Coexistence among a large group of people can generate conflicts, anyone who has attended a neighborhood meeting knows this. The larger the community, the more diverse interests will surely converge and it will be necessary to establish a moderation to ensure the general well-being. As a professional of group processes, I know that it can be difficult to maintain an environment for healthy harmony, but without due analysis, the rules of coexistence can become extreme.
Today, the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, written in the second half of the seventeenth century, are a reason for censorship by the contemporary social network for the development of feminism. Recently a wave of temporary blocks has been the cause of complaint from my fellow human rights defenders and artists, all classified as “hate speech” by Facebook’s community standards, impersonally reviewed by algorithms that now rate almost any sentence that includes the word “man” as such. One of these blocks was due to the posting of the famous poem by the poet from New Spain and another due to the appointment of the theorist Marcela Lagarde.
So several centuries after the so-called tenth muse revealed herself from the society that guarded the intellectual world for men, Facebook insists on keeping women quiet since any criticism expressed on its platform would violate the strict rules that its group review has filed. On the other hand, the community clinging to ignorance of the political theory of feminism and a detractor of the movement, insists on the use of the word “feminazi” which is not considered a form of discriminatory violence in discourse.
Facebook has a Content Advisory Council, which is entrusted with the task of reviewing appeals of the blocks it interposes and although it is made up of people from various parts of the world in an attempt to promote diversity, they have not managed to permeate a gender equity perspective and their efforts have not been sufficient to even recognize violence. This is not only notorious in the restrictions on users, but in those that are not accepted.
In recent weeks, a call was launched on feminist networks to pull the different social networks of Salgado Macedonio, who had complaints of rape and sexual harassment and whose candidacy for the governor of the State of Guerrero had been approved by MORENA. The demonstration, which only circulated among separatist women’s groups, did not have an echo and Facebook’s response was that no rule was being breached in the face of requests to block.
On the other hand, on more than one occasion, pedophilia groups that operate on Facebook have been found and reported without the network detecting their encouragement. In 2017, a group of Indonesian mothers organized to infiltrate one and managed, together with the police, to capture five perpetrators. The group had more than 7,000 members and it is unknown for how long they operated sharing video material and photographs of child abuse. This, apparently, because the company community rules are not violated.
The scandals that Facebook has had in the past have been several and Zuckerberg has already had to face up to some of them, especially those associated with data privacy. But their work is still insufficient to maintain the virtual space as a safe place for women and children. Added to this today is the criticism of misogyny in its norms that restrict the expression of women while not sanctioning violence against us.
Twitter @lolcanul
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