Facebook has been operating for over 12 years now with virtually no transparency regarding application of their community standards. Many users report being logged out of the system only to log back in and be confronted with a banner saying objectionable content removed describing images that do not appear in the frame.

I have become aware that a petition is being circulated by a Palestinian group that accuses Facebook of censoring posts originating from the Gaza and the West Bank as directed by the Netanyahu administration. This allows me to pivot to something I was concerned about mentioning in this petition. I have over the years made it very clear that I am Pro-Palestinian. I have been since I was a child. With the actions of the Trump administration regarding Jerusalem and the Netanyahu  government, I have released a large stream of reposts of articles from Human Rights Watch and Al Jazeera. I have posted articles describing the human rights violations and made videos stating my position that Israel is an apartheid state and is committing a systemic purge of Palestinian people from their remaining land by any means necessary. The IDF has been shooting peaceful protesters dead. It is documented along with the IDF's continued murder of young Palestinian boys who throw rocks at IDF forces and vehicles.

As a result, I have been repeatedly censored. At least this is my belief. My husband and I own a male erotic photographic studio trademarked as MASSIVE Studios. Over the last two years we routinely put up low-level erotic images of a beefcake nature. Since this past fall when I unleashed my current series of information in reposted articles and original video content, Facebook is now removing content from the MASSIVE Facebook page and specifically locking me down, not David despite him being a joint page admin, for days even weeks on end for very old content. I did not state this in the original petition because I had nothing to corroborate my position, and I did not want to risk the larger important issue of censorship across the platform by coming off as a conspiracy theorist, thus damaging any creditability I have with the arguments I have already made.

Facebook also appears to be specifically targeting LGBTQIA content. There are groups and pages focused on female heterosexual eroticism where the photos posted in many cases go beyond titillation and are for all practical purposes soft core erotic images. That is not the problem. The issue is that LGBTQIA eroticism in either photographs or rendered art are being removed. Facebook's own community standards indicate that artistic nude images drawn or painted are within guidelines. There needs to be equitable treatment of all erotic images that are not hard core.

The goal of this action would be multi-pronged. First and foremost, Facebook would have to stop censoring segments of unpopular political positions, not hate speech, but facts, as well as opinions that do not amount to hate speech. Facebook would also have to agree to removing the opaqueness from their handling of community standards actions against those who have accounts. There is inconsistency in how those standards are applied presently. Second, Facebook must apply an equal standard for any adult-oriented content. If male images cannot depict buttocks, then the same must apply to female images as well. Third, Facebook must use technology already in place in their core software architecture that would prevent anyone who is underage from seeing content that is prohibited by age restriction. Additionally, it is long overdue for parental controls of their children's accounts to be able to more granularly filter content on a child's account. The argument that a child might look at an adult's Facebook session is specious, as that same child can go to xtube.com and without even having a login, they can see hardcore motion content.

This action is not about money. It is about human rights and First Amendment Rights as well as the fostering of a safer social media ecosystem for children. Facebook has argued that as a public company that they are not bound by First Amendment standards, but at 2.2 billion users as of 4th quarter 2017; Facebook has penetrated more than a quarter of the Earth's population. This is of greater concern considering that as of 2016, there were 2.1 billion smart phones in active use. Based on this fact, if only 75% of these phones have the Facebook app in use, this represents 1.575 billion Facebook users.

As a result of Facebook having such deep penetration globally, it is now arguably in some degree of public domain, and as such, it must be held to standards. Facebook argues that since they do service global markets that they must apply community standards that do not offend anyone. Understandable. The way that is achieved? As with the earlier example of age based controls, the same hooks and application programing interfaces (API's) exist across the platform. To block erotic groups, pages or timeline content is a simple switch automated in the system that traces back to the ip address of the computer running the browser. With that, you can determine point of origin.

Facebook netted over $10 billion in 2016. As a DevOps professional who works with corporate internal software development and systems, I firmly believe based on my experience that to do these upgrades to their systems, it would likely not go above half a billion dollars. I am a senior level software consultant with 26 years in IT, I clearly remember the 1990's and Microsoft's abuses of it corporate and retail business partners. They also unfairly controlled the desktop due to operating agreements that were ultimately held to be illegal. The net result? Consent decrees in both the USA and the EU which finally made Microsoft play on a more leveled field.

It is time for Facebook to be forced to act in the good of their "users." Because you do realize that we are their product. That's what the ads are for, but much more important the telemetry (page clicks, photos, ads you click on) they collect is how you are monetized. This is the attitude that Facebook has towards their base, and as such, unchecked they will ultimately be possibly the most effective silencer of free thought and expression. They already are well on their way.