Thus far i've largely been amused by Facebook's attempts to censor offensive content on its network - in particular the banning of images of women breastfeeding was perhaps the most oddly conservative of all, and indeed the social network's over-enthusiasm in this task has occasionally been quite a source of comedy for many others too in the blogosphere.
On a more serious note however, all sorts of downright disturbing images have also been successfully removed, and truth be told it's hard to critique Facebook for being lax over image censorship (if anything they are perhaps at times slightly over-zealous, though i perfectly agree that it's better to err on the side of caution). It's precisely for this reason that I'm quite shocked that totally the opposite is true with some of the network's other content - starting with groups and fan sites...
In particular i'm referring to FB's failure to remove a number of actively racist hate groups which have been created by some FB users, ranging from generally horrible white supremacist stuff right through to holocaust denial groups. As Andre Oboler has clearly pointed out - if such things are illegal out in the open 'real' world, then why do the same laws not apply to FB?
After all, FB is well beyond its fledgling first steps when it could claim ignorance, or simply inadequate time to set up a system for dealing with such things. As one of the world's biggest social networks it is now imperative that the company takes the lead on this and sets a clear example for the whole online social world and stops facilitating such activities.
There is no doubt that the size of such networks, and their high user and activity levels will make the task tricky - but the challenge is one faced by all social networks, be it Myspace, Facebook or bebo and Orkut (hence some co-operation might be a good idea). Just as freedom of speech is enshrined in law (and respected by the networks) so too should be the unacceptability of promoting and spreading racial hatred. The whole question of losing a few users as a result (and therefore a few advertising dollars) shouldn't even be considered relevant - this issue transcends any kind of corporate financial considerations, and I for one would like to see Facebook tackle it sooner rather than later.
Dejan Levi
