Monday, November 10, 2008

What part of OFFENSIVE did you misunderstand?

Dear Facebook,

I would like the thank you for providing your users with options to rate the advertisements that appear on the right-hand side of the page. Soliciting feedback to tailor the ads to the user is a fantastic idea and I truly commend you for doing so. My question to you is - why do you refuse to listen to this feedback????

I am sick and tired of clicking on the little "thumbs down" icon and selecting "offensive" just to be inundated with MORE ads of the same nature, or worse, the exact same ad. Just in case you are confused, let me refresh your corporate memory about the definition of offensive:

Offensive –adjective
1. causing resentful displeasure; highly irritating, angering, or annoying: offensive television commercials.
2. unpleasant or disagreeable to the sense: an offensive odor.
3. repugnant to the moral sense, good taste, or the like; insulting: an offensive remark; an offensive joke.
4. pertaining to offense or attack: the offensive movements of their troops.
5. characterized by attack; aggressive: offensive warfare.

–noun
6. the position or attitude of aggression or attack: to take the offensive.
7. an aggressive movement or attack: a carefully planned naval offensive.
We can look at this one together. The very first definition there? The example is about offensive commercials. Remove "television" and replace with "Facebook" and you have my case in the middle of Dictionary.com. This is NOT rocket science here. This is me, someone trying to remove negative body image talk from her vocabulary, thoroughly pissed off at the overabundance of diet propaganda staring back at me on my Facebook page.

I suggest creating a filter. It's especially obnoxious when I click on various groups associated with recovery from eating disorders and find myself reading information about "Oprah's Diet Success" or "How Top Models Stay Thin" -- I appreciate irony as much as the next educated person, but the juxtaposition of these issues is, well, offensive.

So please, either remove the option for users to rate your ads, or DO SOMETHING about the feedback we provide.

This is all.

1 comment:

Aly said...

Unfortunately, Facebook has more important things to do...I literally have no idea what people working for Facebook could possibly do all day...unless it's take our comments and throw them out the window!