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Bennett, Jessica. "Should Facebook Ban Sexist Pages?"
Misogyny is alive and well online; the Internet provides just another forum in which bigots can express their views. In "Should Facebook Ban Sexist Pages," Jessica Bennett (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/05/should-facebook-ban-sexist-pages-the-reality-of-misogyny-online.html) suggests that female bloggers can control the discourse by raising awareness about the presence of misogyny and working to correct the underlying social problems that spawn it in the first place. In many online forums, misogynists can hide behind the cloak of anonymity that the Internet provides. Even when identities are exposed, as on Facebook, sexism remains rampant. As Bennett puts it, "Facebook is just a newer version of the same old problem," (p. 2).
While Bennett fails to effectively address the central question she poses in the title of her blog post, other authors tackle the subject well. For instance, Brendan O'Neill of The Telegraph (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100115868/the-campaign-to-stamp-out-misogyny-online-echoes-victorian-efforts-to-protect-women-from-coarse-language/)...
1). In similar fashion, Wendy Kaminer of The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/11/stamp-out-online-misogyny/248236/) writes that government censorship of the Internet would be dangerous, and that it is up to individual Websites to police themselves and keep the discourse on their sites civilized.
Indeed, censorship harms the rights and freedoms that women are trying to preserve in the first place. No sane person likes reading hate speech of any sort; but censorship only feeds the flames. As Kaminer puts it, "I don't believe that misogyny will be eliminated or significantly diminished by private suppression of misogynist online speech." Certainly, the real problem of sexism exists in the real world and not online: in persistent and pervasive income disparity, political power disparity, and worse, the dreadful phenomena such as rape, sex slavery, and abuse.
Eszter Hargittai. Facebook Privacy…
