A group of leading women’s rights organizations from around the world, including MissRepresentation.org, have signed an open letter to Facebook asking the company to do a better job of monitoring hate speech directed at women and girls within their massive social networking site.

Excerpt:

We, the undersigned, are writing to demand swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook. Specifically, we call on you, Facebook, to take three actions:

1. Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.
2. Effectively train moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
3. Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

To this end, we are calling on Facebook users to contact advertisers whose ads on Facebook appear next to content that targets women for violence, to ask these companies to withdraw from advertising on Facebook until you take the above actions to ban gender-based hate speech on your site.

The campaign is being led by Soraya Chemaly, Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) and The Everyday Sexism Project.

Read the full letter

Take action.

See examples of content allowed on Facebook (Trigger Warning).