SoylentNews

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jessica Roy reports at NY Magazine that news aggregator Fark has became one of the first original link aggregators to ban misogyny from its community making moderators responsible for ensuring that misogyny doesn't make its way into headlines or comments. Banned headlines include rape jokes, calling women as a group "whores" or "sluts" or similar demeaning terminology, and jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it.

There are lots of examples of highly misogynistic language in pop culture, and Fark has used those plenty over the years. From SNL's "Jane, you ignorant slut" to Blazing Saddles' multiple casual references to rape, there are a lot of instances where views are made extreme to parody them. On Fark, we have a tendency to use pop culture references as a type of referential shorthand with one another.

On SNL and in a comedy movie, though, the context is clear. On the Internet, it's impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point.

According to Roy, Fark's new guidelines are a "refreshing departure from the misguided free speech arguments that sites like Reddit that bend over backwards to defend the handful of misogynist communities that are among its ranks, not to mention the free-floating slut-shaming that snakes its way into regular comment threads."