Gay Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims was recently banned from Facebook (and subsequently reinstated) for sharing a post with an anti-gay slur that was directed at him. While posting homophobic messages does go against the social network’s community standards, its rules allow people to post slurs when quoting others or ascribing such terms to themselves (i.e. “I’m such a hot f*ggot”).
Sims’ original post was from an alleged Baltimore resident named Jill Freb who sent him a message stating, “You get out f*ggot.” Sims shared the message and asked people to report her, but the cowardly user quickly changed her screen name and photo to avoid any consequences.
Sims suffered consequences instead as Facebook banned both his public and private accounts for 24 hours for reposting her slur. After sharing news of his banning on Twitter and alerting Facebook, his account was restored 15 hours later.
Related: Brian Sims just put this homophobe on mega blast, says “This isn’t going to go well for you”
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Nevertheless, Sims is still criticizing Facebook for its handling of his and other hate speech directed against marginalized users:
“Taking no action against those kind of statements is wrong. Taking actions like this, where you’re just patently wrong from the get-go, is also wrong. But all of it is an indication that they’re either not taking this seriously, or they’re not doing it competently….
Every single day, I work with women and people of color whose professions, whose expertise, whose talent is making these kinds of decisions, and it doesn’t sound like Facebook is working with them…. The kind of thing that happened to me happens to women, to people of color, immigrants all the time.”
Metro Weekly reports, “[Sims] adds that part of the reason the story has even received press is because Sims enjoys a fair amount of privilege due to his race, gender, position of power and a network of Facebook followers who helped him get in contact with Facebook to quickly resolve the situation.”
Facebook itself explained its mishandling of Sims post thus:
“We allow people to share messages they receive even hateful ones. Removing this post was a mistake in misunderstanding that it was discussing a message Representative Sims had himself experienced. The post does not violate our Community Standards and has been restored and Representative Sims is no longer in a feature block.”
misterjack
Facebook sucks.
Polaro
Beat me to it.
Wicked Dickie
I only log in to Facebook to see who wished me a happy birthday.
MonkeyMan
Evidently, we shouldn’t be using Facebook in the first place and I honestly don’t get why anyone is ever surprised when they f up.
iamru2
I certainly don’t agree with how Facebook handled the situation but I would have loved to see Sims meltdown over being blocked. And his race and gender have nothing to do with him getting a response from Facebook I mean come on people. Obviously his occupation had everything to do with it.
fur_hunter
You are absolutely CORRECT!!!!!!
DumpTrump
It’s not because of his occupation,,,,it’s because fb is homophobic.
skywriter
Now she goes by JILL FREEDOM
fur_hunter
Oh…PLEASE……You HAVE to be kidding!
sfmike64
The ultimate problem is that people aren’t monitoring this stuff. Brian Sims is quasi famous and a public official, so people will look again at his issue, but that’s not true for the rest of us.
They have more money than god, but no actual human beings dealing with this stuff.
That’s what happens when you don’t pay for things and when you are the product being sold.
fur_hunter
You definitely have a good point there.
DarkZephyr
You are absolutely correct about us being the product. Facebook sucks more and more all the time because they don’t care about making it a good experience for us. They care about serving us up to advertisers. They keep it serviceable *enough* that we will stick around and use it, but beyond that, they don’t give a crap. But they continuously strip more and more privacy features and make dumb moves with their features. And they don’t care that it upsets us. They just don’t care.
mz.sam
Facebook sucks and will go down in flames by a Democratic congress’ regulation legislation come 2020 (right after the Trump impeachment).
fur_hunter
After kicking and screaming, I finally made a FaceBook Page. Not much is there. Only things that are extremely important, regarding ME, stays there forever. Occasionally, I find something interesting enough to put there for a week to a month, then it is deleted.
GBinMD
Brian Sims for President in 2020! (unless Dumpty is impeached whichever comes soonest).
MojoPhoenix
Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Trumpty Dumpty had a Big fall
All of Trump’s horses and all of Trump’s men
Will NEVER put Trumpty together again!
batesmotel
Neither of those things will ever happen.
tjack47
They’re so arbitrary at fb. It’s not easy for an algorithm to make judgment calls. I was put in jail for 24 hours, but won my review. I shared the same type of content in a secret group of like minded mature men, and I was jailed again. I asked for them to review, and appealed when the review wasn’t in my favor. Lost that one. It was so dumb, but I was on the cusp of some policy changes with the last one. I just went to Twitter and Instagram. What’s interesting is the content I shared on fb is rampant on Instagram. They own IG. What gives?
Brian
Nearly all of the reviewers are living in foreign countries, they learned English as a second/third/fourth language, they earn less than our minimum wage, and they work strange hours. They are required to make decisions at the rate of something like one image per 2-3 seconds. That’s all they do, all day long.
Much of what they review is obviously bad content like animal abuse, rape, and gore. They have nightmares, and quit right away. Facebook just hires more people to replace them.
The reviewer decisions don’t make a lot of sense, but once you learn about their lives you’ll be disgusted.
BShade77
f-you Facebook.
Mack
What do you expect from the company who hired Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to advise them on hate speech. Facebook is fast becoming anti LGBTQ.
DumpTrump
uhm,,,when was fb ever PRO lgbtq???????????
rcblue73
I read that FB began using contract workers to manually police the site starting back around July. That’s when I noticed most of my posts beginning to get shadowed so that no one seemed to be aware of them. Especially newsworthy gay posts though even innocuous posts like a link to a Castro Street (SF) web cam or sometimes even photos I took around my neighborhood. God forbid I post images of any of my gay themed artwork. From my experience in the corporate world I know that contract workers usually include a lot of good ol’ girls from the suburbs who have rather conservative views about things. Me thinks that may be happening with FB. I’ve also noticed around the same time as the shadow banning I started to get friend requests from ladies offering to sell photos of their lady parts. I guess that’s not as offensive as a web cam of people walking down Castro Street. LOL.
da90027
Facebook moderators are high school dropouts. They banned me for 30 days for posting a news story about a guy who dressed his kid as Hitler for Halloween. Then FB said they made a mistake and reposted it but kept my 30 day Facebook jail sentence intact. No one at FB knows what the hell they are doing.
Brian
They’re contractors. They’re not “at” Facebook. They live in places like Indonesia, and you’re right in that they may never have finished high school. They’re from places that might not even have a high school. They are unlikely to understand context of US/UK culture, jokes, or slang.
[email protected]
I got banned just the other day for an anti Nazi post. Once your banned, they will ban you for anything over and over. 30 days each time. Does any one know a better system than FB????
nitejonboy
Facebook is monitored by a bunch of frigging morons…I’ve reported some seriously sick and disturbing things people have posted involving children and animals and hate speech and Facebook ALWAYS informs me that these posts DON’T violate their standards. If those don’t I’d sure like to know what the hell does ??
HMFan
Facewhat?