However, when one is surfing the internet, freedom of speech appears to be a very strange phenomena, as some sites will feature texts inciting hatred of other people, animals or countries for example, and sometimes it gets downright ridiculous as to what is perceived 'freedom of speech' and what is not, leaving the unsuspecting person accidentally stumbling upon those pages confused - is that kind of thing legal? One of the most ridiculous pages I recently came across was of a company promoting 'tea cup puppies', dogs bred to be so ridiculously small they were bound to have severe health problems, yet the site merrily claimed that all their animals were sound and healthy. As if.
And then there's the social media. Like facebook. It's a wonderful tool, enabling people to stay in touch with old and new friends, share experiences, and find kindred spirits to make some parts of the world a better place. The facebook policy on freedom of speech - and artistic freedom added to that - is quite odd though, to say the least. An American artist posting his painting of a semi-nude androgynus person was censored - it showed nipples. Yes. It is very offensive to show nipples in the country of Nipplegate, even if the nipples are on a non-exsting person on a painting. Following the same logic, a 70's political campaign poster by the Dutch Peace party PSP was banned and censored for showing nudity. We are talking about an historical piece here, part of our national political legacy. Facebook took offense and blocked the lady's parts that they deemed offensive...
However there are pages out there on the world wide web that show a hell of a lot more offense. How about pages dedicated to depicting scantily clad 'models' crushing puppies and kittens to death with their high heels? Or a facebook page of someone who is obviously a member of a dog fighting ring, proudly showing his 'champions', featuring photographs of dogs with visible fighting scars running over their entire bodies? And there is a lot more of that out there, pages that make you sick in the stomach. They only come to the surface when someone has stumbled upon them and starts reporting them and sharing them far and wide, asking everyone to share and report. Still, the facebook 'complaints corner' doesn't have a button for animal cruelty. They seem to get more upset if you show a nipple or use the name of your pet for your profile. Now there's a real threath to society, a doxy babbling about his work as a therapy dog, or a retired greyhound swapping stories of best places for roaching and how to steal a nomnom from the kitchen counter without being caught out. Facebook users are invited by facebook to report those kinds of profiles, even though they do no harm to anyone whatsoever (and one of them actually has sold quite a few books with his writings as a fundraiser for greyhound rescues!) - but there is one important button missing. And that's the 'mass reported by cyber bullies'- button.
Why am I getting into that one? Because, dear friends, I got blocked by facebook after being mass reported by a group of people who are staunch defenders of a certain council involved in a certain case of a seized and destroyed dog, because apparently they didn't like my opinion. So when ridiculing my profession (insinuating I was a lousy teacher) and ridiculing my name and gender (I was a he, a she and an 'it' according to one of their posters and my name was altered in jesper, jester, and so forth), resorting to general childish namecalling and trying to discredit my character, tracking every comment I made on a page where said case was discussed by supporters of the family involved in order to copy and paste it on their own public profile (which happened to be one of two profiles from exactly the same person, which is a violation of facebook policy anyway), and having a ball dragging me and other persons standing up for that family through the mud, calling the family names, claiming the family were fraudsters, making vile remarks about the family's daughter, showing general insensitivity towards them, and so on - and on - and on, didn't work, they mass reported me.
So why was I reported? Well, it appears to be that they have picked a statement, which wasn't hate speech, violating intellectual property or anything in the facebook community standards list, and then another one where I replied to some nasty comments made by one of them using a fake name 'to protect' her/himself because of the work they were in - as he/she proclaimed him/herself... And so I received TWO notifications within 24 hours saying that I was blocked from posting, even liking or sharing anything to the facebook for 24 hours. Which meant I couldn't congratulate a fellow volunteer with her birthday, could no longer bid on a much coveted item in an online charity auction, and people were wondering why I was not responding to them - all of which was indeed very vexatious (to use a term that said council often used in their reply to people requesting information).
I turned to facebook for help, but there is no 'contact us' feature either. You get a lot of explanations on the Facebook Community Standards page, but there is nowhere a link enabling you to contact them if people are mass reporting you, not because you have shown illegal content or because you are a hatemonger, but because they are cyberbullies who claim you are a nobody to them and openly question you intellectual abilities - yet make sure they shut you up for 24 hours. Why? Good question.
Cyberbullying and social media are new to the police and the legal system. Somewhere around 2000 the first cases started popping up of children and adults being bullied via MSN, e-mail, text message and popular in-school networks where in one case the 'gossip pages' started to affect the entire school (http://www.ehow.com/about_6643612_history-cyberbullying.html) and the popular gossip pages had to be shut down.
In the Netherlands I first encountered cyberbullying early 2000 through MSN, later the popular social network hyves was root to some of the vilest bullying campaigns seen in modern history, entire hate pages sprung up, and with the rise of technologically advanced cell phones it became a sport for some disgruntled students to bully their teachers first to push their patience and calm to the max and hit the record button if said teacher snapped, modify the clip and hurl it on youtube. Nowadays they don't even have to wait to get home first because facebook allows direct uploading of film clips.
Now this is in itself a fantastic feature if it is used to say, fight crime, like filming some drunk halfwits being violent towards ambulance staff trying to give aid to a traffic accident victim, or someone abusing their family dog, but it can also be easily employed by cyberbullies. And lo and behold, before you know it they have taken a picture of you, unsuspecting passerby walking your dogs, and hurl it onto their facebook wall to have a ball making vile comments, sneering and jeering, feeling utterly smug about themselves, hiding behind fake or multiple profiles and thinking they are above the law. Yet when it dawns upon their juvenile minds that this is indeed an illegal activity, they hasten to take the offending pictures off. And forget that most people nowadays know how to do a screenshot (and if you don't, there is a good description on the Facebook Community Standards page https://www.facebook.com/report/ on how to do it using the microsoft Paint programme). Facebook then advises to block the bullies and of course don't respond to anything they say (ie 'don't feed them') - but it offers no solace on what on earth you should do to protect yourself from being mass reported, and contrary to what facebook claims the 'offending' bits of text are not even read, since the parts that I got blocked over were anything but offending... So I did what I usually do in those matters: I googled. I will share my findings in the next blog.
