Feminists vs. Facebook

Article here. Excerpt:

'Of course there is some real, gross misogyny on the Web. But how likely is it that a Facebook user would encounter such content on the site without actively looking for it? For the record, its existence was news to me after several years of Facebook activity. The now-removed pages were hardly popular: a Google cache shows that “Violently raping your friends, just for laughs” had a whopping 17 “likes”; “Kicking your girlfriend in the fanny because she won’t make you a sandwich” had 34. (That’s one fewer than the still-existing “Dumping your boyfriend via castration”.) On the HuffPost Live panel, Friedman and co-campaigner Laura Bates talked about women being driven off Facebook by sexism, but the evidence is, once again, strictly anecdotal. Non-anecdotally, women were 57 percent of Facebook users last year. Friedman also claimed that Facebook staff is “overwhelmingly male”; actually, in 2011, it was about one-third female, the best among the major technology companies.
...
Now, the feminist protest coalition is pushing advertisers to drop Facebook unless the company takes appropriate action. ... The activists clearly don’t want equal treatment for what could be considered gender-based hate speech against men, such as the Facebook page “Beating up your boyfriend to keep him in line” (which is still online and has over 16,000 “likes”)—or a feminist “satire” exhorting the average man not to rape women, which has over a thousand Facebook shares.

People have every right to speak out against bigotry and bashing—and to ask moderated websites to reject noxious content. But letting ideologues dictate the boundaries of acceptable speech on a large area of the Internet is a very bad idea.'