They don’t deserve your Christmas dollar: Give these companies a miss this year!

Sexploitation 

As published by www.ausport.gov.au Reprinted with permission

*Content warning: child exploitation references

UK children’s charity says platforms have duty of care to keep kids safe

[UPDATED] Finally - after action from eSafety - Instagram has deleted three accounts we reported for child exploitation. The accounts posted explicit imagery of young girls in lingerie and swimwear, with with captions like 'hot young teen booty'. One account promoted a 'lingerie contest' using an image of a 14 year old Australian model in a g-string bikini, advertised a link to the deepnude website (read more about this exploitative app here) and sold spots in a private chat group for access to 'uncensored content', referring to images of teens as 'jerk-off material'.

These accounts are exploitative and degrading. This isn't Pornhub - it's mainstream social media.

Girls deserve better than the so-called 'dedication' to child safety Facebook is offering. We've heard enough talk. It's time for Facebook to stop facilitating child exploitation on its platforms.

Just overnight, Facebook announced a 'renewed commitment' to child safety. We hope this isn’t more PR spin.

Last year, Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton labelled Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘morally bankrupt’ for plans to introduce end-to-end encryption across all Facebook-platform private communication tools - a move which would aid sex predators and the exchange of child exploitation material, and endanger children further.

We’ll be watching to see how Facebook’s commitment plays out.

Between April 2017 and October 2019 police recorded over 10,000 incidents of online grooming in England and Wales. Where the communication method was known, fifty-five per cent occurred on Facebook-owned platforms, with more recorded on Instagram than any other individual platform. The UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has used this data to bolster a call for regulatory measures to hold social media platforms to account for facilitating these crimes.

Source: NSPCC via BBC

Facebook responded:

There is no place for grooming or child exploitation on our platforms and we use technology to proactively find and quickly remove it.

Facebook served up similar public relations spin last year in response to our collaborative, international #WakeUpInstagram campaign. But for almost a year, we’ve documented the failures of Facebook’s proactive tech and content-moderating system to keep kids safe from predators, harassment, exploitation and abuse. Earlier this year we pointed out that by giving predators unfettered access to underage girls, Instagram is complicit in normalising the idea that they are available for sexual gratification - an idea that has real-world consequences for girls. 

Last month Facebook released its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, including data on takedown of content that violated Community Guidelines. It reported a proactive takedown rate of 97.7% of content that exploits children, and said that the other 2.3% was removed by human moderators. Facebook said that views of child exploitation content were ‘infrequent’,  estimating that there were no more than five views of violating content for every 10,000 views.

These figures related only to the violating content that Facebook actioned. What about all the violating content they didn't action, or the content that wasn't reported, or even found, because it was hidden behind private accounts, in unsaved stories and live posts, or in DMs and messenger rooms? Is Facebook keeping tabs on those views of child exploitation?

On May 20 we reported an account which posts explicit imagery of children - imagery which Facebook's 'proactive tech' failed to detect and remove. At the time of writing - two weeks later - the account (with nearly 2000 followers and 65 posts) is still active and posting child exploitation material. The longer this page is up, the more followers it gains and the more images it posts, the higher the number of views of child exploitation. Will these be counted?

How does Facebook defend its claim that, regarding content that exploits children, they 'do not find enough violating samples to precisely estimate prevalence'? Is turning a blind eye to it really a defense? Whose interests are served by pretending it doesn't exist?

While Facebook has a clear and comprehensive child nudity/exploitation policy, the sexualisation, harassment and exploitation of children on Instagram is rampant. Users don't heed the policy, and moderators don't consistently enforce it.

COVID-19 is having an exacerbating effect. As experts have warned, children are now at more risk of online sexual exploitation than ever. In keeping with this tragic trend, we recently discovered and reported hundreds of Instagram accounts for child exploitation activity - many of which were created after the start of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Just last week we reported a new Instagram account which was posting images of a pre-teen girl dressed in pink lingerie and advertising images for sale on Patreon and Boosty (read more about this - including our action and win - here).  Instagram's response to reports is generally slow, though, and most often consists of a standardised reply that says due to COVID-19 they 'can't prioritise all reports right now'. 

Undoubtedly, Facebook's 'transparency' data for the COVID-19 period will present outliers. But as our investigations and NSPCC's data show, Instagram's serious child predator and exploitation problems and failure to keep kids safe long predate the current global pandemic.  

Facebook recently appointed an Oversight Board to arbitrate content takedown decisions. It's unclear whether this will improve child safety on its platforms. What is clear is that big tech and social media companies like Facebook are part of the child sexual exploitation supply chain. And through its public relations spin, lack of transparency and weak policy enforcement, Facebook is aiding predators and hurting children.

Read more about NSPCC's call for regulatory measures to hold tech and social media heads accountable for child exploitation here.

See also:

No Facebook, you're not doing enough to protect children.

Instagram CEO says 'can't post nudity'. Why did we have to repeatedly report content to police?

Instagram a “predator’s paradise”: Collective Shout joins anti sexploitation groups in global campaign

Instagram hosts sharing of child sex abuse fantasies

Graphic rape comments fuel #WakeUpInstagram campaign

The Ultra Tune brand has become synonymous with misogyny and sexist portrayals of women in its advertising over many years. We have documented the company’s use of degrading gender stereotypes, its vilification of women resulting in multiple Ad Standards’ rulings against it and the engagement of known perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence in the production of its ads. 

Ultra Tune's sexist ads were broadcast during the Australian Open, including the women's matches, serving to undermine the public's celebration of women in elite sport. 

Last month, we wrote to Craig Tiley, CEO of Tennis Australia and Tournament Director for the Australian Open, who is also a Male Champion of Change to "end everyday sexism", and asked him to inform Channel 9 that he did not want Ultra Tune to be represented as a sponsor of his tennis-related events. We have not received a response. 

Click here to read the full letter. 

See also:

SLAMMED! Sexist Ultra Tune ad broadcast during women’s tennis condemned

Why is a rapist fronting a major TV campaign?

Sexism, plastic surgery pressure, strip clubs and other reasons to boycott Ultra Tune

British lingerie brand Agent Provocateur, known for its sexualising ad campaigns, has released a commercial featuring elite female athletes in lingerie. The ad includes gymnast Georgia-Mae Fenton, climber Sasha Digiulian, pole vaulter Alysha Newman and hurdler and sprinter Queen Harrison Claye.

The ad shows slow panning shots of the women’s g-string clad backsides, close ups of women’s bouncing breasts and bodies, as well as footage of the women competing, still wearing lingerie. 

Content Warning - sex shop advertising, depicts eroticised violence against women

For years, Honey Birdette sex shops have relied on sexist and objectifying representations of women to flog their products, despite claiming to empower women.

Women working in food services are prone to sexual harassment.  The 2018 National Survey on Workplace Sexual Harassment report found that people employed in accommodation and food services - 60 per cent of whom were women - were "overrepresented as victims of workplace sexual harassment”.  A 2019 survey of Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association members - a group made up primarily of employees from the retail, fast-food and warehouse sectors - showed that nearly half of women had experienced workplace sexual harassment.

Last week KFC gushed about its partnership with icare for a staff-education program aimed at equipping staff with skills to de-escalate customer abuse and reducing its prevalence. Background data confirms that for workers in the fast-food sector, customer abuse is the norm, and is experienced more widely by female workers than male workers.

We know that abuse is borne out of disrespect, and so it’s reasonable to view customer abuse - abuse that tends to affect women more prevalently than men - as another symptom of societal-level disrespect for women. When other research confirms that gender stereotypes and sexually objectifying representations of women in media and advertising diminish our view of and value for women, we’re hard-pressed to understand why - at the same time it invests in employee empowerment - KFC would use casual sexism to flog chicken. 

icare’s pilot program involving KFC reportedly resulted in a 48% reduction in cases of customer abuse. But in the wake of KFC’s cataclysmic advertising fail, do young, female employees in KFC outlets have reason to feel empowered at work? KFC has sent the message to men and boys everywhere that ogling a woman’s breasts - an act of sexual harassment - is just a natural, normal thing to do. The message to women and girls? To borrow a pun from another KFC ad campaign, ‘Bucket. Why not?’ - just go with it. This is the antithesis of the message of respect-based, anti-harassment training programs which instruct victims and onlookers to speak out against harassment. 

It is always good to provide workers with skills to manage the spectrum of customer misconduct, but young women should not be expected to absorb the consequences of a nationwide ad campaign where sexual objectification and sexual harassment of young women is the punchline. 

How can young women feel respected by their employer when KFC is contributing to the very problems they are trying to solve with a "respect and resilience" program? Will they be safe at work when men like this walk through the door?

If KFC has - as it claims - genuine interest in the well-being of young people and empowering its staff, it will retract the ad and commit to marketing its products without endorsing sexual harassment and perpetuating antiquated sexist narratives that contribute to a culture of disrespect for women. 

See also:

Attitudes shape behaviour: men defend sexist KFC ad with onslaught of misogynistic abuse

KFC issues non-apology over sexist ad

KFC serves up buckets of sexism

Sexist grooming of boys - brought to you by KFC

Submission on National Inquiry into Workplace Sexual Harassment