For years, Facebook has been ignoring posts that contain images and speech that encourages violence against women. An ongoing viral campaign is now putting more pressure on the social networking site to change their policies.
Women Action Media, a feminist activist group has been compiling various cases of alarming and explicit images that are depicting violence on women which are posted on the social networking site. In several cases, the group claims that Facebook has not taken action to remove the posts.
A spokesperson from the group mentioned many of the disturbing images were approved by Facebook moderators, even though they were clearly violating the standards of the site. Only a few were taken down after it came out of the media, but there are some that are still in circulation.
Jaclyn Friedman, WAM Executive Director, Laura Bates, founder of Everyday Sexism Project, and Soraya Chemaly, feminist writer and activist, joined forces to post an open letter in Facebook, demanding that the site take appropriate actions against pages and images that condone and encourage domestic violence or rape, or suggest that they are humorous.
The campaign also branched out to another social networking site, Twitter, with hashtag #FBRape. Another website, Change.org also supported the campaign by petitioning Facebook to remove pages that are promoting sexual violence. The petition has now gathered more than 200,000 signatures. As of Friday, Nissan UK of Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. and WestHost has shown support by withdrawing their advertisements on the website, several other companies have done the same thing.
Facebook has answered to the campaign-
"As you may expect in any diverse community of more than a billion people, we occasionally see people post distasteful or disturbing content, or make crude attempts at humor. While it may be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our policies."
