It’s important to remember that a social media empire founder was under investigation for using tech to intentionally violate women’s rights at Harvard (illegally scrape their personal data to intimidate and shame them) when he left and relaunched these harmful practices into the commercial success known as Facebook.
Fast-forward to today and it seems not much has changed. Facebook is curating protection of men accused of abusing women, deleting criticism of them, under a “back to our roots” policy.
Meta’s HR team is deleting internal employee criticism of new board member, UFC president and CEO Dana White, at the same time that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Meta will “get back to our roots around free expression,” 404 Media has learned. Some employee posts questioning why criticism of White is being deleted are also being deleted. […] Several posts critical of White were deleted by Meta’s “Internal Community Relations team” as violating a set of rules called the “Community Engagement Expectations,” which govern internal employee communications.
Get it? Free expression means license for abuse of power in the most toxic paradigm, where misogyny will be curated and its criticism censored.
…private Facebook groups are “cesspits” of racism, misogyny, doxing, slut-shaming and fat-shaming.
That sounds very similar to the very origin concept of the founder, and thus shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Notably I deleted my Facebook account in 2009, as I warned openly here in 2011, because its privacy-violating abusive roots clearly were aligned with and driven by Russian operatives and money.
[Facebook] misogynist pages had headlines that read “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking Your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich.” Other pages included images of women being abused. Some pages had been on the site for a couple of years, even after users complained about them…
Misogynistic censorship today being called a “root” value of protecting expression is just deeper evidence for analysis of this relationship.
When Dana White slapped his wife, it just once again drew nationwide attention. It’s time to stop tolerating the abuse.
And yet…
…UFC President Dana White expressed remorse for a video blog posted April 1 in which he uttered misogynistic and anti-gay slurs (see here) and said he “never intended to hurt the gay community.”
See that? What about intentions to hurt women? He seems to have obviously left that part out of an apology en route to being recruited onto the board of Facebook.