• Facebook restores wedding photo of gay couple; man decries harassment

    Bishop Erik Swope-Wise

    Bishop Erik Swope-Wise, right, and his husband Kelsey Swope-Wise stand before a unity candle on their wedding day on April 28, 2012. The photo was inadvertently removed from Facebook by the site after a complaint was made about the image.

    By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News

    A gay man whose wedding photo was pulled from Facebook after an anonymous complaint believes the social network’s reporting policy allows for a "subversive" type of harassment.

    The photo of Pastor Kelsey Swope-Wise, 37, and his husband, Bishop Erik Swope-Wise, 49, of Elgin, Ill., was taken down from the Gay Marriage USA Facebook page on Monday after someone lodged a complaint with Facebook. The administrator of the page, Murray Lipp, said Facebook informed him on Monday that the image of the biracial couple standing together at their April 28, 2012, wedding "violates policies and community standards."

    "It’s subversive, the type of harassment, meaning that you can do it anonymously," Erik Swope-Wise, who founded a local chapter of The Affirming Pentecostal Church International, told NBC News on Tuesday. “So you can throw the rock and hide your hand. There’s no accountability for somebody’s actions. So somebody could make that accusation, ‘Well this picture’s offensive.’ Well we don’t know who said that, so how can we even go back to them and say, ‘Why is this offensive? Tell me why it’s offensive.’”

    Facebook restored the photo on Tuesday and apologized to Lipp, who told NBC News that the social networking site had initially blocked his ability to post for one week in addition to taking down the photo. This wasn’t the first time he has had problems with posts being reported.

    “Sadly, Facebook's reporting system is so flawed that it allows people against equality to attack & target pages like mine and Facebook almost ALWAYS sides with those who complain. I was given no opportunity to respond or say anything … ,” he wrote in an e-mail.

    Erik Swope-Wise said Lipp asked to post the image last weekend. He initially was pleasantly surprised by the outpouring of support in comments and likes, but then the messages turned “hateful” and “condescending.” Some who made comments were upset because the men are Pentacostal, which traditionally rejects same-sex marriage, though their church does not.

    Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes told NBC News in an email that the photo did not violate their “policies or community standards and was removed in error. The image has been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." A team reviews hundreds of thousands of reports every week, and occasionally mistakes are made, he said.


    “I accept that … we’re all subject to human error,” Erik Swope-Wise said. “However the process by which Facebook uses to make those determinations is probably a little too mechanical. When a person puts an opposition to a post … it’s a list of choices that you choose to describe why this is offensive or inappropriate but there gives no validation, you know, as to what that really is.”

    What might be offensive to one group may not be to another, and the term “offensive” was also “too general,” he added. “I think the scrutiny of it needs to be a little more clear before they take such harsh action.”

    Rich Ferraro, a spokesman for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), said he has seen this happen before but that Facebook has always taken quick action.

    “More often than not reporting tools on sites like Facebook are used positively to report anti-LGBT bullying or hate speech. Unfortunately, anti-LGBT users have also used these tools to target LGBT community members -- but when GLAAD has brought incidents like this to Facebook, they have always immediately restored the content,” he wrote to NBC News in an email.

    Issues can arise when social networking sites wade into heated debates.

    "This is involving a lot of judgment calls right, like what is hate speech and what is a political statement. It's extraordinary difficult some times," said Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for the public’s digital rights.

    She said best practices would be to have a “really clear procedure for contesting any kind of take down and for that to be followed consistently.”

    "Lots of activists use these forums for their activism and so if you censor their activity through Facebook then you're functionally censoring their speech activity on the Internet,” she said. “Facebook isn’t like a state government. It can restrict speech in any way it wants, but sometimes the ramifications are the same."

  • Occupy DC faces eviction as deadline passes

    By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News

     

    An Occupy protester sits at the McPherson Square Occupy encampment in Washington, DC, on January 30, 2012.

    Occupy protesters chanting "let us sleep so we can dream" set up a large, blue tarp with the words "tent of dreams" in the nation's capital as a noon deadline to end camping at some of the movement's last remaining large encampments passed.

    The National Park Service said in a flier released Friday that it would begin enforcing regulations prohibiting camping and the use of temporary structures for camping at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza. Individual violators may be subject to arrest and their property subject to seizure as evidence, the flier said.

    Washington Post live-blogs Occupy D.C.

    Justin Jacoby Smith, a 25-year-old activist with OccupyKSt and member of their media team, said the protesters at McPherson Square had plans for the deadline but noted: “We’re still sorting of keeping the specifics under wraps … we like to have surprises when we can.”

    Still, by noon the blue tarp, also decorated with the words "dream together" and yellow stars and a moon, could be seen in the square via a video livestream. "This is what democracy looks like," protesters chanted.

    “Today what we’re trying to do is make sure that everyone knows that when you enforce a regulation against sleeping then you can’t dream of a better world, either … when you can’t sleep, you can’t dream," he said. "We’re going to make sure that we still have the opportunity to dream and that the people in this demonstration that have no place else to go are kept safe from the criminalization of homelessness that this order effectively creates.”

    Officers would be on site to monitor the situation and try to get protesters to comply, Carol Johnson, a Park Service spokeswoman, told msnbc.com on Friday. Compliance entails removing all camping materials and leaving one side of all temporary structures open.

    “People can be there 24 hours a day, but they can’t live there, they can’t sleep there,” she said.

    “We still do back the First Amendment, and it is their right. It is not their right to camp. And ... we would, you know, support them if they came into compliance and they had a vigil and they had tents that were there for logistical or symbolic purposes,” she added. "They can occupy as a vigil but not camping."

    More than 80 arrests have occurred at the two sites, including for public urination, drunkenness, assault and drug use, she noted.

    On Sunday, a protester at one of the camps -- in McPherson Square -- was Tasered and arrested following a confrontation with law enforcement, according to NBCWashington.com. A video of the incident, posted on YouTube, shows the man yelling at officers, "We all know you're coming tomorrow."

    Many of the Occupy camps were closed across the country last fall and early winter, and the sites in the nation's capital were two of the bigger outfits remaining.

    The Park Service noted that two "compliant" 24-hour First Amendment vigils have been running in Lafayette Park and near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial since the early 1980s. Johnson said they were "very small" vigils and also noted that they were not evicting the Occupy protesters.

    But the McPherson Square camp said it was a de facto eviction: "Rather than own up to the fact that they're evicting us, the 'camping ban' allows NPS to pick us off one by one. Death by attrition," read a tweet from the OccupyKSt twitter account.

    The action by the Park Service also comes after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Subcommittee held a hearing last week about the McPherson Square encampment.

    "Late is better than never," Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the subcommittee on the District of Columbia, said in a statement after learning of park authorities' notice. "I continue to wonder whether others who are 'camping' in national parks would have been afforded a 100-day grace period before the law was enforced."

    Occupy groups across the country continue to assemble and organize protests, with about 400 demonstrators in Oakland arrested late Saturday after authorities thwarted their attempt to take over a vacant convention center for a new camp site. Some protesters broke into City Hall and smashed glass display cases and burned the U.S. and California flags, while others ran into a YMCA to evade police.

    At least three officers and one protester were injured. Mayor Jean Quan said the cost to the city related to the Occupy Oakland protests is about $5 million.

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