Jaclyn Friedman: Combating Gender-Based Hate Speech

2013-06-07 67

In a culture where we are continuing to suss out about and combat misogyny, in all its various forms, last week marked a major win in the online media world. Facebook acknowledged their channels for dealing with hate speech--specifically, gender-based hate speech – were not working. Through a campaign lead by Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action and the Media or WAM!, author/activist Soraya Chemaly, Laura Bates of the The Everyday Sexism Project, and the assemblage of supporters through massive online Facebook and Twitter posts, the social media network hopefully had their consciousness raised by people declaring that facebook groups based on violent images and violent language of women are unacceptable. Facebook has since agreed to update its guidelines about what constitutes hate speech and to better train their employees monitoring pages. GRITtv spoke with Jaclyn Friedman to find out more.