Facebook, Twitter, and Hate Speech Policies

As mentioned, given the increasing episodes of online harassment and their reports in international press coverage, some major SNSs have developed specific policies to counter this conduct on their platforms. Because my thesis focuses on the abuse of women on Facebook and Twitter, here I present the standards of these two SNSs to highlight their problematic attitude towards the phenomenon at issue.

To allegedly guarantee their users’ safety, both Twitter and Facebook prohibit the publication of hate speech content on their virtual domains. By relying on the collaboration of their communities to report such material, they explicitly declare their commitment in removing harmful content and, when necessary, by suspending the accounts of abusive users (Facebook, Standards; Twitter, Conduct). More specifically, Twitter bans the promotion of

violence “on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease,” particularly in the form of “repeated and/or or [sic] non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” (Twitter, Conduct). These standards extend to paid advertising products for which the company prohibits “the promotion of hate content, sensitive topics, and violence globally” (Twitter, Ad Policy) against the just-mentioned categories.

Facebook has expressed a similar attention towards hate speech and potentially harmful behaviours by developing some more articulated policies. In its Community Standards

(Facebook, Standards), the company affirms its commitment to remove hate speech “which includes content that directly attacks people based on their: race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, or gender identity, or serious disabilities or diseases” (Facebook, Hate Speech). In its guidelines, the company declares that sharing graphic images “for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence” (Facebook, Violence) is not permitted, and that therefore this material gets removed from the platform when reported. Similarly, it states that, following carefully reviews of reports, it removes: “credible threats of physical harm to [private] individuals” (Facebook, Direct Threats) and to public figures (Facebook, Public), “content that appears to purposefully target private individuals with the intention of degrading or shaming them” (Facebook, Bullying), as well as “content that threatens or promotes sexual violence or exploitation” (Facebook, Sexual).15

The development of such detailed standards is the result of the strong criticism received by the company for its loose control over the material shared by its users, especially around issues of gender-based hate speech. In fact, in 2013 Facebook admitted its failure in addressing the harassment of women and pledged to improve the monitoring of its platforms (Levine),

15 _{By “sexual violence and exploitation” Facebook means a broad category of harmful sexualised acts, like rape,}

after its inefficiency was denounced in an online campaign signed by more than 100 women’s movement and social justice organisations (Women Action Media, Letter). A similar – but even less spontaneous – admission came from Twitter in 2015, when, in an internal memo leaked to the media, its CEO Dick Costolo confessed to his colleagues: “we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day” (Costolo in Tiku and Newton). He also declared that he felt deeply ashamed for how poorly the company had dealt with harassment during his tenure, and that he would take full responsibility for this failure (Costolo in Tiku and Newton). Despite the admissions of their representatives, Twitter and Facebook have often failed to implement the above-cited policies. They have remained virtual aggregators of harmful content, and their alleged noble intents have not yet translated into a more effective supervision over online harassment. Social media users – especially but not only women – are still attacked through rampant hate speech and aggressive behaviours which often undermine their right to equal access to the cybersphere, and frequently damage their offline private life, as I show in the following chapters of my thesis.

Some institutions and social networking sites have lately tried to work together with the aim of reaffirming their commitment against cyber abuse. In this direction, some major SNSs, including Twitter and Facebook, have agreed with the European Commission on a Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online.16 _{In this document, signed in May 2016,}

the parties undertook to provide reciprocal support in combating cyber hate in their respective domains. In particular, according to this Code of Conduct, SNSs affirmed their full commitment to effectively apply their policies, to monitor online hateful speech, and to provide

16 _{Text available in European Commission.}

quick feedbacks to users’ reports. Even though this document intended to be a way to tackle hate speech through “a collective responsibility and pride in promoting and facilitating freedom of expression throughout the online world” (European Commission 1), it has been criticised by some commentators who have read it as an act aimed at privatising the control over the nature and the online presence of contents, and as a potential violation to users’ right to free speech (Saetta).

As this last example indicates, much disagreement still exists on whether and how hate speech should be regulated on the Web. As a result, many users of disadvantaged social groups still suffer from this problematic attitude, and women remain particularly exposed to various types of harassment in the virtual domain. The brief overview that I provided in this section shows that regulations and policies are already available for institutions and social networking sites to counter the continuous abuse of women online. As the British journalist Laurie Penny notes, “just like in the real world, however, there is a chasm of difference between what is technically illegal and what is tacitly accepted when it comes to violence against women, and the fight back is less about demanding new laws than ensuring existing ones are taken seriously” (Cybersexism). Therefore, in my opinion, the first step to overcome this reluctance to apply existing regulations is a full recognition of the pervasiveness and seriousness of this phenomenon. For this reason, in the remainder of my thesis, after reviewing academic literature on cyber hostility in computer-mediated communication and behavioural studies, I discuss the features and effects of online misogynistic discourse.