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A little brouhaha has been brewing this week over a Facebook page called “Dogs suck.”
I received an email message from a friend yesterday asking me to join him and others in reporting a Facebook page called “Dogs Suck” to site administrators and asking them to shut it down. The reason: It seems to incite violence toward dogs, beginning with the thumbnail, which is a picture of a dog with a gun to his head.
This sounded pretty awful, so I figured it was probably worth joining the cause. I also thought I should probably check the page out for myself, to see if I really felt that censorship was appropriate. (I’ll put the link at the bottom of this blog, if you feel inclined to explore further.)
I had to do some searching to find the Facebook page in question, and while I was trolling around I discovered that there are actually quite a few pages on the I Hate Dogs theme, and all of them seem to share some commonalities: insubstantial, moronic, and also unnervingly angry and disrespectful toward dogs. If there were actually interesting content about the negative aspects of dog ownership, then these pages might be worth reading (with emphasis here on might). But instead, we get pictures of dead dogs with comments along the lines of “a good dog is a dead dog.” And pictures of dogs doing “gross” stuff like having sex (what does this suggest about our dog haters?). Perhaps worst of all—and the images that I have since been unable to delete from my mind—we get pictures of dogs that have been abused or tortured, with comments like “Oh yeah!”
I’m of mixed opinion about censoring these sites and others like them—and whether to respond by joining the call to shut down. First of all, I don’t even like to look at pages with content of this sort—partly because I find the nastiness directed at animals to be really disturbing, partly because the content is generally so inane that it isn’t worth the millisecond it takes to click on the page, and partly because I don’t want to contribute to the number of “pageviews” and thus fuel whatever it is that drives people to post this sort of thing.
Still, although the content of the page is really quite stupid, it bothered me enough that I did go ahead and report the page as inappropriate. I know the line between funny and offensive can be quite thin, but in my mind, the Dogs Suck site crossed this line in important ways and entered into the realm of hate speech and graphic violence. If we were to replace the face of the dog in the thumbnail picture with the face of a human--particularly a human belonging to some marginalized group—the pointed gun would be very clearly inappropriate and racist. I also find the pictures of dead or abused dogs very disturbing. What really bothered me was picture of a dog whose eyes have been gouged out, with a joke underneath about dogs being color blind (I don’t know whether the picture is real or photo-shopped. But it is disturbing either way.) There are some things—like child abuse, rape, racism, and the abuse of animals—that really ought to off-limits when it comes to making jokes.
(Here is a link to the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dogs-Suck-4/104366999752051?fref=ts. To report the page as inappropriate, use the dropdown menu just to the right of the “like” button.)
*** As a follow up: Facebook sent me an email the next day telling me that they had investigated my report, and have found nothing inappropriate about the page in question.
