Huffington Post, Sandy Garossin, May 30, 2013
For years
Facebook has maintained an imperious and stony silence against pleas from users
and victims about its most objectionable content. Not a word when Amanda Todd
took her life after being relentlessly stalked and blackmailed by a sexual
predator on Facebook. Even the suicides of teens Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie
Pott (whose gang-rapes were posted to Facebook) brought no response from the
$60 billion company.
But on May
27th, Facebook finally flinched. And then it cratered, caved and capitulated in
the course of a single phone call after a one-week #fbrape campaign by the
smartest feminists on the planet.
The Scent
of a Dollar
In the end,
it was all about the money.
WAM (Women
Action Media), feminist Soraya Chemaly and Everyday Sexism in the UK took direct
aim at Facebook’s advertising revenue stream. They publicly showed major advertisers their own paid ads prominently displayed (Trigger Warning) on
horrific rape-oriented Facebook pages. The most objectionable content can’t
ever be shown, but it includes graphic images of gore and horror, beaten
children, naked children, women bound and gagged, or thrown down stairs. All
supported by advertising dollars of the world’s best-known brands.
It was too
much for Nissan and the insurance giant Nationwide, which both pulled their ads
immediately. Organizers then aimed a blistering barrage of social media
messages to Dove, American Express, ZipCar and other brands, demanding that
they too withdraw their ads. Twitter and Facebook were used to spread some
60,000 messages and 5,000 emails.
Followers
of the campaign fanned out as if in a coordinated strategy. They disseminated
the location of Facebook’s upcoming shareholder meeting on June 11, and the
names of all its major advertisers, including Disney and McDonalds.
Some
tweeted at major financial writers for Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal,
Financial Times, the New York Times and others. Major business media and
financial analysts were asked to comment on the potential damage to Facebook’s
share value if the advertiser exodus snow-balled. Others searched for and found
a bottomless pit of violent rape-promoting content, all screen-capped on
Facebook with major brand advertising. Then Amanda Todd’s mother Carol and
Rehtaeh Parson’s father Glenford Canning joined the campaign.
Which Straw
Broke the Camel’s Back?
We won’t
ever know which straw broke the camel’s back. It may have been the ruthless and
caustic assault on Dove’s Real Beauty brand, which suffered real damage when
the company failed to respond. Or maybe it was the personal pressure on Sheryl
Sandberg, currently promoting her soft feminist message book, Lean In.
Whatever it
was, by the time Glenford Canning’s moving blog post to Mark Zuckerberg
appeared on Huffington Post, Facebook was on the phone to campaign organizers,
agreeing to every term demanded from the outset.
Yet
compared with many online campaigns, the #fbrape campaign was not that large,
and failed to garner mainstream media attention until after the battle was won.
Why did
Facebook move so swiftly to staunch the bleeding? To put it simply, it had to.
Advertising
dollars are the octane that fuels Facebook. The #fbrape campaign organizers
seized on the key paradox and gaping vulnerability in the advertising model.
Although monetized like a titanic broadcast network, Facebook’s content ethic
is actually stuck on frat-boy setting. A striking mismatch exists between the
chaos generated by a billion content up-loaders and the brand discipline
demanded by multi-billion dollar advertisers.
No
advertiser can risk having its brand associated with violent rape, gore, or
child abuse porn, all of which are widely disseminated on Facebook by an army
of trolls and goons.
Facebook’s
Back Against the Wall
On June
11th, the world’s media will descend on San Francisco for Facebook’s first
shareholder meeting. Picture the PR disaster of them being met by a pandemonium
of mothers brandishing giant placards of Rethaeh Parsons, Amanda Todd, and rape
victims bound and gagged — all displaying Facebook advertising by American Express
and Dove. That’s only one possible scenario of many.
The
potential damage is breathtaking, and mainstream media would probably relish
nothing more than a takedown of their Internet nemesis.
The
WAM/EverydaySexism partnership grasped all of this. Facebook’s back was against
the wall, and both sides knew it. The #fbrape campaign was a spectacular act of
free market political theatre, executed to perfection.
The future
of course is unpredictable. Whether Facebook can actually assert the needed
control over its site is far from certain. But the #fbrape campaign
demonstrated that failure to do so can still inflict a mortal wound on the
company.
On May
27th, women won the Internet.
Follow
Sandy Garossino on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Garossino
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