Reporting ‘Punch Women’ Facebook Groups
Reporting Facebook groups is all well and good and eventually Facebook takes them down. But we need something more direct.
I feel that groups such as ‘reasons when its acceptable to punch a woman in the face (non sensored)’ [sic] and ’40 Reasons To Punch Guys In The Face. 🙂‘ (this group was deleted by it’s creator 25/02/10 as the creator no longer thought it was funny) are not ironic, funny or outlandish statements. They not only normalise violence, they incite it.
Before the group ‘ reasons when its acceptable to punch a woman in the face” [(ll wall posts and discussions deleted and group closed 24/02/10) underwent a radical change of ethos (I am now an admin btw*) it contained links to videos containing violence towards women and men exchanging stories about their asbos for ‘domestic’ violence. Facebook didn’t remove any of this material – a new admin did because he negotiated with the creator of the group.
The Facebook Safety page contains this statement:
Reporting inappropriate or offensive content. Facebook maintains a robust reporting infrastructure that leverages our hundreds of millions of users to look for offensive or potentially dangerous content. This reporting infrastructure includes links on pages across the Facebook site, systems to prioritise the most serious reports and a team of professional reviewers who respond to reports and escalate them to law enforcement as needed. We encourage our users to report any offensive or inappropriate content by clicking on the “Report” links located on pages throughout the site. We ask all users to report suspicious people and inappropriate content they encounter, and encourage users under the age of 18 to talk to a parent or a responsible adult immediately if someone online says or does something to make them feel uncomfortable or threatened in any way.
But if Facebook does nothing about the reports then what is the use of the report button?
Facebook comes under the legal jurisdiction of Santa Clara, California. If Facebook does nothing about incitement to violence within it’s site then perhaps it’s time to start reporting it to somebody else.
Santa Clara Police Department contact page: http://scpd.org/index.aspx?page=129
California Office of the Attorney General contact page: http://ag.ca.gov/contact.php
* At half seven tonight Lekan Adebanjo removed John and me as admin and posted a message that he was deleting the group. As of 8.15 Lekan has deleted everything and closed the group. All that is left is the info page and the members list.
Earwicga 
My take on these moronic posts is to just ignore them. Despite the internet’s omnipresence today, it is still a largely unregulated medium and there will always be sites like those quoted that will slip through the net.
By not spotlighting these sights do we not reduce the oxygen of publicity rather than risk inflaming their socially and humanitarianly message?
There were 35,000 members of the ‘Reasons when it’s acceptable to punch a woman in the face’ group this morning. If you wish to ignore them then fine. We don’t accept them and won’t ignore them.
Fair comment. I just think you run the risk of giving these groups more power by reacting to their absurd campaigns than if they were genuine political movements, I don’t want to come across as though I don’t take these groups seriously, but I fear that any attempts to shut these groups down will only give more publicity to what is a rather stupid attempt to gain notoriety than any serious campaign.
Ear – THANK YOU so much for working to get this offensive site down! And for refusing to “just ignore” it (although I appreciate Sean’s point that we don’t want to give them any more attention).
I really, really appreciate your work in getting them to shut down!
I’d love to hear how you became an admin of the group. Please write me if you are interested in chatting more. And I’ll let folks know the site’s down as of tonight.