CO-AUTHORED WITH SARAH SKWIRE

(Trigger warning: while this post discusses violence against women only in general terms, some of the links contain graphic images.)

A headline at CNN this afternoon indicates that Facebook seems ready to give in to pressure to take down pages that appear to promote various forms of violence against women. The pressure is coming from advertisers being lobbied by women’s rights groups who are arguing that Facebook has a double standard: they’re perfectly fine with pages like “Raping Your Girlfriend” and “Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus,” but they won’t allow pictures of breast feeding or of women with exposed mastectomy scars.

The women’s rights groups are correct about the double standard. They’re also right about the horrific nature of some of things people are putting on Facebook. We were going to embed some examples in this post, but we couldn’t do it. Jonathan Haidt might not be right that it’s all but impossible to disgust libertarians.

We are disgusted by Facebook’s decision to take down non-violent and non-sexual pictures of women’s bodies. We are disgusted by the kind of deeply offensive material these women’s groups are protesting. We’re also disgusted by the kind of arbitrary and heavy-handed power it would take to enforce rules against offensive material on Facebook. And we’re not at all confident that Facebook—which has removed a photograph of a child pretending to nurse a doll because it violated community standards—or any other company, for that matter, can enforce these rules reliably.

It’s foolish to say that the problem can be eliminated by removing the double standard and allowing breastfeeding photos on Facebook. But it’s equally foolish to think that ratcheting up the regulations and oversight will solve it either.

To be perfectly honest, we don’t know what we want Facebook to do here. We began this post thinking we had a solution, but the more we looked at the images people are posting and the images that are being taken down, the more conflicted we became. Being committed to freedom of expression requires learning to tolerate hearing and seeing a certain number of things we find intrusive, obnoxious, and (Haidt is right) even disgusting. Maybe the problem is that we’re asking Facebook to solve a problem that’s bigger than they are. Maybe it’s foolish to expect a single company to police the behavior of over one billion users making 300,000 posts a minute. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question.