While the hate group Daesh continues to make headlines for its military and terrorist acts, attacks upon the the Goddess Isis for simply sharing a name with a common acronym for these Islamic extremists continues to be under reported. The number of Isis worshippers is eclipsed by those who follow an Abrahamic path, making it understandable on some level that mainstream media outlets dismiss those concerns, such as the statement by the Fellowship of Isis requesting that the name of their goddess not be used in such a manner.
The goddess Isis. [Public Domain]
More recently, a small Facebook group called “Following Isis” was removed, purportedly for violating the site’s terms of service. Its creator, AJ Melia Brokaw, was confronted with that news when she logged into the site on Feb 5. Brokaw posted her reaction to several other groups of which she is a member. She wrote:
I’m so upset. I got on this morning to find that my Isis Devotee group “Following Isis” has been deleted by Facebook as being against community standards. It wasn’t a very active group but it feels like a smack in the face. Will see if I can get it reinstated.
Anyone who has attempted to get a decision like this one reversed has likely found the process of appeal to be extremely challenging, if not outright impossible to navigate. The reviewing of complaints about individual accounts, groups, and pages appears to be a completely automated process. If a decision is made, the affected user is provided no specific information, and offered no clear path to appeal.
For example, this helpdesk post by a group owner asking for information on how to get the decision reviewed was apparently ignored.
All Brokaw knows came in a formulaic message advising her that the group had been removed. It wasn’t exactly an active group, she said, with less than thirty members and only occasional posts in the 6-12 months since she’d created it. While she didn’t have a copy of the exact text to look at, in her recollection the group’s description was, “Something along the line that it was a place for devotees of the Goddess Isis, any were welcome whether Wiccan or Polytheist.”
Posts ran along the lines of quotes, images, and articles relevant to the worship of Isis, under that name or others, such as Aset and Iset.
An ironic twist stems from the fact that Brokaw made the group because it’s difficult to find anything related to the Goddess Isis on Facebook. The name is mostly used in groups and pages focused on opposing Daesh under its moniker of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which is commonly used in mainstream media despite the fact that most governmental officials refer to the group as ISIL or Daesh. Brokaw wanted a space to honor a goddess important to her in the company of like-minded users, of which there were at least a handful. The one page that does continue to stand out against the tide of terrorist-related information is the one maintained by members of the Fellowship of Isis.
Both Brokaw and The Wild Hunt have made numerous attempts to contact someone at Facebook to discuss this issue, to no avail. A contact in the public relations department did not return seven messages left for him, and the emails sent to the address provided in his outgoing voice mail message were returned with an email error that occurs only when an email server will only accept messages from a specific list of domains. This suggests that the system is designed to be used internally by Facebook employees only. A similar non-response resulted from inquiries into some Pagan Facebook pages being hacked.
Given that Facebook continues to be where people gather, and no social networking alternatives have emerged which have taken any measurable number of users away from the site, its employees will likely be able to continue to ignore such concerns for the foreseeable future. While Brokaw is still looking into getting her group restored, she understands this reality, and to some extent has resigned herself to it.
She’s created a new group, one with what she hopes is a clearer name: “Following Isis, Goddess of Many Names.” Perhaps that will be enough to keep it off of the virtual execution block.
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“A contact in the public relations department did not return seven messages left for him.” SEVEN! I’m so glad you gave the specific details here. Lets us know how important the public are in Facebook’s public relations work, certainly.
Facebook’s uneven, automated and often irrational enforcement policies are a scandal; I’m aware of any number of anti-racism activists who have had pages shut down or access to Facebook denied, based on having called a white supremacist something like “a special snowflake,” or having been reported for non-existent nudity on their page, typically by bigots who are angry at having racism discussed at all. And yet any racial slur short of the n word itself is given a green light by the community standards at Facebook, often despite dozens of reports.
Those “community standards” are pretty discouraging–especially if knee jerk rejection of the voices of religious minorities and activists is actually the standard of conduct Facebook endorses.
Public relations doesn’t matter to Facebook because the public, the ordinary users, are not stakeholders of any kind in the company’s business model. They are the product. They serve exactly the same role as cattle serve in the economy of a meat packing plant. The cynical genius of Mark Zuckerberg’s model is that he has trained his cattle to walk themselves into the plant. His two-legged livestock of course have free will and the mental capacity to notice that no one entering the plant comes out the other side any better for it, but they keep walking, because, well…that’s where all the other cattle are going and if there was anyplace else in the world to walk, the gates would have diverted us there before the stun line…
Facebook users are not customers in any sense of the word. When you sign up, you agree to give over every bit of your online existence and content to the company as marketable data points. You sign an agreement which entitles you to…absolutely nothing at all. They give you some toys to play with, if they feel like it and on whatever terms they want to impose, that day. You didn’t contract to receive a definable good or service at its market value. You took a deal which promised something for nothing without reading the fine print as to who gets the something and who ends up with nothing.
Corporations never “do the right thing” because it’s the right thing to do. Ever. They are conscious entities which don’t even possess the mental machinery for moral reasoning, and the laws that create them would not allow them to exercise moral judgment even if they could. They have only one instinct: to profit, and they will always, always take the path of least resistance to feed that instinct. When things like unions or regulation or market forces mandate things like fair wages and working conditions, they adapt to the extent they must. If the legal regime of the day permits actual chattel slavery or provides a labor force of concentration camp workers designated to be worked to death in savage conditions, so much the better, where the corporation is concerned. Maximize shareholder value.
The Facebook-using public has one theoretical source of leverage. As the world’s only sentient raw material, they could elect not to turn up at the production line. They have steadfastly refused to exercise this leverage or even to give serious thought to it. In the context of what we know to be true about corporations and this corporation, moral outrage in isolation of meaningful action is utterly futile. It’s Newton’s First Law of Motion. No force applied=no change in position or velocity. In the Pagan community, where we strive to understand the metaphysical implications of everything from the universe down to the microcosm, cracking the cause-effect relationship with Facebook should be like 1st grade arithmetic.
I have a limited capacity for meaningful outrage and a lot of things going on in this world that deserve a share of it. Facebook’s unfairness is no longer one of them. If people decide they can’t live with it, it will change. If not, they should settle in for the long haul and perhaps sharpen the sort of cat and mouse tactics of reopening new groups on the fly etc.
Indeed, I’ve been part of several Facebook “Black Outs” already–coordinated waves of “not showing up at the production line” on the part of anti-racists, including for that crucial marketing period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday–and I’ve watched as some of my favorite activists have left the networking site entirely. I’m not quite ready to do that yet myself–in spite of everything, it’s a wonderful tool for activists–I am going to be more than happy to join the exodus, once the tide does begin to turn.
Yes, well those FB black outs really seem to have done wonders! How is it a wonderful tool for activists when its main purposes are at total odds with your goals? It kills me, for instance, to see anti-capitalists willing be capitalist fodder just for the chance to use Facebook’s magical system, as if there were no other way to communicate in this amazingly interconnected world.
It’s also a remarkably wimpy stance to say you’ll only do something once enough other people are doing it. Way to take a stand. You’re exhibiting just the kind of apathy that Facebook counts on every time it makes yet another unpopular policy but doesn’t actually suffer for it.
Just say “No!” to the above mentioned site, and others like it.
*cheers loudly*
Thank you so much for writing that. I am so sick of people whining about Facebook being unfair, but then refusing to actually stop using it in the same breath. “But it’s the only place we can do X” will only be true as long as they all remain loyal to it. Not to mention how completely foolish it is to make one’s important activities – like, say, organizing activism – entirely dependent on a tool you have no control over and often actually opposes your goals.
Imagine the response if, say, the terrorist group went by the name Jihadists Ensuring Slaughter of Unwelcome Shi’a – or if other people referred to them by the resulting acronym – and Facebook started arbitrarily shutting down groups that had the name JESUS in their group title… The mind boggleth…
An interesting and less than charming footnote to this story:
I just tried to post a link to it on Twitter, using the link provided in the email message sent to me from The Wild Hunt. Result?
Facebook Deletes
That was it, no rest of the title, no link, no nothing. So apparently, and oh so delightfully (if unsurprisingly) the wholesale discrimination without any form of rationalization continues to spread.
Tempting as it is I won’t spend time expressing my opinion of Facebook (I refuse to deal with them and why more people do not do the same is beyond me) the media (that would take hours and really become a rant) or members of the general public who refuse to understand the significance of the words they choose.
Oh, yes. That’s of course another very common Facebook ploy. And applied with no rationality, too.
Imagine how successful a moral Mark Zuckerberg would be? I know, we’ve been taught to believe his cynicism and lack of moral compass are the reason his company is successful… but as a woman who bought her cars for decades from the most popular used car business in my area, one built entirely on their reputation for honesty and integrity, I have my doubts about how inviolable an amoral business plan is. Certainly, Pleasant Journey’s competitors would have loved to have a fraction of their business.
The difference is that car buyers know they can go to any of hundreds of competitors. If Pleasant Journey somehow convinced everyone that they were the only source of reliable automobiles on the planet, and people fell for it, you’d find a very different consumer experience before long.