Racebending.com

Earlier today, the Facebook group People Against Racebending: Protest of the Cast of The Last Airbender Movie was removed by Facebook. The group has been around since the early days of the protest (Dec. 2008) and as of last week had almost 6,000 members. A cached version of the group can be seen here.

While we still have our Racebending.com Fan Page on Facebook, the group was our original home on the social networking site, one of our open forums, and a way for us to keep in touch with most of our supporters. While the Group had received its share of trolls and had hosted some heated arguments, the Group as a whole was certainly not “unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory” (causes for removal as listed on Facebook’s Terms of Use.)

This is the email we received today:

From: Facebook (generic notification email)
Date: Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 12:38 PM
Subject: Facebook Warning
To: (personal email redacted)

Hello,

The group “People Against Racebending: Protest of the Cast of The Last Airbender Movie” has been removed because it violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, groups that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down groups that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page at http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wgroups.

The Facebook Team

One of our staff members contacted the Facebook team with the following:

To whom it may concern:

I am one of the administrators of the group “People Against Racebending: Protest the Cast of The Last Airbender Movie.” Today I was contacted that the group has been removed because it violated the Facebook Terms of Use. I am writing to request that Facebook further clarify why our group was removed.

I had not received any warnings prior to the complete erasure of the group today even though the FAQ indicates that administrators will receive warnings when inappropriate content is posted. After thoroughly reviewing the Facebook Terms of Use, I am unclear as to how our group violated the terms.

The group is one of many protest groups on Facebook. It does not advocate anything “hateful, threatening or obscene”, it is simply advocating for greater diversity in movies and pointing out a glass ceiling in casting in one or two specific films. We are not “attacking any individual or group, nor are we advertising a product or service.”

When we googled the message we received to see other groups Facebook has banned, we found that other groups deleted for violating the terms of use included White Supremacist groups (Stormfront), anti-white groups (eg: “Kill the Whites”) anti-Zionist, and anti-Islam groups openly employing profanity and hate speech to further their agendas.

In advocating for fair representation in media, our group has always striven for the opposite by fighting discrimination. Other facebook groups similar in purpose to “People Against Racebending: Protest the Cast of The Last Airbender Movie” exist without any repercussions, such as Boycott Transformers 2 and Boycott Dragonball.

Recently, the group has been harassed by trolls, and has received “hateful, threatening or obscene” posts about Asian Americans, or about the protest, on the wall. Administrators have tried to monitor these attacks diligently and Facebook users who have repeatedly posted inflammatory language on our group have been banned. We hope that Facebook did not misconstrue the hate speech left on our wall by the people harassing us, as a product of our supporters.

Facebook’s FAQ writes that “Any content that is obscene, violent, malicious or otherwise offensive will be removed.” We have no idea as to how the entirety of our Facebook group could be considered to meet this criteria, particularly given the precedence of similar discrimination-in-movies protest groups on Facebook.

Please explain why our group is removed and outline any steps we can take to see it restored.

Sincerely,

Marissa Lee
racebending.com

As of this writing, we are still awaiting a response from the Facebook team.

We are getting closer to the release of the movie and we need the support of the greater community now more than ever. This is a setback, but we will continue to spread the word about how The Last Airbender created a glass ceiling when it erased the ethnicities of its Asian and Inuit characters and cast white actors to play lead characters of color.

If you and/or your friends were members of the Facebook group (or even if you weren’t), please stay in touch with us by joining our Facebook Fan Page or our LiveJournal Community. You can also follow us on Twitter or sign up for our newsletter.

We will share whatever we learn with the Racebending community and let you know if there are any steps we can take to restore the group.

EDIT: We’re still trying to figure out the best way to contact Facebook. YOU can start by going to Facebook’s Groups Suggestion page and asking them to look into why we were deleted.