Hi,Jesus fucking christ, can no one take a joke any more? Honest to god, I had two or three black people in that group. I wonder who flagged the group. Oh well. Satire is dead.
The group The Abercrombie & Fitch Society For the Promotion of Racial Hygiene (BC Chapter) has been removed due to a violation of the Terms of Use.
Continuing to violate the Terms of Use will result in termination of your account.
Facebook Team
EDIT: Added continued correspondence with bitch at facebook.
This is kind of disappointing. The group in question was a satire on Abercrombie's discriminatory hiring practices. It was linked to afjustice.com, a site dedicated to the elimination of such bigotry. They've filed and won a number of lawsuits against the store already. I can only assume that the violation to which you refer is in regard to your non-discriminatory policy, specifically, " you agree not to use the Web site to upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;" The goal of the group was not to cause hate. It was created to draw people's attention to something vulgar, obscene and hateful in the hopes that they would then do something about it. Anyway, I don't expect the group to return, and I'm not going to try to recreate it. I just feel that your conduct policy needs to take into account satire, which has been an effective tool at bringing attention to and ending discrimination for hundreds of years now. Thanks for your time. Terribly sorry for the trouble.
Peter Herman
A few minutes later, facebitch responds:
Hi,
Thank you for explaining the purpose of the group. The problem
with satire on a site like Facebook is it is impossible for
administrators to tell what is harmful and what is meant as a joke.
It is Facebook's policy to remove anything that could be considered
threatening (even if it is just a joke) because it has no way of
verifying who is and isn't getting hurt by the situation. I'm very
sorry for the inconvenience it causes in your case. Hopefully you
can understand the need for Facebook's policy.
Thanks,
By the way, I didn't cut off the signature. There wasn't one. Just "thanks,". :P
4 comments:
Oh, Facebook! You're just mad because I'm on to you.
Yes, gander, and that's really what bothers me most about this whole situation.
I chatted with Facebook. Cordially, as always:
Let me reiterate: It is quite possible "on a site like Facebook... to tell what is harmful and what is meant as a joke." The steps are 1) Read the material in question, looking for helpful satirical hints like the fact that only a moron would take this seriously, 2) Ask the administrator whether or not his joke group is, in fact, a joke, 3) Check the link on the profile to see if perhaps this links to a site that explains the joke, and 4) Examine the membership roster lest you humiliate yourselves by condemning as racist a group whose membership included two black students, and an Asian*.
*Figures are approximate. Original source was deleted without warning, so backups are hard to come by.
Cordially,
Byrne Hobart
Gander, are you serious about that group? God, I'd overload their inbox til they deleted that. That's awful. People piss me off sometimes. They're defining discrimination based on their own version of "ethics". :P
Byrne, woot. Just woot.
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