Facebook 0, Gay Activism 1
Facebook caused global controversy recently when they decided, in all their infinite wisdom, to remove a photograph of two men kissing after it was flagged by some homophobes as being “offensive”. The moderator in question didn’t seem to see a problem with obeying the vocal minority who have a warped sense of reality and promptly complied, removing the said image from a page.
Conveniently, this story also ties in to my previous report on the homophobic incident in London, where two young men were evicted from a Soho pub by the landlord and landlady for being “obscene” and daring to share a kiss.
The page on Facebook was a blog entry by Richard Metzger, commenting on the incident. Want to see the offending pic?
I know! Disgusting isn’t it? How dare someone post such a “sexually suggestive” image on Facebook, and on a blog post about gay rights too!
It’s actually quite funny to think that a post about gay rights and homophobia toward a male couple kissing was targeted in this way by the Facebook staff. It’s not quite irony, but close to it.
The Sexually suggestive element of this image is purportedly what Facebook objected to, although I fail to see why this is any more sexually suggestive than any one of the billions of images there must already be on Facebook of heterosexual couples kissing. So is it only sexually suggestive if the couple are both male? How about if it were two women, I wonder how that would be viewed by the almighty overseers at FB?
Never fear though, because the gay community and their friends are here to help out when our clan is being abused unjustly. Before you could utter the words a-moderator-lost-their-job-today thousands of copies of the image flooded FB profiles and pages in protest at the move, forcing FB staff to eventually back down and apologize for what they called an error.
In what could be considered an unemotional retraction (perhaps even reluctant?) FB staff released an official statement on the matter, suggesting ““The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologise for the inconvenience.”
Well, in more emotive speak I would like to say SUCK MY BALLS FB!
A royal cock-up like that requires a little more than an unfeeling response after being pressured into making a U-turn.
What I would have expected would have been something along the lines of… “We are terribly sorry for this unfortunate incident. It was not our intention to suggest that we supported homophobia. While it is clear that some members of our vast staff may be considerably backward and unenlightened, FB itself supports diversity and equality. To adequately display our regret and assert our support for the GLBT community globally, we have made a $1m donation to Amnesty International in the names of the two gentlemen at the heart of this story.”
But no, apparently their PR people are paid less than that idiotic moderator responsible for this fiasco!
What do you think, were FB right to remove it? Should their apology have had more meat on the bones? Will a squirrel fall from a tree if you hit the trunk with a hammer?
Conran,
While I’m not normally in the business of making excuses for Facebook, what you might not be aware of is that FB has an *automated* system for responding to reports of supposedly “offensive” user-posted material on the mega-site. For some categories of “offense” that system automatically yanks the material from view while it goes into a queue for a staffer to review, pending final dispensation.
Until just recently, users were not even informed when their pictures were reported like this or removed – it just disappeared. Due to the far too many incidents of abuse of the system, exactly like this one, FB has implemented the new policy of informing users that their pictures have been reported and allowing them to challenge the report to get them restored quickly. This is exactly what the original poster of the picture did.
In reality, this happens far too often on Facebook. Recently, Jason Dottley, the hunky star of the tv show Sordid Lives had a BABY PICTURE reported as “offensive” for being “sexually suggestive” and had to go through the exact same routine, because someone on his page kept reporting his pictures to get them removed.
Unfortunately, Facebook is a very large site and there are a lot of very stupid and immature people on it. They have to have some sort of system in place to deal with all the internet porno stars, call girls and whatnot. Are there going to be people who abuse it? Heck yeah! Are they doing their best to adapt and change as problems pop up? Yup!
Is Facebook biased against the LGBT community? Not in the slightest!! In fact, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find that one of the co-founders & his husband(!) is a big supporter of the equality movement here in California, plus they are a great equality employer here, too.
This incident was simply a case of a Facebook user not fully understanding the situation, or how the system worked, then making a huge deal out of nothing to get a lot of unnecessary publicity. Case closed.
I fully understand that such processes need to be automated. However, their response to the media uproar and their delays in rectifying the situation certainly exposed a clear problem.
This was not kept quiet, it was all over the Internet within an hour, and FB still did nothing.
If only for their public image this should have been acted on within that hour, and yet they chose to continue to go through a ridiculous process of investigation and assessment, only acting when the uproar smacked them in the face and thousands of duplicate images flooded the network.
Either way, the fact that FB had to drag its heels while the story continued to roll and the uproar amongst the community grew certainly makes it appear that they were forced to back down rather than taking the sensible decision themselves.
I concede that this could simply be a case of accidental offense being caused (by FB toward the gay community) but you would have thought that FB would have an inkling about how this would play out, and act on it immediately. They might not have needed to be forced into backing down, and they might very well have decided that the image was flagged incorrectly and then restored it as soon as possible, but the fact that it took the community to actively argue the case before it was done is indicative of other motives in my opinion.
thats gay