Oregon Mom Challenges Facebook on Rape Posts, Becomes Target for Threats

[Jazzy]

An Oregon woman who helped create a Facebook page to fight trolls posting violent and sexual content on the website found herself the target of vicious threats and vile material posted on her page.



Trista Hendren, 38, of Portland, Ore., founded a page on Facebook called Rapebook, which aims to flag and report inappropriate and misogynistic content on Facebook. The page focuses on violence against women and children, especially rape.



The page links that posters flag to Rapebook go to inappropriate content such as pornography, graphic images depicting sexual assault, sexualization of children and photos with rape jokes on them.



As with any potentially inappropriate content on Facebook, if user wants to flag a photo as inappropriate, a pop-up window asks two questions. The first asks if the photo is about the user or a friend of the user. Then the user can select what their issue is with the image -- they don't like it, it's harassing the user or it's harassing a friend of the user.



If the photo is not about the user or a friend, it can be flagged as hate speech or symbol, spam or scam, graphic violence, nudity or pornography or drug use.



Facebook said that content that clearly violates their terms is removed, but content that is distasteful but not illegal or in violation of the terms has the right to stay up.



For Hendren, the battle against ugly content took an even uglier turn when people and groups posting the material targeted her.



They posted hundreds of threatening messages and vulgar photos on her personal Facebook page and the group page. They found her phone number and email address and posted it online, she said.

Full article



Some of the comments were that she brought this on herself by creating Rapebook. Do you agree with this?

 

[Evil Eye]

Not really, though it's only to be expected.

 

[Jazzy]

I see that her intent was good but IMO she should have left the monitoring up to the Facebook staff.

 

[DrLeftover]

Vigilantism is alive and well.