When Facebook is Not Funny - the responsibilities of platform owners

This week, it's all been about Google+ brand pages, and how they stack up against Facebook Pages.

This post isn't really about Google+ however - but it starts out with an appealing feature of Google+ that I noticed.  The page feedback mechanism. I noticed was this, in the corner of each page:

It's a button, so I pressed it.

Yay!  You get to highlight what part of the page has upset you AND black out any bits you don't want to call attention to.  Looks good - makes issue reporting a whole lot easier.  There's no kind of attempt to categorise the problem though, so I'm not sure how Google will be prioritising and reporting on page flags since it's likley that this will be used for innapropriate content as well as issue reporting.

Will Google+ do better than their Facebook counterparts at handling reported content?  We don't know yet - of course Google+ hasn't gained the kind of critical mass to attract 'the wrong kind' of UGC.  (If anyone has experience of flagging content on Google+, please do comment)

But to illustrate just how low Facebook have set the bar at dealing with reports, two examples came my way yesterday.  I had a conversation with the Director of Practice at Beatbullying about what happens to victims of bullying when they make reports to Facebook (answer: often nothing.  Not even an auto-acknowledgement of response, which she says is devastating to them) and I also read this horrifying post from Bianca Bosker on The Huffington Post, highlighting Facebook's lack of action over pages with names such as: "What's 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? My knife."  From the article: 

"A Facebook page bearing this name was among more than half a dozen recently removed by the world's largest social networking site following weeks of outrage online and a Change.org petition that garnered more than 180,000 signatures.

"Though Facebook's terms of use prohibit posting content that is "hateful," "threatening," or "incites violence," getting the social network to take down user-created pages such as "I know a silly little b--ch that needs a good slap" [...] took almost two months, thousands of people, and outspoken criticism on a multitude of social media sites. And even then, more than a dozen in the same vein remain.

"The controversy sheds light on the challenges that Internet companies face when policing individuals' actions online, as well as the difficulty users have in communicating with web behemoths that control hundreds of millions of individual accounts. 

"While sending photos, updates and other personal information to Facebook is a seamless process for users, getting answers from the social networking site about its policies can be far more difficult. Shelby Knox, Change.org's director of organizing for women's rights, noted that weeks went by before Facebook reached out to explain why it would allow pages like "Riding my girlfriend softly so she doesn't wake up" to remain on its site.

"Facebook initially declined to pull the controversial pages, citing users' freedom to voice their opinions and likening the pages to jokes friends might tell over a few beers."

There's a whole great big fat discussion to be had here about what is freedom of speech, where you draw the line, what opinions can and cannot be expressed because of fear of offence.  (In fact, later this month, eModeration is going to a research seminar on this topic as it relates to news media).

But there can be no question that these particular Pages are inciting violence against women and contain "hateful," and "threatening," language. That they are gaining so many thousands of 'likes' from people unafraid to brandish their opinions on their social networking profiles says something about my fellow men that I don't want to hear, and that Facebook can willfully condone them by allowing them to remain is beyond offensive. I think they should be considered criminally liable.  After all they have been notified ...