While 25th November is celebrated as
international day for Elimination of all forms of discrimination of women, I
got to see the internet being flooded with “orange the world” messages. This is
the particular term taken up by the United Nations to spread awareness about
elimination of violence against women and inspired by UN, many stakeholders use
#Orangetheworld to express their concern, share experiences and vows to fight against
all forms of violence against women. I follow the rest here. I have never opted
for any particular app to show my solidarity with any cause including that of
Nirbhaya rape case when many men and women opted for showing black spot in
their profile picture, judgements on 3rd gender case which motivated
many to opt for rainbow coloured profile or even the recent Paris attack when
many opted for French flag colour. This year, when the UN first started their #orangetheworld
campaign, the social media spread the colour. I changed both my Facebook and
Twitter profiles to stand as one of the millions of ambassadors of the
campaign. But did the Convention on elimination of all forms of discrimination against
women, which advocates to stop violence against women, really prove beneficial
to women especially for online violence cases? We need to consider the issue
again and again.
Couple of days ago a responsible citizen contacted me
showing some Facebook links. These were of groups where adult women’s photos
were randomly selected, posted and they were made to be “fake avatars” by
adding extremely vulgar, indecent sexually explicit comments. These women were
picked up mainly because they looked beautiful and had attractive physical structures
which were enough to motivate these perverts. Some photos indicated that they
may have been parts of promotional photos of television serials or modelling contracts;
some were taken from beauty pageants as well. I was not contacted by any women
or any of these victims or any women’s group. The person who alerted me was a man and I salute
him. When he came across these groups, he tried to report the groups, the images
and the posts attached to the images which actually made these photographs typical
fake avatars, rather sex-items. Facebook did not take any action. The main
reason for this was, these victims were not children and Facebook did not
recognise these posts as offensive. Here I must recall my meeting with child
right activists, women’s right activists and transgender right activists at the
meeting on Porn Panic Ban conference organised by Point of View and Internet
Democracy last month at Delhi. I was
invited to speak about indecent representation of women on internet and I
shared information about my work. I used this opportunity to learn about other’s
experiences as well. I got to know more
details about the recent sensational case of Manikanta Prabhu, who was arrested
for creating Facebook group with images of children and posting violent,
sexually explicit messages about these children. This case and the case that I recently
dealt with, are quite similar with only one difference: in my case, the victims
are adults and in the other, victims were children. The noted child right
activist who was incidental in moving the courts and making the accused get
arrested in the later case, told me that Facebook refused to recognise the
harmful language that were being posted targeting these children because these
were mostly in vernacular language. The activist had rightly approached the
court against such action of the Facebook.
While dealing with the case relating to adult women, I took note of the experience
shared by the activist and mobilised support to report these groups as Facebook
may respond to larger volume of reports. However, our collective attempt remained unsuccessful.
It was only later that Facebook officials
responded to my reports and mails and made me understand how to report such
indecent representation. While from my side, such groups and posts were reported as 'harassing', seeing the images and the language of the posts, the
post reporters who came up to support me, reported the same to Facebook as ‘nudity’.
But ‘Nudity’ may have a completely different meaning as per Facebook ‘offence
vocabulary’. Here lies the difference between Indian understanding of the term
nudity and digital technological as well as western understanding of the term
nudity. As such, the volume of the report grew basing on reports on 'nudity' and not 'harassment'. As the officer from Facebook had told, these posts which present
indecency in their overall presentation must be reported as ‘harassing’. I feel extremely happy to say that finally
these groups as well as the offending comments were restricted and were taken
off by Facebook. This would not have happened unless Facebook considered my
reports and again, renewed reports. This should be therefore noted that while
Facebook or any other social media may not respond to reports positively, we
need to understand the offence- related perspectives of the social media as
well. However, it is an obvious fact that social media including Facebook and
Twitter need to improve their own understandings and policies in such issues. When we speak of ending violence against women
in all forms, we need to understand that all stakeholders must act together to
bring out a fruitful result. I am
anticipating that such groups may resurface on Facebook again because Facebook
or any social media in that case, does not and cannot bar any individual from
coming back to create another new identity with yet another set of false
information.
Let us be prepared to fight such online
harassment against women in a positive way.
Please Note:
Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations
provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article,
please cite it as “Halder D. (2015), “How we were able to
remove Facebook groups victimising women through creating fake avatars: A success
story
”, 26-11-2015, published in http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/
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