Facebook won’t remove photo of woman ‘begging to be raped’

Dimi Reider By Dimi Reider November 16, 2012 | Edit

You may have heard about the massive cyber-war against the Reddit group “Creepshot”, which featured users sharing surreptitiously taken pictures of women’s cleavages, upskirts etc. The war hit the headlines when one of the thread’s contributors was revealed to be a school teacher taking pictures of his own students in class. It seems now that some of its denizens have found a new home – Facebook.

Yesterday, a Facebook page titled “Creepshots” posted a photo of a woman in a short skirt with the caption “begging to be raped“:

Facebook won't remove photo of woman 'begging to be raped'

Although almost all 45 comments (at time of writing) were negative and most promised to report the photo to the Facebook admins, 24 hours later it was still there, and users who attempted to report it today got the following response:

“Status: Content Not Removed

Details:Thank you for your report. We carefully reviewed the photo you reported, but found it doesn’t violate our community standard on hate speech so we didn’t remove it.”

Here, for example, is a screenshot of the response given to one user:

Facebook won't remove photo of woman 'begging to be raped'

And here is another:

Facebook won't remove photo of woman 'begging to be raped'

And so on and so on.

How on earth is “begging to be raped” not considered hate speech by Facebook? Seriously, it’s more than just getting them to remove the picture now: Users deserve to know just why the Facebook employee who reviewed the block request did not think this caption was beyond the pale.

Dimi Reider

Dimi (Dmitry) Reider is an Israeli journalist.  His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books,  The New York Times,The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Haaretz,  Jerusalem Post, and  Index on Censorship. "Dimi's Notes" has been quoted and referenced by the following publications:

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