Celeste LiddleMelbourne, Australia
Mar 17, 2016
Thanks to all who have signed this petition thus far. It has been greatly appreciated. In the past two days, I have seen that news on this issue has been covered by press in Taiwan, India, Canada and the UK, to name a few, and it has additionally been continually on the radio, as well as being discussed on The Drum. At this stage though, there has been no commitment from Facebook to address this to ensure not only that cultural images such as these are not censored (and offensively being labelled as sexually violent and the like via their screening system), but also that they will tackle their online complain system to ensure that there is less capacity for it to be used to bully and silence. The only official statement from Facebook was the one at the beginning where they mainly just reiterated their stance and felt the solution was to simply remove such pictures from our postings. This is not a solution. Such censorship is unreasonable and offensive. So we are still fighting the fight here, and will be until Facebook makes these types of commitments. In other news, joining the ban list for sharing the image and keynote was Daily Life columnist Clementine Ford, who, only a couple of days earlier, had filed this article http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/facebooks-ban-of-aboriginal-activist-celeste-liddle-reveals-its-censorship-double-standards-20160314-gniycj. Clementine was hit with a 7 day ban. Additionally, artist Ella Dreyfus was also slapped with a ban, this time for posting up images of her 1999 exhibition Age and Consent. I encourage people to read this article when they can because it does talk about the hypocrisies within these "community standards" and how they are applied. http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/facebooks-ban-of-aboriginal-activist-celeste-liddle-reveals-its-censorship-double-standards-20160314-gniycj So yes, as mentioned above, the fight is far from over and there are no official assurances from Facebook at this point in time. It is important therefore that we continue to challenge this. The issues around the 8MMM video censorship happened 10 months ago and without a commitment from Facebook to properly review their policies, we are going to be back here in another 10 months having to make the same arguments. Thanks again everyone for your support!
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