Facebook could end up changing some of its key policies governing its community standards on online abuse, if the efforts of a group of women from Kerala bear fruit.
In recent years, online abuse and harassment of women who voice opinions on social and political issues have touched worrying proportions, but response from the social network as well as law enforcement agencies have been disappointing.
Earlier this month, a group of Malayali women working in different parts of the world, put their brains together to tackle this issue.
The immediate trigger was the torrent of abuse, including rape threats, faced by Preetha G., a Facebook user who posts regularly on political issues. Several hate pages sprung up in her name.
Though many of her friends reported these pages to Facebook, the company responded that the pages “don’t violate community standards.”
At the same time, following mass reporting by the abusers, Preetha’s and many of her supporters’ pages were shut down by Facebook stating violation of “Real Name Policy,” according to which the users should use only their real name in full for creating profiles.
This scenario led the women to launch ‘For a better FB’ movement, a campaign to make Facebook take a relook at some of its policies.
Key platform
“Facebook has now become a key platform for publication of views and debates. But it has also become an avenue for serious attacks on individuals, especially women. Facebook’s current policies seem to protect the abusers more than the abused and there’s an urgent need to bring some change to this, as FB is a powerful medium of expression,” says Najma Jose, one of the campaigners, who works as an Emulation Engineer in Canada.
As word spread, the movement gained some strong support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital rights group based in the U.S.
Veteran linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky pitched in too. In an e-mail to the group he said — “The treatment of women in South Asian societies has long been shameful and intolerable. The efforts to overcome the scandalous abuse of women in social media merit strong encouragement and support.”
Women’s rights activist and Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Kavita Krishnan has offered her support too.
Language experts
On April 18, a couple of people representing various organisations and other activists working for this cause met with Facebook Policy Heads in the U.S. and India.
One of the demands put forward by the group includes appointing linguist experts who can really understand regional languages and the complexity of the non-English cultures.
They have also asked for a systemized responsive system or dedicated personnel for assessing hate pages in non-English languages and a timely response and follow-up in such situations.
Another key demand is to get rid of the real name policy and its associated proceedings, to allow users to retain their choice of names or even discard caste markers.
The group is waiting for a response from Facebook, after the meeting.
Support from digital rights group, Noam Chomsky
Activists meet Facebook policy heads
