Facebook's Subway Body-Shaming Group Sparks Controversy

In London, women are going underground to protest the Facebook group, Women Who Eat On Tubes.  The page, which features photos of women eating and drinking while riding London's subway system, has been slammed as a body-shaming platform for bullies, and a place where women's photos can be posted without their permission, violating Facebook's terms and conditions. To protest, women have taken to the Tube (London's subway system) carrying their lunches, to show they're not ashamed to eat in transit. 

Although Facebook originally shut down Women Who Eat On Tubes over privacy violations, they later compromised and agreed to make the group private — with 23,000 members. Now, anyone whose photo is posted on the group without their permission will have to join the group in order to see it and lodge an official complaint.

The group's founder, a British filmmaker named Tony Burke, insists that the page is "art" and claims that it led to many "tributaries," or spinoff conversations. However, website The Daily Dot isn't buying it.

"Most of those “tributaries” consist of people accusing the Facebook group of being laughably misogynist, since its entire purpose is to make fun of women for eating in public," wrote Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. "Even if you give Burke the greatest possible benefit of the doubt, most of the “art” on his Facebook group is immediately met with comments like, “Feeding time at the zoo,” which kind of negates the artistic merit Burke claims."

So, why would Facebook go after the group in the first place? They've had some bad PR in the last few years about other controversial or offensive groups and were slow to act. In 2009, a pro-rape Facebook page called "Define Statutory" was permitted to stay up and operate for several months despite a wave of complaints.

At the same time, Facebook came under fire for taking down pictures that women had posted of themselves breastfeeding even as they allowed other users to post sexually graphic, demeaning pictures of women until last May, when an organized group of UK and US activists convinced Facebook to flag such photos as inappropriate.

That double standard got the social network in a heap of trouble, and it looks like they're now responding to user complaints in a much quicker time-frame to avoid negative PR and blog blowback. As Emma Barnett wrote in The Telegraph about the way-too-late move to remove hateful images of women: "Until today — Facebook — which disallows any such equivalent hate images or messages broadcasting homophobia, racism or anti-Semitism, has been blithely letting these images by shared, ‘liked’ and commented upon across its network for years."

Facebook isn't the only social media site to come under fire for its unregulated content. In 2012, Tumblr banned self-harming blogs after the platform was called out for hosting a wave of pro-anorexia photo-sharing sites. Meanwhile, Twitter faced backlash over the rampant bullying of female users on it's site last year. With the exponential growth of user-generated content on the Internet, and the evolving legal and ethical issues that go along with it, regulation is a constant game of whack-a-mole for both users and social media giants alike.

For better or for worse, Facebook's very public brand means that they are Stop #1 for activists online. But simply closing a group or making it private is not the same thing as actually shutting it down, and we need to stop confusing the two.