Who Goes to Facebook Jail, and Why?
Note: this includes a close look at some really fucking nasty anti-trans and anti-antifa propaganda from an extreme right-wing source.
Just a couple weeks ago, I did a 24-hour stint in “Facebook Jail.” The powers-that-be took away my posting, commenting, liking, and reacting privileges because I “violated community standard of nudity and sex.”
Actually, what I did was post a link to this entry on Medium. When I put the link on my newsfeed, the banner image was an artsy black-and-white of a fairly conventionally attractive nude white woman seen from behind. In one hand, she’s holding a vinyl LP. You can see the image below.
Less than twenty minutes after posting that link to Facebook, I was banned.
If this was an extraordinary fluke, it wouldn’t piss me off quite so much. But I’ve been banned before and I’ve known many, many people who have been banned for much longer periods of time. I’m sure that anyone reading this has their own ream of tales and anecdotes about Facebook. Most recently, women have been getting banned for calling men “Scum.” To dig into the muck of that, check out the site FacebookJailed.
I’m not trying to make this into a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment has fuck-all to do with Facebook. But what Facebook bans and what they don’t is extremely revealing about their institutional ethos. ProPublica recently published an article looking at the arcane standards that Facebook uses and their consequences:
In June, ProPublica reported on the secret rules that Facebook’s content reviewers use to decide which groups are “protected” from hate speech. We revealed that the rules protected “white men” but not “black children” because “age,” unlike race and gender, was not a protected category. (In response to our article, Facebook added the category of “age” to its protected characteristics.) However, since subgroups are not protected, an attack on poor children, beautiful women, or Indian taxi cab drivers would still be considered acceptable.
I’ve experienced things from the other side of those standards too, which just confirms how useless and corrupt they are in application. A couple of months ago, I reported the graphic below which came from an alt-right group. It’s revolting, especially if you know anything about the numbers of trans and gender non-conforming people who are murdered every year. It’s just a red square that says:
ANTIFA
Hunting Permit
OPEN SEASON
All 58 Gender Identities
No Bagging Limit
No Tagging Required
Facebook’s response:
Thanks for letting us know about this. We looked over the photo, and though it doesn’t go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it. We understand that it may still be offensive or distasteful to you, so we want to help you see less of things like it in the future.
It’s not just that single graphic, either; violence against Antifa is a constant theme in the group’s graphics, and their cover image depicts a bunch of machine guns laid out on a blanket. Another one of their graphics says: “Hospitalize your local Antifa scumbag.”
There’s no question about the group’s message. Kill. Hurt. Maim.
There’s lots of room for discussion and disagreement about the tactics of Black Blocs (which are not the same as antifa, although there is a lot of overlap) but regardless of where you stand, there’s no plausible case to be made that women angrily cursing at men, or the tastefully-shot nude that was attached to my link, are more threatening to online community than a graphic that specifically encourages shooting people.
It’s one thing for Facebook to have rules about what can be posted on their site. But it’s transparently clear that the rules aren’t the same for everyone. Because of the sheer scale and dominance of Facebook, that’s a problem. The First Amendment doesn’t apply, but no matter how many times they assure us otherwise, hate speech consistently gets to keep its spot on the soapbox. Frank talk about sexuality, misogyny, and racism gets knocked off. We keep hearing the same story over and over again, and I for one am really tired of hearing it.
When I reported that “hunting permit,” it wasn’t a random choice, made because I don’t like right-wingers. The part that made my guts squirm was the part on the black field:
Open Season
All 58 Gender Identities
The Human Rights Campaign — perhaps the most conservative of all LGBT advocacy groups (and properly speaking, might be considered strictly an LG advocacy group) — has documented 28 violent deaths of trans people by gunfire or other means in 2017. Those are just the ones that we know about; the people who were identified as trans in news and police reports, the ones who didn’t simply disappear, their bodies to perhaps be unearthed five, six, or seven years from now.
The people who read that group don’t need to be told that it’s open season on non-cis gender identities. They already know. In 2017, there were at least 28 bodies to mark how well people who follow that group know it.
But when faced with the choice, Facebook’s “standards” (whatever the fuck they might be) resulted in the decision that the call for “open season” had more legitimate claim to a place in the public discourse than a bare ass. Functionally, their standards and the people enforcing them are more comfortable encouraging the murder of trans people than gently indulging someone’s ass fetish.
Even in the best of times, this would piss me off, and we are far from in the best of times. The growth of the extreme right has thrived on exactly this kind of double standard. It’s not a new thing; there’s long been something in our national character that says that it’s better for our children to look at swastikas and burning crosses or their modern equivalents than tits, cocks, and asses. This goes double for queer tits, cocks, and asses, and triple for nonwhite tits, cocks, and asses. The combination of incomptence and bigotry shown by Mark Zuckerberg and his minions has just cranked it up past eleven, to twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.
We’re here in part because Zuckerberg et al. haven’t yet grown out of being a bunch of frat boys and taken fucking responsibility for one running the biggest communications platform that the world has ever seen. They couldn’t look up from their algorithms to notice how expertly they — and thus, the American people — were being manipulated by Russian intelligence, and we’re paying for that.
My 24 hours in Facebook Jail were little more than an annoyance to me, but the reason behind them is terrifying. It’s time for Facebook to take responsibility for itself.
