For over a year I’ve been noticing and documenting the kinds of sexist, racist and homophobic comments that proliferate on the official Star Trek Facebook page (more examples of posts here).
And I kept hearing from followers: this is a serious issue and it needs to be addressed in an organized campaign.
Thanks to testimonials sent by many of you, and incredible help from some other Tumblr connections to screencap even more egregious examples (collected at this link), we’re ready to go.
Please click here to sign the petition to CBS and StarTrek.com, calling on them to work together to implement a comments policy that:
- Clearly bans hate speech, rape jokes, and referring to women as a group by derogatory terms (e.g. “sluts”). As well, the policy should ban comments referring to groups of people by racial, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist slurs;
- Disallows personal attacks against other commenters; and
- Bans aggressive negative commenting on the personal appearance of other commenters and the posts’ subjects.
See here for additional supporting documents:
- Examples of good comments policies from other sites
- Fan testimonials on why the page needs to change
- Collected screencaptured comments from a single two-week period on the page, categorized into Racism, Homophobia, Sexism, Rape Jokes, and Fan Responses & Comments
Thanks everyone for your support and help getting this campaign together!
