I don't understand why Facebook needs to block content. If I don't like what people are posting I can just unfriend them.
Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
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Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#12I don't understand why Facebook needs to block content. If I don't like what people are posting I can just unfriend them.
you don't understand, facebook is doing this for the benefit of their users/customers
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#13Too bad negative keywords (what baidu/bing/google/yahoo/yandex/etc use in search ads) don't really work in this context. Display ads are hard :(
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#14Facebook has gotten too big for it's own good. How can they be held accountable for every single thing said by their users?!
It goes against human nature. People curse, people are horrible to each other, people make fun of terrible things... It's a fact of life. You can't cleanse the world of bad human behaviour. That's a fight you can't win. Facebook will try and censor their systems, people will hate it, and Facebook will die trying.
EDIT: I guess I'm being overly pessimistic here. Facebook has no choice but to do something. It just feels like:
"We have to do something." "This is something!" "Therefore we have to do it!"
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#15Facebook has gotten too big for it's own good. How can they be held accountable for every single thing said by their users?! It goes against human nature. People curse, people are horrible to each other, people make fun of terrible things... It's a fact of life. You can't cleanse the world of bad human behaviour. That's a fight you can't win. Facebook will try and censor their systems, people will hate it, and Facebo…
In the same way I don't expect my government to take care of when people are mean to me. There should be social consequences (and there are) to being unnecessarily rude. I don't mind that people through fits over mean statements, but I mind it when they require laws to fill it in.
Surely, government and law enforcement have been things to take care of than people being horrible without being violent.
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#16Well it would have been better to ban rape jokes (shorter stronger and easier to communicate and connect to), but seems PR departments are quite busy in transforming the English language to Bureaucracyspeak already.
It is good to see movement of the problem, although some for m of hellbanning of pages and profiles is a better solution.
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#17Facebook has gotten too big for it's own good. How can they be held accountable for every single thing said by their users?! It goes against human nature. People curse, people are horrible to each other, people make fun of terrible things... It's a fact of life. You can't cleanse the world of bad human behaviour. That's a fight you can't win. Facebook will try and censor their systems, people will hate it, and Facebo…
> How can they be held accountable for every single thing said by their users?!
That could stand if they didn't try to police their users at all, but they do, significantly, on a number of areas: facebook has banned or censored groups and images on such sujects as breastfeeding, breast cancer or children with birth defects[0]. Yet, and there's the rub, rape and violence groups were allowed to run unimpeded and reports were generally ignored when they didn't lead to the complainer being blocked.
[0] http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/11/does-facebook-hate-al...
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#18I don't understand why Facebook needs to block content. If I don't like what people are posting I can just unfriend them.
> I don't understand why Facebook needs to block content.
It may not need to, but it decided to do so years ago. And when breastfeeding or breast cancer groups get blocked or partially censored, it's hard to understand why rape apology groups are allowed to remain.
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#19I don't understand why Facebook needs to block content. If I don't like what people are posting I can just unfriend them.
Because if they don't they will lose some advertising contracts. Facebook's reason to exist is to try and turn a profit, not to exist as a place for people to post without censorship.
I imagine someone realized that people who would leave if sexual assault 'humor' was banned make them less than the advertisers who would leave were the jokes not banned.
Re: Facebook agrees to block sexual assault 'humor'
#20I find it strange that there is pressure from companies advertising on facebook about this. They signed up for ads on a user generated content site and then are displeased with some of the content? Why are they even concerned about this? "Sexual assualt 'humor'" is in the extreme minority of posts on facebook. Maybe they don't want their ads next to it but that's what they signed up for . They wanted their ads next t…
This is a rather disingenuous comment. Maybe they didn't anticipate that a site that rigorously polices (for example) breast-feeding pictures and race hate material wouldn't rigorously police "rape a bitch" image macros. They have discovered that having their ads next to this sort of content is not what they signed up for, after all, and are planning to unsign up for this stuff. Companies change their minds all the t…
I will not be sad to see "rape a bitch" macros go but having their ads next to stuff like this is exactly what they signed up for. They signed up for their ads to be displayed next to whatever anyone posted.
Anyone who has used the internet for any length of time knows there are large amounts of disturbing content on it which will definitely spill into any user generated content site. I find it hard to believe that 15 separate companies failed to realise this, especially since I would expect their advertising departments to be well read on "the internet".
What I think may be happening is one company latching onto a group of activists with a very reasonable request to get some positive press and a bunch of companies "me too"ing along behind them. 4 companies were named in this article and 2 of them got airtime on NBC with the most inoffensive sound byte ever ("we are against rape"). That's free TV air time in a news slot appealing to your core demographic.