Let me tell you that as a woman I received all kinds of messages on very popular platforms from a large variety of creeps. I have one single picture on my profile, just in case you were thinking that maybe I deserve it because I have lots of provocative pictures. I don’t and even if I had, I am still a human and deserve the same respect as any human being. This is just one thing that is seen at the surface and that everyone knows about, that women are a group of people that is harassed on centralized platforms. I am sure there are other groups of people that received their portion of harassment on centralized platforms.
I will tell you a story and you can draw the conclusion by yourselves. I was in a Facebook public group entitled “Japan from The Inside”. Every day I watched beautiful photos of Japanese places, foods, and entertaining things on that group. As you can see, until now that this was an educational entertaining group, talking about diversity, cultural exchange, and trying to bring people from other parts of the world together. One day, like today, the admin of the group posted some pictures of an almost naked Japanese actress and in the description, he wrote her name and that she is a model and an actress. I asked him why didn’t he posted some of her movies. If she is an actress you would expect someone who puts her pictures in a group to mention at least one of the movies that she played in.
I am thinking that if a large number of members from the group will see the title of a movie, they would see it, out of boredom, rate it, make her movie popular, increase her reputation and give her more opportunities to be cast in other movies in the future. Because this is how you are helping your favorite actress, making her work popular not her body. But the admin of that group only wanted to objectify her body, didn’t mention any movies that she played in. After I asked him why, he bluntly told me that this post is only about her pictures, and then he deleted his comment because he was thinking that the members of that group would be triggered by his reaction.
He kept tagging me in the comments of that post mentioning some of her movies first and then he muted me in the group. He started publicly attacking me in the group, and I tried to explain to him in private messages that what he was doing was wrong, then he unmuted me in the comments of that post and let me comment in the post what was wrong about what he was doing to that actress. I tried to calmly explain to him that this is the reason why some actresses are not given any roles in movies because people are only looking at their bodies and not at their work, people like him are promoting only photos that don’t bring her any money when they could promote movies that people would watch the movie and the crew that was working on it would receive more money.
He told me that I am jealous that my body is not like in those pictures. This is the only conclusion an adult that is an admin of a group on a very popular centralized platform, can come to after all the time I spend enlisting objective reasons as to why it is bad to only care about actresses' bodies and not their work as well. Of course, he blocked me after all of that and he got me out of his Facebook group after harassing me. That group that he created is disguised as a cultural exchange and diversity-friendly group because he is was objectifying an actress's body, because of her body first and because of her race secondly, without giving any credit to her work or trying to make her movies more known to the public.
This wasn't the only time that he was doing things like this, but was perhaps my first time since I realized the impact these kinds of things have on the women that are in those pictures. It is important to note the fact that he deleted all of his replies because he was trying to maintain his image intact as a group administrator that doesn't harass and mute people taking their right to reply in an argument.
If I was wrong about it, his reaction is still not an acceptable one, because he could calmly explain to me what I was so wrong about. But he knew that I wasn't wrong because he started attacking me. Saying to a woman that she is jealous of another woman's body doesn't prove anything and doesn't bring any reaction other than disgusts. Just like posting actresses' half-naked pictures in a group when you could promote her movies and help her grow.
In a centralized platform, anyone can do everything they want, harass whoever they want, post what they want and if someone has a group with thousands of peoples in it, they can do whatever they want to you in that group. Also, another aspect that I want to talk about is the existence of fake groups and fake pages on Facebook. There are lots of pages that are spamming, groups that have fake accounts in them and are adding real accounts into them by default, and real people like me and you can not get out of those fake groups so easily. Also, real groups that have real accounts in them can be attacked by bots from Facebook. I also learned how to create a bot on this platform without spending too much time on it.
Another story that I will tell you is what happened to a friend of mine. He was not in any groups on Facebook, unlike me, he was not such a fan of the platform. one day while casually scrolling he received a notification that was telling him that he is the creator of a Porn page that he didn't create or see in his life before. He couldn't make the Page not include his name, and after a few minutes he was also included in a group with 25-30 accounts, some were fake, some were real, that public group was spamming and tagging him. He couldn't get out neither of the group nor of the Page.
So this is a centralized platform for you ladies and gentlemen!