Our Facebook Comments Policy

Everyday Feminism strives to maintain a respectful, engaging, and thoughtful community of feminists who are supportive of each other’s marginalized identities and experiences.

If you wish to participate in the discussions on our Facebook page, we ask that you adhere to the guidelines below and to the spirit of the community we seek to create.

Community Standards and Guidelines

Everyday Feminism’s Facebook page is for people who want to incorporate intersectional feminism into their lives and support each other’s healing and growth, so that we can all become more self-loving and self-accepting people.

Through our discussions here, we hope to encourage each other, and ourselves, to become more compassionate, ethical, and responsible feminists and allies. This is a space for people who wish to:

• Better understand how patriarchy and kyriarchy (different forms of intersecting systems of oppression) impact people of different identities in our society.

• Discover new ways to, both, survive and thrive in a society that marginalizes them.

• Think critically about how they have unearned privileges in areas where they are part of the dominant group

• Learn strategies for how not to contribute to (but rather, stand up to and dismantle) the systems of oppression from which they benefit.

Please follow these guidelines in order to create an engaging, respectful, and supportive space:

• Participate in conversations that respond to the post’s content and take responsibility for your comments and engage in good faith dialogue.

• Don’t dismiss or deflect an issue raised by members of a marginalized group to which you don’t belong. Often, what makes you uncomfortable contradicts what you’ve been told as someone who belongs to the privileged group. In this case, it’s best to pay attention to other perspectives.

• Sit in the discomfort of having your privilege pointed out and think critically about how the different forms of oppression you benefit from permeate our society.

• Don’t reward disrespectful, problematic comments with attention. Instead, report them via the Contact Us form and note which post they’re on.

If Your Comments Are Hidden Or If You’re Banned

Our Facebook page is moderated in order to support the experiences of marginalized people in our oppressive society. Therefore, it’s not an open forum where any oppressive or silencing comments are allowed. Since we are not the government, this isn’t censorship — this is how we institute anti-oppression.

Given how much our society privileges people who have dominant identities while dismissing the experiences of marginalized people, our Facebook page is moderated to counteract that. In our own small way, we’re trying to create the type of exchange, love, and compassion that we’d like to see in the world at large.

Therefore, our Facebook page does not allow comments that reflect:

• Little or no desire to learn about feminism (including debate about whether or not it should exist).

• Care about sexism, but not about racism, transphobia, fatphobia, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of oppression, and/or a lack of care in regards to how they’re interrelated.

• Claims that situations targeting marginalized people are not actually related to oppression, particularly from privileged commenters who aren’t impacted by the post’s topic. This would be privilege explaining – when a person of privilege is explaining a marginalized person’s own experience to them. This oftens show up in the form of mansplaining, whitesplaining, cissplaining, thinsplaining and straightsplaining.

• Attempt to derail the conversation to a tangential topic that doesn’t further the conversation regarding the post’s content, especially if it redirects attention away from a marginalized group’s experiences for the more dominant group’s experience or to minimize the marginalized group’s experiences. For example, saying #NotAllMen and #AllLivesMatter or claiming “racism against white people and “reverse racism.” 

Everyday Feminism reserves the right to hide or delete any comments that:

• Promote anti-feminism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, classism, religious discrimination, ageism, fatphobia, ableism, or any other form of ignorance, discrimination, or hatred toward any group of people.

• Intend to personally attack another user or member of Everyday Feminism.

• Blame someone, particularly people sharing their personal stories, for their issues.

• Contain lewd, violent, or profane commentary or images.

• Derail the conversation to a tangential topic that doesn’t further the conversation regarding the post’s content.

• Are spam and posts that are commercial in nature.

• Are made by fake Facebook accounts. Profiles with no friends will be assumed to be fake accounts.

This is not an exhaustive list, and other types of comments that threaten the community spirit will be hidden or deleted. Everyday Feminism reserves the right to to ban anyone who violate these policies and guideline, and without warning.

If you disagree with or are confused about the content of our posts, that’s okay!

• If you are not targeted by that issue because you do not share that marginalized identity, than it’s likely you’re engaging in privilege explaining. Please read this post on privilege explaining to better understand what that means.

• To help you learn more about an issue that doesn’t impact you, please check out the other related posts on our website by using our search function in the right hand column of the site.

• You can ask questions in the Facebook post, but please make sure to ask them respectfully, engage in a good faith dialogue, and not feel entitled to marginalized people explaining their oppression to you. Please make sure not to derail the conversation in order to center it on your own experiences over those impacted by the issue, and do not dismiss the concerns of people whose marginalized identity you don’t share. Also be aware of how much space you’re taking up in the conversation, as we want to prioritize the voices and experiences of people who are impacted by the issue and not of privileged people.

If you disagree with our content and are impacted by the issue discussed because you share that marginalized identity, please let us know! We do our best through our strong editorial process. But we do make mistakes and appreciate being called out and called in and being held accountable.

Some Things To Be Aware Of

Given the nature and limits of moderation, please note that:

• We are a small team of staff and and have a commitment to paying everyone for their work. Therefore, we have limited capacity to moderate Facebook and are always juggling moderation along with running a very popular and large site. While we do regular checks to moderate, we are unable to moderate 24/7 and in real-time. Sometimes that means a problematic comment is up for a while before we can handle it.

• Sometimes we may leave up a problematic comment because our community has put a lot of time and effort into replying to them, and we wish to respect that.

• If we delete a comment or ban someone, it will hide the comments of everyone who responded to that post or the banned person. This is a function of Facebook, which we can’t change. Please do not get this confused with your comments being intentionally hidden or deleted by our moderators.

• We also use the Facebook filter to help keep the trolls at bay. However, sometimes a perfectly fine comment gets hidden automatically by it. We usually check the hidden comments to make sure it’s been rightfully filtered. If comments are wrongfully filtered, we unhide them.

How to Report a Violation

Please report any violations by completing the Contact Us form here.  Thank you!

Update on the Changes to the Image Descriptions

 

We’ve moved the location of the image descriptions from our Facebook posts to inside the articles themselves, underneath the feature image as well as in the alt text.

For more information, you can read Facebook’s statement about image descriptions here.

Note: You may also notice that in most of our captions, we don’t describe the race or gender of the people in the images. Identity is an incredibly personal (and complicated) aspect of our lives, and using the limited words available to us to attempt to describe those identities from the outside can be hurtful. As an organization, we don’t believe in making assumptions about people’s identities. This means that when we use stock photos, we can’t know how the models identify simply by looking at them, so we describe their appearance without assumptions about race or gender.

If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about how we can be more accessible, we welcome your comments through our Contact Us form.

With Love,
The Editors at Everyday Feminism