Does Facebook have a problem with women?
Trigger warning.
Does Facebook have a problem with women? The question has been around since 2011 when Eve Ensler and Ms Magazine drew attention to the social networking site's failure to remove misogynistic images that seemed to glorify rape and domestic violence.
Then the issue came back again with users taking to Twitter in recent weeks to express their anger at Facebook's refusal to remove images that tried to make a joke of rape. Two in particular were widely circulated. One showed a woman bound and gagged on a sofa and a caption that read: "It's not rape. If she really didn't want to, she'd have said something." The second showed a condom, beneath the words "Plan A"; an emergency contraceptive pill, "Plan B"; and then "Plan C", a man pushing a woman with a bloodied face down the stairs.
The site's community standards state: "Facebook does not permit hate speech, but distinguishes between serious and humorous speech." What is not clear, in spite of several high-profile campaigns and a Change.org petition that garnered more than 200,000 signatures, is how it makes that distinction. Over the past few years, women say they have been banned from the site and seen their pages removed for posting images of cupcakes iced like labia, pictures of breastfeeding mothers and photographs of women post-mastectomy.
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When I asked if the banned cupcake images could have been removed in error by an automated image scanner, the spokesperson said it was very unlikely. So it was a human decision to ban the image of a cupcake. Just as it is a human decision to allow pages such as "Teen SLUT pics" to continue to publish images of very young-looking girls, with no evidence they gave consent for their photographs to be used.
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It is galling that the largest social networking site is committed to removing images of feminine sexuality unless they pander to the male gaze (pornified/caricature type images and 'creepshots' type stuff is fine with facebook), but treats violence against women as if it is a joke.
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it has become a resource for various groups of activists around the world to communicate online. There are international feminist groups which link other groups from various countries to audiences around the world.
Ceding territory is no way to win a war. 
That said, there are efforts to start independent networking sites but as you might imagine these are slow to get going and don't offer anywhere near the same robustness, at least not yet. Who knows though, in the coming years there might be more viable options.
I hope a viable alternative does arise...I find much of what appears on FB contemptible and spend almost no time there at all. 5 minutes a month at most. 
It's well underway, but not irreversible.
Which of the following do you believe more likely:
1) Like pretty much every non-porn site on the internet, Facebook has a policy of essentially instantly banning nudity and/or racist content -- a policy that does not apply to content considered by feminists to be sexist or insensitive
or...
2) Facebook, with over 1 Billion user accounts and aproximately 500 Million female users, secretly has a problem with women (or even gives a damn about the issue at all).
or...
3) Facebook, the largest social networking site on the planet, with over a billion users, really doesn't care one way or the other, they have no agenda, and their employees spend most of their time running around putting out fires more or less at random.
I learn towards option three. You don't have to. I have a facebook account for my business that I visit once every few months. I think it's a garbage program, I have never really been able to figure out what the hell it's doing, and I have no interest in finding out. But that's my opinion, and it seems a billion people disagree with me. They apparently like the software and like whatever it is that they see posted on the site. So I guess Facebook must be doing something right.
I think it is unfair to blame the entire company, because the issue is really a cultural one. The company is made up of many individuals, and these people are tasked with determining whether something is "humorous" or "harmful". At this point, they apparently only consider direct, physiological harm as being worthy of consideration, but these toxic, misogynist ideas are harmful, on a very fundamental level.
I think part of the solution is better training for these employees, but first management needs to understand that our culture is changing. Rape jokes aren't acceptable anymore. Domestic violence isn't a 'personal matter' anymore, its a serious problem. Stalking women and girls is considered a crime in many places, and purient photos taken without permission should be taken down.
But we are just now beginning to see the resurgence of the women's liberation movement which sadly stalled not long after MacKinnon managed to get sexual harassment at the workplace defined as a crime. So the entire world has a lot of catching up to do (with Nordic / Scandinavian countries so ably leading the way), and facebook can he dragged kicking and screaming or they can decide based on events around the world and the feedback they're getting to take a more proactive approach. I can promise you feminists aren't holding their collective breath and hoping for the best. As so many women around the world have so aptly demonstrated in recent months, we are taking the bull by the horns.
There is, for instance, a group that describes people with Asperger syndrome as "Ass-Pies". Despite repeated alerts, it's still there.
Then again, ever alert on sexist, homophobic or ableist crap here at DU? Dollars to doughnuts the jury will vote to LEAVE IT. 
That picture is one of the most population examples of the double standard Facebook employs.
Barely covered patriarchy-pleasing pornified boobs? YES!
Tattooed chest with no boobs at all? NO!
