Is it hate speech to compare your daughter to a pigeon? Facebook says yes.
The other day, I was idly scrolling through my Facebook news feed and saw a post by a buddy of mine. He had uploaded a photo of his 7-year-old lounging outside with a bag of Tostitos.
His caption:
Girls are like pigeons… feed them and they’re nice to you.
About an hour later, his post was gone. Someone who had seen the post had apparently reported it as objectionable, and Facebook sent him a notification:
This photo goes against our Community Standards on hate speech.
He was surprised that any of his friends would report the post, because he thought it was obvious he was just cracking a joke, as he is known to do. But he felt confident that once a human at Facebook reviewed the post, it would be restored. So he requested a review of the decision.
Soon he received another message:
We reviewed your post again and it doesn’t follow our Community Standards on hate speech.
He was baffled by Facebook’s decision.
It also baffled me, so I took a look at Facebook’s published Community Standards on hate speech to see what rule this might fall under.
Facebook defines hate speech as an attack on people based on protected characteristics, such as race, religion, sex, and disability.
What constitutes an attack? The hate speech document lists a number of scenarios, and among them is “Dehumanizing speech or injury,” which includes “Reference or comparison to animals that are culturally perceived as intellectually or physically inferior.”
The joke bombed
Yes, it’s true that my buddy compared his daughter to a pigeon.
And yes, there might be a cultural perception that pigeons are intellectually inferior.
But two points are quite clear, if you consider the context.
The first point is that this is clearly meant to be a joke, not an attack.
Is it a good joke? I’ve heard better. Is it a misogynistic joke? I asked my buddy about that, and he admitted that he understands how it could be construed that way, even though it was not his intention. Does that make it hate speech? If it does, then Facebook is woefully inconsistent in what content it removes, because I’ve seen a lot more misogynistic content than this on its platform recently.
Pigeons’ bad rep
The second point is that the metaphor does not imply physical or intellectual inferiority.
My buddy didn’t compare his daughter to a pigeon because he thinks she is stupid. He compared his daughter to a pigeon because they are both incredibly chill.
Think about it. It doesn’t take much to make pigeons happy. Offer them some cold french fries and you’re tight.
In humans, that’s an admirable quality. We call it “low-maintenance” or “easy to please” or “congenial.”
And that’s not the only positive characteristic pigeons possess. They’re also surprisingly smart and can be trained to do incredibly useful tasks.
If you have any doubt about that, look no further than this article about the Top 10 Heroic Wartime Pigeons.
Notice that the title doesn’t say just “10” but “Top 10.” That means that the author actually had to exclude some heroic wartime pigeons who, valiant though they were, nevertheless had colleagues even more brave and intrepid.
Clear in context
My buddy told me that he didn’t even think about the undeserved negative reputation pigeons have acquired when he published the post.
“I was truly thinking about how when you feed them in the park they will eat from your hand,” he said, and he was comparing his daughter to pigeons because she is similarly easy-going and not difficult to please.
“ It was not in any way meant to demean my daughter or women in general,” he wrote in a later post about Facebook’s decision. “I’m confident that I am raising a strong woman, and a man who will not only respect women but truly treat them as equals.”
Ain’t no hate in that.
