Antisocial media, and especially Facebook, host intense misogyny.

The article's explicit point is valid and important, but (I expect) not really news to readers of stallman.org. You know how nasty antisocial media get, and that generally females receive more hostility there than males.

My main reason for citing this article is to highlight a campaign to change our use of language: the article describes verbal abuse as "violence".

The insults and threats described are nasty, and they can hurt. But they are not "violence" (though threatening violence is but one step away from doing it). To stretch "violence" to include verbal abuse is an abuse of language, and a dangerous one.

The frontier between words and violence is an important barrier to escalation of fights. Respect for this line helps people restrain themselves from moving from verbal attacks to punches or shots. It is not always effective, but if we weaken it by redefining "violence" to include mere words, we will learn the hard way how important that restraint was. Erasing the border will lead to more censorship on the one hand, and more physical attacks on the other.

Hatred can be expressed through words, and through physical acts. We can condemn both without erasing the distinction.

There is a lot of hatred on Facebook, and a lot of disinformation, and a lot of manipulation. Why so much? As I gather, it is because Facebook's business model gives Facebook an incentive to promote these things. It designs its algorithm to maximize "engagement" and the algorithm promotes various kinds of harmful postings because they achieve that goal.

Facebook is under pressure to curb the hatred, but if its profits depend on pushing hatred (along with disinformation and manipulation), its efforts to reduce them are likely to change little.

Rather than trying to fix these problems by imposing various kinds of censorship, I think we should forcibly change Facebook's algorithm, and its business model. Businesses are not entitled to human rights, and regulating business models is not unjust like censorship.