Facebook Is Fine With Hate Speeches..

In class on Wednesday, my group and I were given an article entitled 'Facebook is fine with hate speech, as long as it's directed at women'. This article was about the pages located on Facebook that we're pro-rape and Facebook's reaction toward these crude sites. In which Facebook's reaction turned out to be: "Groups that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs - even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some - do not by themselves violate our policies."

Yet, it actually does violate their policies according to facebook's statements of rights and responsibilies.

It says, "You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence."

I don't know what facebook's idea of threatening is but I know when I see a page entitled "Roses are red, Violets are blue, I've got a knife, get in the van" it's a bit disturbing in my point of view and not a joke to be handled lightly. In agreement with me are over 176,000 people from the U.S who have signed a U.S. based petition and nearly 4,000 people who have signed a U.K. based petition to have Facebook take down these pages. I know possibly that these numbers mostly include women, but men need to understand that this can happen to them too. Yes, no matter how masculine you think you are it's possible for you to get raped. All it takes is for a man to be weaken to have him physically unable to fight back. We all have our weaknesses, men included.

I know more would sign these petitions if only they knew about them. I know I have a Facebook page but I don't go surfing around the site for pages like that. I'm sure if a lot of people were well aware of these pages that they would say something about them, but I'm sure a lot of people don't know about these pages. So what does this say about our society? I don't believe that we don't care about any of the things that are going on Facebook, but it usually takes something bad to happen for us to learn from it. As sad as that sounds that should not have to happen if Facebook were following their guidelines. I do have a feeling through that something bad is going to have to happen through for Facebook to realize that they need to start cracking down on these pages.