Is petition to censor 'Dogs Suck' Facebook page worthwhile?
There's a Facebook page called "Dogs Suck" that revels in hatred toward dogs. It's the type of humor 15-year-old boys might find funny but is likely viewed as immature (at best), disturbing (in the middle) or worth shutting down (at worst) to everyone else. So a petition has been started to shut it down, which I've been forwarded and probably you have, too. The petition has two months left and has already garnered almost 50,000 signatures.
A bioethicist at Psychology Today argued it should be taken down, and she personally flagged it as inappropriate. Facebook responded that it looked into her claim and thinks the site is not worthy of taking down.
Personally, I'm not for censorship and I think such petitions merely attract attention to such sites, when they would normally be ignored and die from lack of anyone giving a darn. (I do support outing people who start such cowardly anonymous sites, though.) This particular site has only 112 likes, probably most of which came after the petition started. Why give it a second thought when everyone worth caring about knows dogs rock!
What do you think?
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!”
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