RINJ Foundation is an international organization based in Toronto and founded by persons in Canada, Britain and Australia.

As of October 25, 2011 RINJ has convinced many advertisers including Royal Bank, American Express, BlackBerry, Future Shop, ModCloth, Sony and others to withdraw their ads from improper Facebook content.  Because Facebook's advertising algorithms don't guarantee blacklisting certain pages, the internet giant has removed advertising from many dozens of pages while simultaneously some companies have removed all their advertising and in essence dropped Facebook from their media plan until the issue is cleaned up.

RINJ has also convinced Facebook to delete a large number of extreme pro-sexual-assault pages including child-porn and rape pages. A few large ones and hundreds of  smaller communities continue to exist and some are doing sex trade from within

 

RINJ has had a huge and growing impact on the problem but it is clear to us that Facebook is overwhelmed with an onslaught of nasty web content from free contributors which it relies on for its content and therefore does not want to overly discourage. Certain content contributed by thugs is awful and breaks hate speech and criminal laws around the world in  varying degrees from country to country. That content and the people it attracts is replacing a large 'traditional' market segment that seems to be vanishing slowly from Facebook.

We have gone straight to the advertiser in a very aggressive way and while being an annoyance, have managed to earn some respect. We have demonstrated that we are willing to diligently make public what they are doing with their ads sponsoring child porn, pro-rape, hatred and other illegal or just offensive content.

Unfortunately most people think of Facebook as a place where they exchange family pictures and keep a repository of favourite photos and videos. Then came "cloud computing" which basically is a process wherein the user can carry a thin client (low resource computer) connected wirelessly to loaned or paid-for storage plus various computing services.

The increasingly sophisticated BlackBerry, iPod/iPad/iPhone and Android devices are giving users an opportunity to replace Facebook for many of their social interfacing functions. Users text each other, send pictures and videos directly instead of going through Facebook.

In addition to this erosion of Facebook user activity, many people are trying other social networks like Twitter and Google+.

Why is that important to RINJ Foundation? Facebook is a money-making monster that is fuelled by free content and massive user contact. When the nice ordinary users drifted away, the thugs look more attractive than ever as users and content providers.

The rate of expansion for this offensive and illegal content is extraordinary because some people have figured out ways to advance the sex trade through the pages and once money-making schemes became possible the process exploded. Some of these porn/rape pages are for sale. There is an enormous preponderance of child-rape/molestation pages springing up. That is a big internet business and seems to be run by gangs or people long established in that world. The group 4chan owns a sizeable piece of Facebook's darker content.

Facebook has lost a lot of control over its own product and during its current look-and-feel metamorphosis, which it has undertaken  to combat Google+ with new features, it has enough trouble fixing broken code and database issues let alone policing content it doesn't really want to police in the first place.

Facebook relies on the lack of internet governance but does mount a small effort to police its own content but only from the perspective of protecting its own interests.

Controversial content which attracts users is good for business. Unfortunately Facebook is too wiling to step far over the line.

The RINJ Foundation and Facebook will evolve together. While RINJ has established web pages and a web presence in other social networks, it's focus is dealing with problems with Facebook from within Facebook.

We do not threaten 'sedition' and do not encourage users to leave Facebook but instead encourage more and more like-minded people to Join Facebook and become part of a new paradigm wherein user groups will have a strong say over content. Facebook and RINJ have not reached any accord on what that content should be but the existence of a fair and somewhat cooperative RINJ Community within Facebook is generally seen as positive.

Some of our more aggressive "promotional" efforts have been described as spamming by Facebook (we are inclined to discontinue that practice) and we have had a conflict with Facebook wherein we have show some screen captures of very graphic content with advertisers ads splashed all over the page. In both cases we have agreed to abide rules and warnings and then just turned around and continued flooding Facebook with reports of improper content in violation with Facebook's own rules.

 

RINJ Foundation operates three pages on Facebook with a quarter million post views per week. We have roughly two hundred and fifty active members each with about 20,000 post views per week.

Media interest in the past two years has drawn a lot of attention to pro-rape content on Facebook. There are many weak imitators but there are also a number of organized cyber criminals exploiting the traffic. Fortunately the media has focussed on the more benign content pages like "the alleyway" which pales in comparison to some other 4chan efforts.

Working within Facebook we seek to facilitate change that sets a new standard of user-governance that would be a positive example for all such international social networking communities in the future.

 

 

Micheal O'Brien Co-Founder and Spokesperson