RINJ Foundation Forms Global "Facebook Action Consortium"

RINJ Foundation Announces International Alliance To Conduct Global Awareness Campaign: Rape Is No Joke

Toronto - October 27, 2011 - Co-Founder and RINJ Foundation spokesperson Micheal O'Brien announced today that an agreement in principal has been reached with "Women's Rights, Change.org"  in America and "Women's Views on News" in Great Britain to form an international 'Facebook Action Consortium' to direct a series of planned strategies aimed at quashing the proliferation of web content promoting sexual violence toward men, women and children. The international group will focus from the outset on Facebook.

According Mr. O'Brien,  the consortium has defined a significant philosophical problem with Facebook.

"Facebook insists that many pages advocating sexual violence and violence against women are merely 'jokes'," said O'Brien.

"Facebook has released a statement saying 'just as telling a rude joke won’t get you thrown out of your local pub, it won’t get you thrown off Facebook' and we fundamentally disagree with that cavalier approach to certain specific content we have identified as both globally immoral and unlawful in many jurisdictions," O'Brien added.

"The site refuses, to recognize these pages as serious violations of the site's own terms of use, for being hateful, threatening, and advocating violence, and will not remove them if reported. We intend to lever our considerable global constituency with numerous tools available to us including advertiser awareness campaigns; boycotts and powerful international communications strategies."

RINJ Foundation has proposed that Facebook has a capacity problem inasmuch as Facebook does not have enough staff to thoroughly monitor and delete content that presents a clear violation of their terms and conditions or even criminal codes (such as child porn). The RINJ (Rape Is No Joke) Campaign suggests FB implement editors -- like Wikipedia editors -- with power to monitor and delete/hide such content, since it will never have sufficient staff.

In a meeting of the three organizations held October 26, an undisclosed number of other organizations were represented by observers.

According to O'Brien, "We [RINJ Foundation] are in dialogues with groups from Australia, New Zealand, South Affrica and other parts of Europe and plan on bringing a large number of organizations to the table to join us in our present proactive consortium of RINJ,  Women's Rights, Change.org" in America and "Women's Views on News" in Great Britain."

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

As of October 27, 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.

 

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