Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Facebook.
A theatre in Barcelona has been banned from promoting a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on Instagram and Facebook because the work includes “social topics”.
Erm…I don’t want to alarm anyone but the reality is, a lot of works include social topics. It’s kind of hard to exclude them. People don’t live alone in caves, so social topics tend to be a big part of ordinary life and of the literature and art that expresses or illustrates it.
When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.
Ahhhhh I see. It’s not so much “social topics” as “social topics I don’t like.” Some men don’t like feminism; they prefer their women quiet and obedient.
The stage production, a one-woman show starring Clara Sanchis, is an adaptation of a series of talks Woolf gave in 1928 at Newnham and Girton, which were then the only two colleges at Cambridge University that admitted women.
The talks were published as an essay the following year on the situation of women in society and their access to education. Women had been admitted to study at Cambridge since 1869 but weren’t allowed to graduate with a degree until 1948.
But Facebook wants to draw a tactful veil over all that.
“We don’t know if the publicity has been rejected because of the name of Virginia Woolf or because of the word feminism, or both,” Sanchis told La Vanguardia newspaper.
“In any case, it’s a way of erasing from the map advances that have taken centuries to achieve. We have given social media unlimited power and every day we can see how dangerous this is. It’s bias and manipulation.”
Yes it is. Facebook is not the institution we want telling us what we can read.
H/t Mostly Cloudy
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