Lately I have been seeing the darker side of Facebook. It started out small. Every once in a while a “friend” would have a status or link that is bigoted and hateful, and I would let them know how I felt about it. But then I started unfriending them as it became clear that this bigotry was a personality trait. I call these The Great Purges (there have been three so far). And it was at the end of  the last Great Purge that I first found the groups.

Groups and pages with names like this, and even more horrible content and fans where you can:

Joke about rape – You know she’s playing hard to get when you’re chasing her down an alleyway

Deny that somewhere between 6 – 10 Million people were murdered – Holohoax

Promote violence against women – Hitting Women

Hate Muslims while making weird references – I Hate Muslims in Oz

We all know there are terrible excuses for human beings out there, but the proper response it to not give them a platform on which to spread their hate. In the United States hate speech is not protected under the first amendment. The problem is that Facebook seems to be a safe haven to these kinds of people in spite of the fact that “Facebook does not tolerate hate speech” and “it is a serious violation of our terms to single out individuals based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or disease”. The pages and groups I listed above have been banned, but only after they were allowed to exist for month if not years of constant reporting by other Facebook users and eventually received media attention. And the dozens of other groups with similar messages, but did not receive media attention were allowed to continue to exist.

Which bring me to dozens of pages and groups devoted to the hatred and murder of Justin Bieber.

I get it. Justin Bieber is an overrated, highly commercialized, shallow, and I cringe to use the word, “artist”. He is a barely above average singer who is by no means great, and his fame is an insult to true musicians, song writers, and singers everywhere. In conclusion, he sucks. And people have every right to believe and say this. But what I don’t understand is this:

My screen shot of 1/5 of the page of my FB search of the term “kill justin beiber” shows 30,624 people who are advocating the murder of a 17 year old boy, a child. Even as a joke this is not funny. If this were some average high school student this would be considered bullying at the very least. Children have committed suicide for less.

And these groups are not about his music. People honestly hate him, and their perceptions of his gender and sexuality. It always comes back to calling him gay or a girl as justification for their hatred of him. As if being gay or a girl is reason to hate anyone.

So stop it Facebook. Stop letting people joke about rape, and violence. Stop letting tens of thousands of people tell a young boy that they want to murder him because he is “gay” or a “girl”, and let us hate Justin Bieber for the real reasons he deserves to be hated: because he makes my ears bleed.