A stencil supporting the Uprising of Women in the Arab World in Cairo. The group is accusing Facebook of censorship. (Photo via Facebook)
On Saturday, I wrote a piece about how Facebook is silencing an uprising of women by blocking the accounts of five administrators of the ?The Uprising of Women in the Arab World? Facebook page.
The blocks began after Dana Bakdounes, a Syrian woman, uploaded a photo of herself as part of the Uprising?s campaign advocating for freedom, rights and independence. In her picture, Dana stood unveiled while holding up an ID picture of herself veiled and a poster that read, ?I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because for 20 years I was not allowed to feel the wind in my hair.?
Since then, Facebook removed the content and blocked the administrators repeatedly with no clear explanation. Administrators of the page shared a post which stated that Facebook removed photos from their campaign because ?fundamentalists and misogynists didn?t like the fact that the woman in the picture had the freedom to choose not to wear her head veil.? Many of the group?s supporters believe that the action might have been a direct consequence of critics of the picture collectively reporting it to Facebook as offensive content. An online protest with the group gathered over 2000 supporters on Facebook questioning the controversial ban.
On Tuesday the story made it to the top of the social news forum Reddit?s ?worldnews? where many questioned the role of Facebook in moderating the content on its pages and thus urged a response from Facebook?s Policy Communication Team. However some of the explanations proved to be untrue.
One statement said:
??We made a mistake. In this case, we mistakenly blocked images from The Uprising of Women in the Arab World Page, and worked to rectify the mistake as soon as we were notified. We're sorry about the accidental removal of this content, and we have already taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future. Additionally, we have removed any blocks on associated accounts and wrote to the admin to explain what happened??
But according the admins, Facebook never wrote to any of them, on the contrary they've been censoring and blocking them since Oct 25 and have never replied to any of their messages.
Another statement by FB team also said:
?..To complicate things further, there was one post that did violate our terms (unrelated to the picture), but this only put a temporary block on a few users and the Page remained up??
The ?post? that violated their terms was a post calling to support Dana on Twitter. That does not violate any of the terms. If it were the case, then why was one of the admins account unblocked after they had initially announced a 30 days block with no explanation? Moreover why don't they mention what was violated??
Well, all bans have been lifted and one of the admins has also received an apology note. But as it looks, Facebook made a terrible mistake by censoring Dana?s picture. The move was widely seen as an attempt to tamper with these women?s freedoms regardless of the technical mishaps that Facebook tried to give explanations for.
That being said, I would like to say that although this event raised many questions about Facebook?s moderation, it should not shift the people?s focus off of the main issue, the women?s uprising in the Arab world and the fact that it is now posing a threat to this world?s equilibrium or ?disequilibrium.?
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