“WILL you give us 45 mins of your time for a biscuit and a virtual conversation to hear our ideas?” – Young Coventry activists tweet global Facebook PR Nick Clegg calling for action against online disability hate crimes.
Coventry Youth Activists (CYA) yesterday (Monday March 1) hosted a Zero Discrimination Day Facebook takeover featuring stories and evidence of the online abuse faced by people with disabilities.
They even tweeted former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, vice president of global communications at Facebook, inviting him to join them for a conversation to hear their recommendations for key changes to the company’s reporting process.
Their message: “@Nick_Clegg many disabled people do not feel safe on Facebook. We have three recommendations to make the reporting process better at responding to disability hate speech. Will you give us 45 mins of your time for a biscuit and a virtual conversation to hear our ideas?” was retweeted 51 times by members of the public.
Joey Mander, a disabled member of Coventry Youth Activists, who is an NHS key worker, said: “I’ve had comments saying people like me would be ‘better off dead’ due to not having a contribution to life – this hurts!
“All of these comments were reported and none were taken down, none were classed as ‘breaking community guidelines’.
“These things seem shocking to most but sadly these comments have become normal to us. This needs to change. Being both young and disabled has meant that we at CYA are able to give a voice to those who often have none.”
This diverse group of young people, who are aged between 14 and 28, are calling for the global social media company to:
- to provide accessible and transparent detail on Facebook’s reporting process
- to ensure there are people with lived experience of a disability on Facebook’s Oversight Board
The group says it has spent months researching the experiences of the people and families who have faced discrimination and abuse on Facebook, including Harvey the 18-year-old disabled son of ex-glamour model Katie Price, which they claim has not been taken down after being reported.
Sophie Greener, community organiser for Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire, said: “Facebook has proven it can act swiftly on a momentous scale when it suits the platform.
“For example, restricting access to news to almost an entire continent overnight amidst the Australian Facebook news ban. Yet in the case of our activists, who experience hate and death threats for being disabled on a daily basis, it’s incredibly difficult to get Facebook to take action. That can’t be right
“We haven’t heard back from Nick Clegg yet, but he is in America and eight hours behind. We won’t stop until we have a response!”
A Facebook Company spokesperson said: “We’ve made significant investments in technology and have a global safety and security team of over 35,000 people to help keep hate speech off our platform.
“We remove over 97% of hate speech before it’s even reported to us and between October and December 2020, we acted on 26.9m pieces of content.
“We also offer tools that prevent unwanted interactions include the ability to block or restrict accounts and prevent people you don’t know from messaging you. We’ll continue working with partners and outside experts to develop even more tools, technology and policies to help keep people safe.”
In Facebook’s most recent Community Standards Enforcement Report, it was reported hate speech prevalence dropped to seven to eight views of hate speech for every 10,000 views of content. While a recent European Commission report noted that Facebook is reviewing reports of hate speech quicker than before, deleting more of it and doing it transparently. According to this independent report, Facebook assessed 95.7% and Instagram assessed 91.8% of hate speech notifications in less than 24 hours, compared to 81.5% for YouTube and 76.6% for Twitter.
HOW CAN FACEBOOK USERS EXPERIENCING ONLINE ABUSE PREVENT ‘UNWANTED INTERACTIONS’:
Currently you can:
- Block profiles: if a person is constantly tagging or messaging you in a way that is harassing you, you can block that person from interacting with you on Facebook.
- Ignore a Messenger conversation: Messenger gives you the option to ignore a conversation and automatically move it out of your inbox, without having to block the sender.
- Report it: Community Standards are clear that Facebook does not tolerate harassment on Facebook. If you think a Page or profile is violating standards, you can report it by clicking on the three dots which are above every Page, profile and piece of content on the platform.
