A page for University of Chicago students to anonymously share confessions, questions, and rants was shut down by Facebook after a post included a meme making fun of French people.
The Chicago Maroon reported the UChicago Secrets Page was unpublished by Facebook last week after a post mocking the French was found to violate the Community Standards. In a screencap provided to The Chicago Maroon, it is clear the meme is in the style of many other copypasta memes that make nonsensical comments with emojis randomly dispersed throughout the post. Copypasta posts posts modeled after templates, but contain words that are swapped out to make different points.
Part of the post that was provided by The Chicago Maroon reads (with emojis removed for clarity):
#UChicagoSecrets15180 I hate France I harbor no negative feelings about any individual French people at the University of Chicago, but everything about French history and culture is absolutely repulsive to me, and if anybody else has researched it as deeply as I have, they would feel the same way. In Germany, it was almost accepted as a fact that anyone you met who was a serious asshole was from France, and almost 100% of the time, you were correct in that assumption. I have traveled to France several times myself, and it only further solidified the impression that, domestically and abroad, French people are the biggest assholes on earth.
As clarified on Tuesday, Facebook’s Community Standards have a prohibition against attacking people based on their national origin. Insulting people, such as calling them gross and ugly, or insulting their historical traditions and calling them assholes, appear to violate the Community Standards.
The moderators told The Chicago Maroon, “Since there are plenty of ‘edgier’ pages on Facebook that consistently publish ‘worse’ content than we do, we are really hoping that Facebook will come to the conclusion that UChicago Secrets was wrongly unpublished.”
Anonymous Facebook pages for university students, like the UChicago Secrets page, cropped up a few years ago. Users submit their thoughts via an anonymous survey for moderators to pick and choose which to post.
While awaiting their Facebook appeal, the administrators for the new University of Chicago Secrets page make it clear that they want to “keep it civil.” In fact, the banner for the page even says “keep it civil.” The new page includes a FAQ, which outright says if users wish to submit offensive posts, they “won’t get approved.”
A spokesperson for the University of Chicago weighed in on the controversy to Inside Higher Ed, saying that while the school is aware of the existence of the UChicago Secrets page, they did not actively monitor the page to seek out violations of the school’s policy.
Robert Shibley, executive director for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told Insider Higher Ed, “While most Americans would ridicule the idea that jokes about the French constitute hate speech, the authorities, whether they be at Facebook, in governments or on college campuses, have to apply the rules equally, leading to absurd results like this.”
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