On May 21 more than a hundred organisations lead by Women, Action & the Media, the journalist Soraya Chemaly, and The Everyday Sexism Project started a campaign to Take action to end gender-based violence on Facebook. Within a week, Facebook accepted weaknesses and lapses in implementing their policies and their own community standards and committed to take steps to improve their content policy in identifying and removal of gender-based violent content on their platform. But not all advocates of freedom on expression online celebrated with us, arguing that Facebook should not be in the business of censoring content even if it is hate speech. This is not a new debate. It is a debate that feminists, who care deeply about freedom of expression, have faced around issues of misogyny and gender-based violent content. What is new is how these arguments play out online. What is crystal clear to those of us who are backing this campaign is that this is not a call to counter the right of users to free expression. The network of women’s organisations behind this action understand that internet freedoms are critical to asserting women’s rights and are staunch advocates of freedom of expression online and offline.
Read Chat Garcia Ramilo’s full Feminist Talk in GenderIT.org .