NRL joins hunt for troll behind Inglis racial slur
July 24, 2013
Glenn Jackson Rugby League Writer
Greg Inglis with partner Sally Photo: Dallas Kilponen
The racial slur against Greg Inglis on social media has attracted the ire of the highest office in the sport, with NRL chief executive Dave Smith condemning the online comments while promising assistance in identifying the perpetrator.
Smith described the Instagram post aimed at Inglis, the South Sydney fullback, and his wife Sally as “abhorrent” on Wednesday night as the Rabbitohs players rallied around their teammate.
“Racism in any form is abhorrent and contrary to every value our game,” Smith said. “This applies on the field, in the grandstand and in any walk of life.
Racial abuse: A troll has targeted Greg Inglis and his wife highly offensive comments to a picture on Instagram. Photo: Getty Images
“Greg is a wonderful athlete and a great role model for our game, and this attack on him and his family is shameful.”
Souths officials have been trying to track down the source of the unsavoury post, which was directed at Inglis and his wife on Tuesday night. The NRL will also investigate “the extent to which the person can be identified and what action can be taken”.
The post was written as a comment on an Instagram photo of the Test representative and wife. In response, Inglis took a screenshot and forwarded the offending remarks to journalists on Twitter.
And here’s a sample of comments made by NRL identities in support of Inglis. Moreover, the majority of readers’ comments in the SMH were supportive of him and disgusted with the cowardly troll.
Nathan Merritt: “It’s not appropriate. But I think it’s going to get taken care of. There’s no place in the world for it.”
Rabbitohs’ prop Jeff Lima described the act as cowardly.
“These things need to be stamped out,” Lima said. “The sooner they stamp it out, the better it’ll be for everyone. There’s a lot of bad people in the world.”
Roy Asotasi : “Racism is not acceptable in this country or anywhere…the more that we’re open about it, and aware that there is racism out there, we can obviously prevent it from happening,”
The sickening comment read in part: “I steered [sic] in your face for more than a hour trying to classify your race but I failed I didn’t not find any human catagories[sic] to classify you on it.”
It went on to further disparage Inglis’ background and his relationship with his wife. Inglis re-posted the comment on his Twitter account, with the hashtag “#racism#it#stops#with#me”.(SMH)
The troll trawls Instagram and associated sites under the nick “beauty_lovero”. It uses a stock photo of movie star Jennifer Aniston as its profile pic.
The whole tone of the comment has the stench of white supremacist about it.
It makes unwanted comments under photographs of young women. It also makes disparaging comments under pictures which it doesn’t like. For instance there was a shot of American parents and their adopted multiracial family which Coward objected to. The offensive comment was removed, probably by one of the parents.
Here are some more comments from random sites. Obviously English is not one of Coward’s strong points, nor is sanity.
We like to imagine what the NRL would do if it ever got hold of that cowardly creep
And Facebook owns Instagram. Given Mark Zuckerberg’s cavalier and careless attitude towards racism we are probably not surprised.
And it’s a great big ‘thumbs down’ from us to Facebook.
One of the downsides of the world’s largest social networking site is its facilitation of hate speech, misogyny, homophobia and racism.
Facebook has more than 1 billion users, a demographic so large that it stands to reason pockets of it would exist to entertain the worst of humanity’s bottom-feeders. While you can’t blame an organisation that provides a free service for attracting rape apologists, racists, homophobes, misogynists and hate-filled bigots, you can hold them to account for knowingly facilitating this kind of behaviour, hiding behind the banner of “free speech” to defend pages with titles like “I kill bitches like you”, “I love the Rape Van” and “Raping Babies because you’re f—ing fearless”. And if they still refuse to address it, reasoning that their reach and influence is so great that not even a bunch of panty-twisted feminazis can dent their huge success, then you attack their bottom line.
It’s exactly the motivation behind the #FBrape campaign currently being run by a trio of online feminist activists. Jaclyn Friedman from Women, Action & the Media (WAM!), Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, and writer Soraya Chemaly have joined forces to urge Facebook to take seriously the bilious swill that masquerades as humour on their website, and that so often makes the rape, assault and even murder of women and children their punchlines.
There’s an absurd irony in the fact that Facebook seems to take a zero tolerance policy to the uploading of breastfeeding photos (many users have been reported and even temporarily banned for sharing images of them feeding their babies), yet it took weeks and a Change.org petition with more than 100,000 signatures to get Facebook to remove a “humour” page called “What’s 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? My knife” and that they continue to respond to images urging the rape of women with tepid excuses like this (after the jump).
The #FBrape campaign began with an Open Letter to Facebook and continues by asking people to notify advertisers when their ads appear on pages promoting misogyny and violence. The algorithms of Facebook mean that ads appear dependent on the users; an ad for Samsung might appear on a page urging its users to “Kick a Slut today” simply because a user happens to have a fondness for both violence and photographic composition (or perhaps even both, given by how many photographs and videos of women and girls being raped have made their way onto the social network.)
But while a company mightn’t elect to advertise on a page that tries to pass off the trauma of rape as “controversial humour”, knowing that it could appear that way without their permission is what underpins the #FBrape campaign. Since the campaign launched last week, companies have already begun pulling advertising, a trend that will hopefully gather momentum as more organisations realise the value in defending women against what representatives from Facebook have referred to as “rude jokes”.
Look, I love a rude joke. I don’t even subscribe to the view that jokes about rape can never be funny. But as Molly Ivins once said: “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful … When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it is vulgar.”
The reason misogyny runs so rampant online is because it’s completely facilitated by our culture. As a woman, I find jokes that make fun of rape culture hilarious. What I don’t find funny is a joke that relies upon the sexual degradation and torture of a woman to raise a laugh. I especially don’t appreciate the minions of Mark Zuckerberg, whose media empire began as a way for Harvard students to minimise the worth of the women in their community by rating their attractiveness, telling me that the real problem here is political correctness and sensitivity.
Male rape “humorists” of Facebook, you try living in a world where one in five of you will be raped in your lifetime; where safety is never guaranteed because even if you haven’t been raped yet, you still could be; where it is common and not rare for your friends to confide in you the stories of their own sexual assaults, some of whom have been victimised multiple times; where when you are raped, you’re reminded of all the ways it was probably your fault; where the leading cause of death among women aged 15 to 44 isn’t heart disease or cancer, but domestic violence; where less than 1 per cent of all sexual assault charges will result in a conviction, because no one wants to ruin the promising futures of young men who “made a mistake”; and where the biggest concern in all of this is not how the perpetuation of these kinds of jokes tell women that they’re nothing, but whether or not a person’s freedom of speech is being threatened.
But more than that, more than the violence, more than the blatant misogyny – you try living in a world where you are reminded at every turn that you’re not allowed to complain about the joke, because you are the joke. And when you’ve come close to experiencing what that feels like, to be marginalised as fodder for juvenile male humour, to be treated as a punchline in more ways than one, and to be expected to laugh along with it so as not to spoil the fun for all the boys who find the idea of kicking you in the vagina “hilarious”, then you tell us to stop being so goddamn sensitive about everything.
Petulantly arguing for your right to unleash violent misogyny free from persecution or criticism doesn’t just misunderstand the concept of free speech, it also betrays an ironic sense of entitlement. Women are expected to endure attitudes whose logical conclusions result in them being beaten, raped and sometimes killed, with any complaints thrown back in their face with a specially tailored threat to accompany it. But tell any one of these so called freedom fighters that their jokes are a hideous insight into their own warped minds and it’s like Stonewall all over again.
This is what the #FBrape campaign is revealing – the insidious, nasty entitlement of cultural misogyny and its skittish reaction to anything that threatens its absolute right to continue unchecked. It’s also why I’m lending it my full support. Like Friedman, Bates and Chemaly, I’m over it. I’m tired of being expected to applaud the continued degradation of my people, to marvel at the cleverness of juvenile, angry sexism, to laugh along as these men show me in every foul, unimaginative, aggressive way possible that they think I’m nothing more than a series of holes for them to violate as they please. You should be too.
NB: Men are the victims of rape and violence too – most often at the hands of other men. And while their trauma is real and far reaching, it has yet to be further compounded by a culture that continuously reminds them of how little control they have over their own bodies and safety. Male rape jokes revolve around the threat of prison issued punishment. Female rape jokes are about ownership. In both situations, it’s about the dominant patriarchy wielding masculine power. This isn’t a fight between men and women. It’s a fight between people who respect women as equal human beings and people who don’t.
According to the film, The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg conceived and founded Facebook largely as a result of being rejected by his girlfriend at the time.
So perhaps we must ask ourselves whether Facebook is merely a gigantic pervasive adolescent frat-boy fantasy theme park based on the need for acceptance and the need for the socially anxious to hang with the cool people and become awesome (and score women of course)
Adolescents are in the process of becoming adults. As part of that process they exhibit a number of characteristics, many of which are irritating to the real adults in their lives.
unrealistic expectations
pre-occupation with self – everyone is like me
preoccupation with image
overwhelming desire for acceptance
black and white thinking
impulsivity
However in the real world, in order to survive, adolescents need to grow up.
Unrealistic expectations
We are told that Facebook has a physical workforce at its US headquarters of around 4000 people. This is supposed to ensure the smooth running of an organisation which has a customer base estimated at one billion
Some four billion pieces of content are shared every day by 845 million users. And while most are harmless, it has recently come to light that the site is brimming with paedophilia, pornography, racism and violence – all moderated by outsourced, poorly vetted workers in third world countries paid just $1 an hour. (Daily Telegraph UK)
However this kind of “moderation” is full of pitfalls and is open to abuse as pointed out by activist Segway Jeremy Ryan who got his account compromised while campaigning against the Governor of Wisconsin’s planned budget cuts.
Trolls are now having activists removed by filing fake Facebook complaints. That is right, people are suppressing information in Wisconsin by actively reporting people they deem to be a threat on Facebook. I myself have been reported and banned for one to three days for simply posting “Good job” or “The majority of Wisconsin doesn’t like Scott Walker.” People have been reported on pages for saying nothing more than my name and have been reprimanded by Facebook. The strategy is simple and Facebook lets it continue. If someone reports something as abusive to Facebook they don’t actually look at it, they just remove it and warn the person who posted it. If you get enough you are not able to dispute them at all, and with no admin contacts and no one at Facebook actually looking at the posts reported as “abusive,” the person gets blocked.
Pre-occupation with self – everyone is like me
Mark Zuckerberg, it is said, wants the world to be an open place where everyone is transparent (except for the Facebook business model but that’s another story) So much so it seems that Facebook managed to upset no less a person than acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning British author Salman Rushdie.
So while racists, bigoted, anti-woman Facebook hate sites abound, if you dare show a picture of a happy nursing mum and her baby you are likely to get a bot warning from oDesk.
Or as one wit put it “Jew-haters are welcome on Facebook as long as they are not lactating”.
Your warning would look like this:
And if you are really really lucky you might get one of these, complete with either space tags or misplaced end tags, just to underline and emphasise its innate stupidity.
The Gold Medal for Facebook Stupidity is an e mail like this one below. And again note the tags.
The item in question was actually this. We remember it well, it was posted at TAB Facebook page and mass reported despite being neither obscene nor featuring real people.
Then again the racists didn’t like it…
Apparently Zuckerberg and the kiddies came up with this “solution” for the problem of undesirable content on Facebook.
Well hey we could really see how that one would work…
Err Mark, which planet are you on again?
Sorry Mark, from our point of view most anti-discrimination activists are way past the age of having teachers and some of us don’t even have parents. It might work if our “trusted friend” was this err…person.
The “trusted friend” we’d like to have
Desire for acceptance
Facebook goes out of its way to be accepted as THE universal social network platform. Its whole business bottom line is based on that premise. The more fools click on the ads and sign up for the data miners, the more money Facebook makes.
In doing so it hosts a variety of fringe wackos who’d be hard pressed writing their own names in the real world.
On Facebook, you do not need the rudimentary web skills you require to run a message board for instance. So that’s why racists, bigots and other semi-literate hate mongers have flocked there in droves rather than gathering at other longer-established hate sites like Scumfront or Winds of Jihad, where they can mix exclusively with others of their kind.
And this is why.
Not only does Facebook give them a laughably easy platform to use, it also lets them share a space with the mainstream. It is rather analogous to the local crack dealer setting up a store on the village green, rather than hiding away in a dark alley.
Hello kiddies. Welcome to Freakbook. We want you to make us very happy…(League of Gentlemen)
So when the kids get onto Facebook to interact with their real-life friends, there’s a whole bunch of Fuck Off We’re Full-type sites just waiting to groom them and entice them in. Something which did not escape this critic from an atheist site.
As far as Facebook pages and groups go, we use the living-room test at TAB for sites. Would you allow the people on site XYZ into your living room? If the answer is NO then we shouldn’t have to endure their intrusion into our space. In real life we do not choose to, nor do we have to associate with, racists, bigots and the like. And we can ensure our kids are kept away from haters.
Of course Zuckerberg apologises. In fact he does so often. Perhaps a little too often for someone who is trying to float a public company. Maybe that’s why savvy share buyers have stayed away in droves – that and everything else we have outlined.
In fact Better Business Bureau gave Facebook an “F” rating with the following comment
Our opinion of what this rating means:
We strongly question the company’s reliability for reasons such as that they have failed to respond to complaints, their advertising is grossly misleading, they are not in compliance with the law’s licensing or registration requirements, their complaints contain especially serious allegations, or the company’s industry is known for its fraudulent business practices.
Impulsivity
One day Zuckerberg must have awoken with a brilliant thought bubble. Why not allow users themselves to police the Facebook site? That way he wouldn’t be forking out hundreds of thousands to pay a bunch of nerds to moderate content.
This sounds nice and cosy at first, not to mention cheap as chips, until you take a look at the calibre of some of the Facebook users. You don’t have to go very far to do that.
Just check out the names on our very own tag cloud.
From Wikipedia:
Enabling of Harassment
Facebook instituted a policy by which it is now self-policed by the community of Facebook users. Some users have complained that this policy allows Facebook to empower abusive users to harass them by allowing them to submit reports on even benign comments and photos as being “offensive” or “in violation of Facebook Rights and Responsibilities” and that enough of these reports result in the user who is being harassed in this way getting their account blocked for a predetermined number of days or weeks, or even deactivated entirely…In addition, Facebook does not ban the IPs of users who have proven to create multiple accounts for the purposes of trolling or stalking others, thereby enabling the harasser, even if they do have one of the offending accounts deactivated, to simply create another one and continue the harassment with no lasting consequences
Take a look at what happened recently to one of our sister sites, a group which exposes racism directed at Indigenous Australians.
And it gets better. After being criticised by our own AFP’s cyber crime unit Facebook responded thus:
Facebook is a service devoted to helping people share and making the world more open and connected.
As such, we often must balance the need for freedom of expression and the even greater need of preventing any harm to the people who use our service.
To achieve this balance, when we write our policies, we must exclude offensiveness when determining which pages are harmful.
So it seems thanks to Facebook we now have a new definition of “offensiveness”. “Offensiveness” according to Facebook are violations of areas which most of the civilised world has long decided are no-go areas.
Facebook regards the following as mere “offensiveness” it seems – racism, religious bigotry, particularly directed at Muslims and Jews ( including Holocaust denial and Protocol-style vilifying myths about Muslims), but also at Indigenous Australians, misogyny, homophobia, bullying, intimidation, defamation, identity theft and the propagation of violent political ideologies such as neo-Nazism.
And speaking of names, this is what Facebook’s apologist Simon Axten thinks of activists who wish to conceal their identities.
And when asked to respond to a request for assistance from no less an agency than the WA Human Rights Commission, this was his glib reply.
In Australia for anti-racists and other social justice activists, having to reveal your identity can mean harassment, intimidation and violence from your enemies.In many other countries it can mean imprisonment, torture and death. But this obviously doesn’t bother Simon.
And his photo. Watch for him in the better Sydney eateries.
Here’s William Easton. No doubt the identity thieves at Facebook will be grabbing this.
Unlike what is demanded of Facebook members, William is a tad shy about revealing his contact details so that we can send our complaints to him. So we might help him out with a Facebook-style fatwa he can use. It’s a lot more honest than the one Facebook is using at the moment.
BONUS No tedious <br><br>
Feel free to post it to your own profile, use it on your blogs and annoy Facebook with it.
Facebook takes its overarching responsibility to protect its users from the uncovered human female nipple very very very seriously
Squads of vigilant non-bot human admins scour the pages, gimlet-eyed, fingers ever-paused over the database delete button, ever alert to the glow of an areola or the actual wink of a nipple itself. Female nipples that is.
So it was no surprise to read at Yahoo Newsjust after we published a post detailing vile Facebook-based defamation of an anti-racist activist, how Facebook was responding to an activist group of breast-feeding mums and their babies.
Anyone who runs an activist group on Facebook and who has attempted to get them to act on legitimate complaints will be very familiar with the stone-walling experienced by the activist mothers detailed below.
We can imagine what happened to the letters of protest once building management got their hands on them. We wonder why Facebook’s Australian reps were so afraid of. That they’d be asked to change nappies?
Double standards really. Blatant racism, hate speeches and pages are ok, as well as young women posing semi nude in front of mirrors in their bedroom or bathroom BUT a baby having a feed deemed explicit?! The world has gone MAD!!!!
So for future reference for those women and for others aggrieved by Facebook’s poor management of legitimate complaints and poor management of its site administration we are going to publish as much detail as we can about how to contact your not-so-friendly Australian Facebook rep.
Facebook’s Australian representative is Stuart Wragg
He is CEO of a spin doctor PR company called N2N Communications
Despite a campaign that included 180,000 signatures, Facebook continues to post pro-rape pages, showing, yet again, that they care about users so long as they’re profitable.
December 12, 2011 |
Since August, tens of thousands of Internet activists have taken to social media to protest a social media giant — Facebook — for its apparent tolerance of user-created pages that make sexual violence into a punchline. The pages, with titles like “Riding your Girlfriend softly, Cause you dont [sic] want to wake her up” and “Kicking Sluts in the Vagina,” have been common to Facebook for some time, but campaigns against them began when a Facebook representative commented to the BBC on its decision not to remove that kind of content, stating, “Just as telling a rude joke won’t get you thrown out of your local pub, it won’t get you thrown off Facebook.” The pub analogy comment circulated among feminist activists on Facebook, and it was quoted widely on blogs, sparking a series of petitions that circulated for months, demanding the removal of the pages. When Facebook failed to respond, online activists organized a Twitter hashtag Day of Action, #notfunnyfacebook, to further pressure Facebook to enforce its own terms of service and hold its users accountable. Finally, following the Twitter action, Facebook elected to delete a few of the pages. It also allowed others to remain, so long as they were retitled as parodies.
The victory came as a half-hearted one for activists, who, with more than 180,000 signatures and hundreds of Twitter participants on their side, had not been able to call Facebook to account. New pro-rape pages are still being posted. One I just visited is called “That one slut you have always wanted to kick in the face.” After scrolling past three nearly identical wall announcements explaining how I could make easy money at home today (not involving, as I had first assumed, being “slutty”), I found a handful of nasty comments, all so poorly spelled it would be difficult for them to retain any air of menace. Then I recalled the anonymous person who scrawled “FAGETS” on the wall of a student organization I worked with in college. Then I saw what the page was really used for: with the “tag a user in this post” function, fans of the page could add the name of their intended target to their wall post, and that target would potentially see the post and the threat. It made me queasy.
If it was not clear before, we must understand now that Facebook wasn’t built for us — it was built for the profit of the very few. That Facebook is of value to the public as a communications platform is only important to Facebook insofar as it allows them to sell targeted advertising against our own speech. Its governing document, the Terms of Service, has been repeatedly applied unfairly and without accountability to its users, as its purpose is to legally protect Facebook from our conduct, not provide us with a free space, or even a safe space. Facebook needs to be only as minimally welcoming to us so as to ensure our return to use it again. And that we might use Facebook as a public square for activism? Not even in the business model.
Activists calling attention to violence against women have experienced similarly bizarre treatment by Facebook. When women’s rights activists in India had their Facebook pages defaced with violent messages and sexually explicit photos, they swiftly complained to Facebook, which responded by disabling the activists’ own accounts. How could Facebook have made such a rotten call? To a certain extent, it was to the credit of the activists and the genius of their message: they titled their Facebook page the “Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women” and adorned it with a bright pink pair of chaddi (women’s underwear), inviting supporters to send a pair of their own to their target: members of a right-wing group who led attacks against women in pubs around Valentine’s Day in 2009. Within a matter of weeks, they gathered over 5,000 supporters and international media attention. The irony, that a group of outspoken women’s rights activists would take to Facebook to denounce restrictions on women’s freedom, only to be attacked again on Facebook, and then shut down by Facebook when it demanded action to remove the hateful comments, is something of a social media ouroboros. As organizer Nisha Susan wrote at the time, “The first rule of Facebook activism seems to be ‘Don’t use Facebook.’”
The insidious thing about most any online activism that relies primarily on social media is that it depends significantly upon the permission and whims of a corporation. Employees at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others are at liberty to apply their terms of service as they choose, and users — the public — have little recourse. Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, encourages us to think of corporate-owned websites along the same lines as the privately owned public spaces where the Occupy movement has staged its protests. As a platform for civic action, social media websites operate much like Zuccotti Park: at any time, if their owners declare our actions there to be in violation of their rules, they can just summon clean-up crews to break things up.
It’s not all doom and censorship on Facebook, of course. Digging into the profiles of users who had “liked” some of the rape-is-funny pages, feminist writer Amanda Marcotte created a little dossier on a few of them. As Facebook requires users to set up their profiles using a real name, you don’t need a subpoena to click through and learn about these rape page fans’ hometowns, employers, and even relationship statuses. Here, the terms of service on Facebook allow for quite a different experience of unmasking a sexist harasser than, say, tracking down the endless legion of anonymous troll commenters who leave little more than an IP address behind as a calling card.
Given these ongoing battles — and opportunities — for free speech online, journalist, censorship expert, and Internet freedom activist Rebecca MacKinnon offers this bold solution: we, as users and the public, must take back the Internet. We must demand a voice as those who are now governed, not just by states but by businesses. In her forthcoming book, The Consent of the Networked, MacKinnon proposes we need a new Magna Carta with Internet companies who use terms of service to regulate our speech, to assert our rights, and to center the civic interest, not corporate profit.
The heart of these companies — their reliance on our speech, our presence, our consent — is where we should aim our calls for transparency and accountability. Demanding that already dysfunctional terms of service be applied more harshly can only intensify the mandate of a corporation like Facebook to further regulate users’ speech. This isn’t to say that users who harass and threaten others should not be held accountable. Rather, we must remember that the mechanisms currently in place are blunt, do not serve the public, and in fact, have been turned against us.
Melissa Gira Grant has written for Slate, the Guardian (UK), the New York Observer and Jezebel, among others. Follow her on Twitter: @melissagira.
Facebook has been criticised for not removing a controversial page which victim support charities say trivialises and jokes about rape.
The group page, called “You know she’s playing hard to get when your chasing her down an alleyway”, has 194,370 likes on the social networking site.
Victim support groups have called it “disgusting”.
Companies that advertise on Facebook have demanded their adverts be removed from the page.
Continue reading the main story
Facebook is a significant social force and it gives quite a worrying picture of how they view women if breastfeeding is considered obscene and rape is not
Orlagh, a 22-year-old student from Belfast who did not want to disclose her full name, saw the page and became concerned.
She said: “This is not just a joke. There are people on there who are advocating rape and there are people on there apparently confessing to rape.
“Facebook is a significant social force and it gives quite a worrying picture of how they view women if breastfeeding is considered obscene and rape is not.”
On its terms and conditions Facebook said: “You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”
Orlagh and many victim support charities argue that this group breaches these rules.
They have started a petition calling for the page to be removed.
When first contacted by the BBC in August, Facebook refused to remove the page saying the site wanted to allow freedom of expression.
“It is very important to point out that what one person finds offensive another can find entertaining, just as telling a rude joke won’t get you thrown out of your local pub, it won’t get you thrown off Facebook,” a statement said.
Facebook has previously barred pictures from breastfeeding mothers
Facebook has previously barred pictures from breastfeeding mothers
Some of the big companies that pay Facebook to advertise on the social networking site have asked for their adverts to be removed from the group.
Sony, American Express and BlackBerry have had their demands answered and in the last few days all advertising has been removed on the group.
Despite this pressure Facebook has maintained its position.
A further statement said: “Groups or pages that express an opinion on a state, institution, or set of beliefs – even if that opinion is outrageous or offensive to some – do not by themselves violate our policies.
“These online discussions are a reflection of those happening offline, where conversations happen freely in people’s homes, in cafes and on the telephone.”
It said that more than 800 million people around the world used Facebook as a place to discuss and share things that are important to them.
It states these can be about controversial topics but does not mean they violate its policies.
On the site many users defend the page.
Tinamarie Smith agrees with Facebook and said it was about freedom of speech.
She said: “This group has nothing to do with rape its only a bit of fun if u don’t like it then don’t read it… I’m not saying rape is a good thing its very bad but when ur stressing someone about a joke then u really need to get a life.”
you said it... 