We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook. Specifically, we call on you, Facebook, to take three actions:
- 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.
To this end, we are calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site. (We will be raising awareness and contacting advertisers on Twitter using the hashtag #FBrape.)
Specifically, we are referring to groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about. Pages currently appearing on Facebook include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus, Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich, Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs, Raping your Girlfriend and many, many more. Images appearing on Facebook include photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up” and “Next time don’t get pregnant.”
These pages and images are approved by your moderators, while you regularly remove content such as pictures of women breastfeeding, women post-mastectomy and artistic representations of women’s bodies. In addition, women’s political speech, involving the use of their bodies in non-sexualized ways for protest, is regularly banned as pornographic, while pornographic content – prohibited by your own guidelines – remains. It appears that Facebook considers violence against women to be less offensive than non-violent images of women’s bodies, and that the only acceptable representation of women’s nudity are those in which women appear as sex objects or the victims of abuse. Your common practice of allowing this content by appending a [humor] disclaimer to said content literally treats violence targeting women as a joke.
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” --Malcolm X
by J. Slavyanski
1. Constantly insist that Marxism is discredited, outdated, and totally dead and buried. Then proceed to build a lucrative career on beating that supposedly ‘dead’ horse for the rest of your working life.
2. Remember, any unnatural death that…Have to specifically reblog for my favorite one:
20. Praise the newfound “freedom” of Eastern Europe. Ignore the massive depopulation via migration, plunging birthrates, huge alcohol and drug problems, political instability, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking and child prostitution, organized crime, high suicide rates, unemployment, disease, etc. Who cares about all that when you have freedom of speech?!
my favorite is “8. Everyone ever arrested under a Communist regime was most likely innocent of any crime. Communists only arrested harmless poets and political prophets who had a beautiful message to share with the world.”
37. Always insist that despite the location, country, historical era, past experience, and all other factors, Communists must want to recreate a modern-day copy of Stalin’s Russia, and all that entails according to you. Do not notice the inherent idiocy in this concept, such as your particular country being already industrialized, and not having a historical problem of severe backwardness.
38. Learn to use the magic word ‘totalitarian’. This word allows you to link two ideological opposites, Communism and Fascism.
39. Ignore the fact that socialist states experienced more economic problems parallel to the number of market reforms they made.
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These are my Favorites though the last one does not leave Stalin off the hook as he at best ignored the contradictions that accumulated with the introduction of NEP in Lenin’s time with every leadership in the USSR after introducing capitalist/market methods and reforms of one character or another until the implosion of the USSR.
It’s a choice confronting more than 180 native communities in Alaska, which are flooding and losing land because of the ice melt that is part of the changing climate.
In a special three part series on the imminent crisis, the Guardian has visited Newtok and spoken to the villagers, politicians and climate scientists about their plight. You canThe Guardian covers “climate refugees” in America.
mmmm well I am still thinking that the people displaced by Katrina hurricane would better qualify though alot of human neglect in infrastructure was involved with that one too…this one is without doubt soley due to climate change
On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped explosives containing C-4 on the roof of a house where members of the black liberation & social justice organization MOVE lived. Right before, police attacked the house with 10,000 rounds of ammunition in 90 minutes, knowing that children were inside. The house burned for 45 minutes before hoses were turned on.
Eleven people, including founder John Africa, five adults & five children were killed. The incident also destroyed 65 homes in the area, leaving 250 homeless. Witnesses reported police officers shooting at those trying to escape from the fire that ensued.
MOVE continues to advocate for prisoners’ rights & for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal & nine MOVE members who were found guilty of the murder of a police officer in 1978.
As we celebrate Mother’s day, we also honor all the moms who can’t be with their children today because of detention and deportations: Not one more mother taken away!
You can be part of keeping one mom, Sandra Figueroa, with her daughter Katherine by signing this petition.
Hoy celebramos el día de las madres y también honramos a todas las madres que están separadas de sus hijos a causa de detención o deportación. Ni una más!Via National Day Laborer Organizing Network
By Ibrahim al-Amin, Al-Akhbar
Iran and Hezbollah may not be under any pressure to respond to Israel’s strike, but certainly many of Assad’s supporters are asking: why not reply?
The following considerations have to be taken into account:
1) The nature of the attack has put Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria in the same boat and therefore any decision to respond can only arise from an understanding after discussions among all three parties.
2) Syria and its allies understand that the priority today is the internal front. As long as Iran and Hezbollah are accusing the armed opposition of being in the Israeli camp, a blow to them is tantamount to a blow to the Zionists behind them.
3) Israel is not stupid enough to believe that such one-off strikes are enough to change the rules of engagement. A change of this sort requires more protracted confrontations like the ones that took place between the Resistance in Lebanon and Israel in the 1990s, which could easily spark a wider war, the extent of which no one can accurately predict.
Given these circumstance, we can conclude the following:
- Those who want an immediate response should look in the direction of Iran and Hezbollah. There are enough indicators on that front to suggest that there is no escaping some kind of reply.
- Whoever was hoping that the Israeli strikes would tip the balance in favor of the opposition should await the results of the coming battles, which promise to be more ferocious than the ones we’ve seen over the past four months.
- There are a growing number of developments that increasingly suggest that a wider war is on the horizon, the nature and timing of which depend on many factors.
Finally, it is important to point out that events in Syria no longer have any relation to something called a revolution; it is an armed insurgency by forces opposed to the Syrian state and all that it stands for. It is an act of great stupidity.
Though when I think response my mind is on Syria being more aggressive to defend oneself when Israelis attacks do happen rather then a response attack after the fact.
