but the humans apply official rules (that is, they are not entirely free to use their personal judgment), so I think “algorithm” is an apt description. The article, from Pro Publica, is titled “Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children”.
http://propub.li/2tXe01I
Yes about the bad words but then isn’t it strange that this does not happen with for instance “cunt”?
Argh. Thank you for that, Sackbut. Reading.
Fuming.
Josh S @9, Thanks, and yes, I recently read one victim-blamer declare “saying ‘he hit me first’ didn’t work with my parents when I was four,” and I temporarily wished I had a Twitter account so I could respond “then you had shitty parents.” Of course it matters who hits who first, whether the hitting is literal physical violence or not. That’s why we have a right of self-defense, and any parent or kindergarten teacher who didn’t recognize that was implicitly teaching kids the lesson “get in the first shot.”
Ophelia and Sackbut, yeah, my explanation is a partial one at best. As Sackbut’s link shows, there’s also some bias and outright weirdness behind which terms get put on the “bad” list.