A campaign is piling pressure on Facebook to remove content that promotes sexual violence and degrades women, accumulating more than 220,000 online signatures.
There have been more than 50,000 tweets supporting the FBrape campaign, while 5,000 people have emailed brands which have adverts appearing alongside the content under scrutiny.
The online petition – Demand Facebook Remove Pages That Promote Sexual Violence – had reached more than 222,000 at the time of publication and campaign group Women, Action and the Media (WAM) has written an open letter to the one billion user strong social network.
It read: “We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook.”
The letter calls on Facebook to do three things:
“Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.
“Effectively train moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
“Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.”
Forty women’s groups and individuals are behind the campaign.
Facebook said in a statement: “There is no place on Facebook for hate speech or content that is threatening, or incites violence, and we will not tolerate material deemed to be genuinely or directly harmful.
“We try to react quickly to remove reported language or images that violate our terms and we try to make it very easy for people to report questionable content using links located throughout the site.”
