One of our supporters recently sent this letter to Facebook’s Australian office after we were able to supply him with the address.
This is in a period when the tragic killing of a serving soldier in London apparently by extremists was hijacked by the motley collection of low-life street thugs known as the EDL, whose equally stupid Australian counterpart is the ADL. This is in a period when racist comments were made to and about an Indigenous footballer and sadly were followed by matching remarks from prominent commentators. This is after we have had a spate of racist incidents on public transport.
And of course the bogot bottom-feeders that infest Facebook have been taking full advantage of these events.
So our supporter took them on at various sites for these and other matters where they gather but so concerned was Facebook at the prospect of losing their bogot customer base that they fried his account.
Dear sir/madam I have to write to you by snail mail because you do not publish an email address nor do you have a phone number to call. You have one billion customers but no help desk.
I have been banned by you on several occasions, the first for daring to suggest to channel 9 they should show the greenpeace anti rubbish commercial. I believe you banned 100 or more users that day. More recently a race hate page was set up on your system. I found that page after the Brisbane Times ran a story because the anti-Islam rally the page organised had zero attendees. On the race hate page the organisers have advertised they are calling for recruits for a secret society to wage war against Islam in Australia. Upon seeing this I contacted several police departments, a dozen or so politicians I know and some news outlets. And then you banned me. You leave a race hate page running and you ban the people trying to protect society. I couldn’t inform you because you banned me and to inform you of anything I have to log in. You require on one of the accounts that I provide government photographic ID.
ASIO, the AFP, my local police and my local members of parliament have told me it is illegal for you to ask for photographic ID, and most especially as you had no Australian address, no Australian contact phone number not even a phone number in the USA. So you wont be getting photographic ID.
As for phone numbers, I like to be a part of the 6.3 Billion people who don’t have a mobile phone. Since finding the race hate page being run on your system I have contacted ASIO, because it is establishing a terrorist organisation. I have contacted the CIA in the USA because the race hate page is recruiting citizens of the USA in the USA. I have contacted the FBI because of the USA citizens on that race hate page. I have contacted the Australian federal Police because you are in contravention of many laws by allowing a race hate page to exist, by asking for government photographic ID, by banning Australians from trying to report law infractions. Ditto with the Queensland and NSW police. All the major media outlets are aware of your illegal practices and your total disregard for Australian law and Australians trying to fight racism. Please restore both accounts, I will decide which I want to keep. Please cooperate fully with ASIO, CIA, FBP, AFP and all police departments who contact you and please provide an Australian phone number where concerned citizens can contact you directly without having to get banned because you have no contact address and no way of informing you what illegal actions are happening under your protection.
If you were watching a recent episode of ABC’s The Checkout you will note that even the redoubtable Chaser team were unable to crack the Kremlin of the West.
Yet ironically parts of the Moscow Kremlin these days are freely accessible to locals and foreign tourists.
Welcome to the Kremlin – but not to Facebook
Here’s some screen grabs as Craig Reucassel tries to engage the mysterious Facebook minions.
Facebook delivers the fastest fuckoff in history to Craig Reucassel and The Checkout team
Watch the full segment on Episode 9 Terms and Conditions here
So for those daring enough, here is as much information as we have been able to gather.
Facebook’s Australian office can be found at
FACEBOOK AUSTRALIA Level 31, RBS Tower,
88 Phillip St, Sydney NSW 2000
Level 18 77 King Street Sydney NSW 2000
There is one available e mail address which is meant for the press.
press@facebook.comUPDATE: Even this one now does not work
And the Australian CEO is William Easton and his Facebook page is here
Also remember #FBrape, the Twitter campaign we featured recently? Writing to advertisers and letting them know when social media is being irresponsible does work.
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.
you said it... 