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Anti-Porn Facebook Page is Deleted, Then Restored
Speaking of Facebook pages being unjustly shut down, on Monday the anti-porn Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PornHarms/, run by the non-profit Morality in Media, was abruptly disabled by Facebook. The page had 35,000 "likes" at the time the plug was pulled. Morality in Media CEO Patrick Trueman, who also ran the Facebook page, says he never received any warning from Facebook before the page was removed.
Some time on Wednesday, the page was restored. I had emailed a contact at Facebook to ask why the page was shut down, and he replied later to say that it had been deleted in error and the page had been restored. (He didn't say whether the page was on track to being restored anyway, or whether it would have remained down indefinitely if I hadn't pinged him.)
Facebook did not respond to inquiries as to why the page was removed, but as Evgeny Morozov
has
pointed out
regarding political pages (and as many other users have heard from people's
anecdotal experiences having pages pulled without explanation), it's common for pages on Facebook and YouTube
to get removed that were almost certainly not violating those sites' Terms of Service.
If enough users decide to file "abuse complaints" simultaneously against a piece of content
on Facebook or YouTube, this has a good chance of getting the content removed, whether the complaints were legitimate or were simply part of an organized campaign of filing
false complaints.
Meanwhile, I correspond with dozens of people every week on Facebook (usually people who use my
proxy sites to get on
Facebook at school or work), and about once a week I get an automated message from
Facebook that says, "You have been
sending harassing messages to other users," and goes on to sternly list the types of messages
that violate
Facebook's TOS. (Only twice has this resulted in my account actually getting
locked, and it was unlocked after I bugged my friend at Facebook about it.)
I figure that these are either the result of users clicking "Report this message" accidentally,
or parents hacking into their kids' accounts, reading their messages, and then trying to
get the account shut down of the person
who was talking their kid about proxy sites.
In either case, I assume it's not
the result of an "organized campaign," but perhaps your account gets locked if you're unlucky
enough that two or three people file complaints within
the same short time frame.
So I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trueman's claim that the PornHarms Facebook page never contained any content that violated Facebook's TOS. He says the page mostly contained links to academic research supposedly demonstrating the harmful effects of pornography, and that while the target audience was adult academics, there was nothing in the content that most parents would consider inappropriate for underage viewers. There was certainly no actual pornography on the page, not even in censored form with the fun parts blurred out (although I didn't check every single academic paper linked from the site to see if any of them might have used pixellated/censored porn for illustrative purposes). Trueman also says that they prevented third-party users from posting on the PornHarms page directly, and regularly monitored the page's content to remove any "inappropriate" comments that users had written in response to the officially authorized posts. (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.)
Because of the word "Pornography" in the title of the page, it's also of course possible that a human at Facebook actually did review the complaints, but thought the word "pornography" meant the page was a porn-trading hub, without looking to closely at it. (It's also possible that the word triggered an automated filter at Facebook. Obviously, there is no filter pre-emptively preventing pages with words like "pornography" in the title from being created, since otherwise the page never could have existed in the first place. But it's possible that an automated algorithm does something like the following: If a page receives X complains within time period Y, and the page contains certain keywords in the title or the content, then shut down the page automatically.)
Previously I'd suggested an algorithm that Facebook could use to stop users from coordinating phony complaints in order to shut a page down. The gist was: If a page receives a sufficient number of complaints, have the page reviewed by a random sample (chosen by Facebook) of Facebook users who had signed up to review abuse cases in situations such as these. If enough of those users vote that the page was violating the TOS, the page gets shut down, but if not, then it stays up. What makes this algorithm difficult to abuse, is that in order for a "coordinated mob" to swing the vote of the jury, they would have to comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of the entire set of users that the randomly-selected jury could have been chosen from -- a difficult task if thousands of people have signed up as content reviewers. I offered a $100 prize to be split between readers who submitted the best suggested improvements or criticisms of the idea; their ideas were summarized in a follow-up article. A couple of readers commented that there was no point in debating the idea since I don't work for Facebook and have no influence there; they have a point, but the idea has to start somewhere. If engineers at Facebook are looking for a way to fix the problem, one thing that can be said about this suggestion is that it was posted to a large audience of smart people, and several readers suggested very clever improvements, while nobody found any obviously fatal flaws in it.
It seems pretty likely that a process like that for reviewing abuse complaints, would have saved the Pornography Harms page from being yanked from Facebook. Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS. In my experiences posting surveys on sites like Mechanical Turk, where you can pay users a penny apiece for filling out surveys or performing other tasks, I've gotten the impression that people will take such tasks seriously, even for zero (or virtually zero) pay, if they find them interesting. In the case of the Facebook "jurors" who are voting on whether a page violated the TOS, you're talking about users who voluntarily signed up to be jurors, after all -- not underpaid workers grinding through as many tasks as they can squeeze into their working hours.
Finally, it would be easy to point out the irony of a pro-censorship group being censored (and some people did, on the mailing lists where I saw this news announced), but I don't think that's really fair to Morality in Media, since even MIM doesn't oppose people's right to express their opinions in favor of pornography. Likewise, MIM presumably supports the use of Internet blocking programs in schools, even though their Facebook page (as well as the companion website PornHarms.com) would probably be blocked by default by most Internet blockers because of the word "porn" in the URL -- but even that is not as richly ironic as it would seem. Neither Morality in Media, nor almost anyone else, is in favor of political sites about pornography being blocked because of the word "porn" in the address; presumably they'd just want the error corrected by the blocking company, and if a left-wing site on the opposite side of the debate happened to be blocked because of the word "porn" in the URL, I have no reason to think that Morality in Media would be opposed to correcting that error and unblocking that site as well. So this really isn't a case of them being given "a taste of their own medicine."
No, the real irony in this particular case -- at least, if I did have a role in getting their Facebook page restored -- is that not only would I support their right to express their view (duh), I would support students' right to bypass their school's Internet blocker to view the page from school if they had to, and I would even support the right of under-18-year-olds to view the page even if their parents were specifically trying to block them from it. I highly doubt that even anyone at Morality in Media would go that far.
Without porn, what is the point of the Internet?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
As we all know, "The Internet Is For Porn." Like any large organism, the internet has a sort of immune system that rejects dangerous or invasive entities attempting to disrupt its homeostasis. That is why the facebook page in question was brought down, and why a thick "network cyst, preventing packets from spreading further into the network" is growing around locations like China and Iran.
My theory is that the page was taken down by mistake and the email claiming that is was was basically true. There is probably an algorthim that deletes based on complaints and the appearance of words like "porn." In any case, the page is back up. Nothing to see here, let's move on.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
What is this guy giving to the /. editors to keep getting these useless stories front page'd? Do we really have to be subjected to this guy's "novel" musings over what is essentially a copy of the /. mod system every few weeks?
I have to say. Nothing gives me the chills quite like an organization called "Morality in Media."
I'm dead serious when I say it's only a hop and skip from denying girls education and stoning people for sex before marriage. Their attitudes are derived from the same imperative - moral superiority, and the belief that they have the right to dictate the personal behavior of others.
It's a good thing the constitution denies our government the privilege of restraint on speech, because this is one group I would like to silence.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
You have no right to tell them what is right or wrong to delete.
I'm never good at this--is it irony when someone thinks they have a right to tell people they don't have a right to tell other people to do or not do stuff, or when someone makes it their business to tell someone else, whom presumably they don't know, that something else is none of their business?
What do morals have to do with porn? What could possibly be immoral about displaying one's body, no matter the context? I could understand a claim of indecency, but it's not as if everyone who participates in the creation of porn is exploited. To most, it's simply a job.
I've notice that if an algorithm on Facebook needs revising and it doesn't have something to do with showing more advertisements to more people in more intrusive ways, it usually gets pushed to the back of the queue.
Considering this same group harassed members of a pro-porn Facebook group, and then got their group deleted (despite it not violating the ToS) and then gloated about it, my only problem with this story is that the group got restored, honestly. http://violetblue.posterous.com/my-letter-to-facebook-about-removing-the-our
Facebook can do whatever the fuck they want. Ultimately, it is their site, so why would you get your panties in a bunch over what was deleted?
If facebook "censors" you, it is really of no consequence. Just take your ball and go home if you don't like it. This is not like the government censoring you, or anything of the sort.
Stop whining over what Facebook or twitter deletes or "censors". Its really none of our business. You have no right to tell them what is right or wrong to delete.
I partly agree with the parent. It's reasonable for Facebook to control the algorithms and decisions that affect what content may appear on their site.
On the other hand, various governments may not entirely share this view due to issues around privacy, users' rights to control "their" information, and possibly other concerns.
is the article a series of books?
tl;dr
The trouble is when a "non-governmental entity" grows so large that it becomes a de facto "governmental" body, or filter on what people receive.
Left-wingers and right-wingers like to complain they are being "censored out" from various forms of media. Right-wingers started Faux News specifically because they believed they were not being given a fair shake by the likes of NBC, CBS, etc - and they weren't completely incorrect, though as Stephen Colbert loves to say, "reality has a liberal bias." Left-wingers complain about their lack of representation in talk radio formats, a fair charge given that the owners of most talk-radio formats (including the Clear Channel pseudomonopolists) are crazed right-wingers and "Tea Party" kool-aid drinkers.
If "the government" doesn't censor, but a small number of entities who control the communication channels DO censor heavily, we still have a problem.
"Complaint mobs" are exactly the kind of tactic supposedly christian moralizers use to keep free expression off the airwaves. For instance, the Parents Television Council is responsible for 99% of FCC complaints.
As far as I'm concerned, it's time the pro-censorship crowd gets a taste of their own medicine.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I got bored around paragraph 3 when I still hadn't seen any point -- so facebook automatically takes stuff down if there is a flood of complaints, then manually checks it, then puts it back up if it's ok? Is that not a perfectly reasonable thing to do?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
" (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.) "
The speaker seems to think that opinions should be punished and someone is the arbitor of appropriate.
"Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS"
Assumes that the people that were complaining were thinking that this was a porn site and not complaining that the anti-porn material was the offensive part. There is a body (small it may be ) that upholds the idea that God created the world in 7 days and that Global warming does not exist or its not our problem. I suspect the site has an agenda and does not publish research that shows that there is no harm (I suspect such research exists).
Facebook is free to do whatever it wants, up to and including removing pages for any reason (such as a maybe-organized complaint campaign) or no reason. They own everything involved except the content supplied by users. They are under no obligation to publish or continue publishing any user-provided content. While I can understand how this seems like a big deal on the surface, it just isn't. We all know the rules of this game going into it. And if we don't, we shouldn't be playing.
I am curious as to the popularity of social networks, is it as most of us lead disconnected urban lives, where most of the people we run into through out the day are strangers, Facebook serves as a substitute for the kind of community we used to live in.
WTF is anti-porn?
Walking in on your grandmother in the shower.
You have no right to tell them what is right or wrong to delete.
I'm never good at this--is it irony when someone thinks they have a right to tell people they don't have a right to tell other people to do or not do stuff, or when someone makes it their business to tell someone else, whom presumably they don't know, that something else is none of their business?
That depends on whether you interpret it as a statement of fact or an imperative. Irony would only apply in the latter case.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
They're right you know.
My arms are getting really sore.
^ FTFY.
Imho, TFS: gtfo FB.
-TTFN
If it had been Bennett Halverson then it might have been worth reading.
I'm overwhelmingly anti-censorship, but this group should have remained deleted. I say this not because of their views (which I do strongly disagree with), but rather that they abused Facebook to shut down a perfectly legitimate pro-porn page by lodging false complaints, and then had the nerve to boast about it on their page. That screams "TOS violation" and should be grounds for an immediate and permanent ban, irrespective of their views.
This deserves to be modded to the moon. What hypocrisy, though that's par for the course for moralists.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
That anti-porn site is clearly preaching anti-women hate speech. I've reported them as such.
or leftism starts from a deeper analysis of problems, which doesn't fit into "quick fix" emotional echo-chamber sound-bites.
wheee! i can make up spurious insulting explanations too!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Man that page keeps going up and then down and then up and down and up and down up down up down up down YES!
The trouble is when a "non-governmental entity" grows so large that it becomes a de facto "governmental" body, or filter on what people receive.
Which, ironically, is an effect that anti-porn groups often make use of to censor pornography. Obviously they're less happy when it happens to them.... (Though to be honest most of the Facebook anti-porn groups are probably in repeated violation of their rules on harassment anyway.)
Just followed the link and clicked "Report Page". You have a right to your opinions, but if you will go ahead and get people with opposing viewpoints' Facebook pages deleted, then I'm very glad yours got deleted too. I'm only disappointed a) nobody else got theirs back and b) you got yours back.