What's Happening With FB's Censorship of BDSM/Adult Pages

Have you been on Facebook lately and noticed that many of your favorite pages are missing? Wonder why this happened? Here is a little background history.

Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, writer and activist Soraya Chemaly and Jaclyn Friedman from Women, Action & the Media joined forces to launch the hashtag Twitter campaign #FBRape in May 2013. The campaign focuses on content that portrays rape and violence against women positively. More than 50,000 have tweeted in support of the FBrape campaign and around 5,000 have emailed brands whose advertising appears around the content.

Following the week long campaign blitz, at least 15 International companies pulled their ads, including Nissan UK, Nationwide UK, J Street and WestHost. On May 29, 2013, Facebook announced it would update its policies on hate speech, increase accountability of content creators and train staff to be more responsive to complaints, marking a victory for women's rights activists. 

Now, we do support the removal of pictures portraying abused women and children from Facebook. But, there has to be a line drawn when they go overboard with picture removal and start closing legitimate educational BDSM Lifestyle pages. What the general public and FB doesn't seem to understand is that BDSM is a way of living between two or more consenting adults. Yes, it is not mainstream and there are many aspects of it that would be deemed vile or the regression of women's rights because some of us choose to happily and willing submit to a man.

However, BDSM is not only made up of male Dominants and female submissives. There are female Dominants and submissives, male Dominants and submissives, and Transgender Dominants and submissives. We are a wide and diverse community. Our practices are not aimed at harming anyone, nor are they done without consent. During play (a scene) where any form of S&M is involved, the submissive has a safety net of sorts by having the ability to use a safeword for any reason. A safeword is a word that stops all play and the submissive is immediately taken out of any action they may be in and cared for.

There are several feminist groups that support our right to live our lifestyle as we want, but there are also many moralist and feminist groups that deem BDSM as harmful, immoral, and indecent. The reason they think it's wrong is because they do not understand deeply what BDSM really is.

One of the most caring, deep, and honest relationships I have ever witnessed are those that live a BDSM Lifestyle. The core foundations of a true loving D/s relationship is trust, complete honesty, and open, two way communication. 

The fallout of the FBrape campaign has been the trampling of the BDSM Community's rights to have a presence on social media sites. There have been hundreds of legitimate Facebook pages that have been unpublished and deleted since FB's policy changes were introduced. Some pages have put in appeals and have been restored.

It seems like the overall morals of society and the internet companies are suddenly taking a step back in time by bowing to the moralist groups and allowing them to dictate what everyone else's beliefs should be, thus inhibiting the rights of minority groups to have freedom of speech and expression. I realize because of the monetary loss to Facebook's revenue, they may not have a choice but to bow to the moralist beliefs of the Feminist groups pressuring them. But surely, they are a big enough company and believe in the rights of freedom of expression and freedom of speech, to implement changes that would balance the wants of the moralist groups while allowing us to live and express ourselves as we want to.

We understand that parents are worried about what their children see on the internet, but it is not our responsibility to police them. We use the built in page settings to make sure no one under age is allowed to see our pages. Parents have to take responsibility for their own children's actions and learn to monitor their internet usage more.

Facebook should also take off the option that allows your friends to see what content you are linking and change it to people having to allow chosen individuals the option to see their likes. As of today, if you don't like or agree with certain pages or content on FB, you can always choose the option to block that page so you won't ever see their content. To me, this seems like it would be the obvious and adult option to take.

So, where does this leave us as a community? Apparently out in the cold or back in the closet, unless we get an organized campaign together to combat these changes and demand our own rights.

I ask all of you, please tweet, email, call, knock on doors, and contact everyone you can think of that will help us get the word out as well as to come together as a community to demand our equal rights to be seen and heard. Use the hashtag #StopBDSMFBCensorship in all of your protest communications.