ABSTRACT: Tracking rape culture’s social license to operate online
Because, actually, this really matters.
The FetLife Alleged Abusers Database Engine (FAADE) is a simple tool to collect reports of allegedly abusive behavior perpetrated by individuals. As expected, it was quickly “spammed” by aggrieved users who expressly articulated a motivation to “make it [FAADE] useless.” However, analysis of the spam suggests there are data-driven ways to identify communities who have toxic responses to the possibility of abuse occurring in their midst, something we’ve read about before but haven’t been able to witness, play by play, on screen. This post will first show how the spam was matched to a geographically proximal social group. It will then discuss the implications of this analysis for suggesting possible heuristics that can protect users of online social networks from physical-world sexual assault that are more useful than deeply flawed processes relying on blacklists such as national sex offender registries.