SF author Rebecca Solnit had her Facebook account suspended after she posted an essay about the LA protests, but Facebook undid the suspension about 24 hours later, and this all likely happened because of the slapdash AI that Facebook uses for content moderation.

We’ve recently had newfound interest in the work of San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit, because of her very well-reviewed new collection of essays just published in the book No Straight Road Takes You There. Yet that is not why Rebecca Solnit is in the news today.

Rebecca Solnit is in the news because Facebook suspended her account in the wake of her post about the current LA protests, according to the Chronicle. But Facebook then unbanned the account within a day, claiming the ban was “an error.”

The "incriminating" post from Monday is seen above. “I also believe that those of us who are older, whiter, safer from the threats of state violence do not have the moral ground to lecture the younger, browner and blacker, more directly impacted on what they should and should not do,” she writes in her a Facebook post, with an external link to her own website. “One thing to remember is that they'll claim we're violent no matter what; the justification for this ongoing attack on immigrants and people who resemble immigrants in being brown is the idea that America is suffering an invasion and in essence only a certain kind of white person belongs here in this place that was never all white.”

And by Tuesday, Solnit’s Facebook account was in limbo. “Facebook decided to suspend my account because of a piece (below) I wrote Monday about violence which in no way advocates for it (but does point out who is violent in the current ruckus),” Solnit said in a Bluesky post whose visibility is restricted.

Solnit included a screenshot of Facebook’s rationale, which said, “Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity.”

That’s obviously quite vague! Solnit appealed the decision, but Facebook responded that the account “still doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity. You cannot request another review of this decision.”

The Chronicle published their piece on this Wednesday afternoon. Within 30 minutes of publication, Solnit’s Facebook account was restored. And as seen above, Chronicle writer Lily Janiak says that "Facebook's communications staff got back to me saying their decision, which Solnit was told she couldn't appeal, was a mistake.” So, Facebook was clearly aware that there was media coverage of this when they decided to reverse their decision.

Facebook/Meta spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted a response tweet at 1:30 pm on Wednesday that “This was an error and the account has been restored.” This continues Facebook and Meta executives’ curious trend of sorting out Facebook controversies on the rival Twitter/X platform instead of, you know, their own platform.

We still don’t know with certainty why Solnit’s account was banned or flagged. But Facebook’s content moderation policies spell out that “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is central to our content review process. AI can detect and remove content that goes against our Community Standards before anyone reports it.”

So yeah, probably AI bot going a little haywire.

Per the Chronicle, Solnit herself blamed Facebook’s “inane algorithms that often delete posts.” Solnit said in a post after her account was restored that “My account wasn't just suspended. When I asked for a review of the suspension I was told my account was disabled and there would be no further appeal. Permanent out.”

And we can’t help but suspect it’s a factor here that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have definitely taken a Trumper turn over the last year or so, or rather, a position of cowardly appeasement to the Trump administration’s bullying. They changed content moderation policies to appease the right wing, added the wholly unqualified UFC president and MAGA figure Dana White to their board of directors, and gave $1 million to the Trump inauguration.

Regardless, here is a link to the full Rebecca Solnit essay whose post got her banned from Facebook, entitled “Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence.”

“I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades,” Solnit writes. “The advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air."

Related: Meta Playing Hardball to Prevent Sales of Ex-Employee’s Tell-All Book [SFist]

Image: Rebecca Solnit (Photo by Rebecca Sapp/WireImage, Getty Images)

Facebook held a conference call Tuesday to discuss which posts they most often remove and why, which was inconveniently timed after the weekend’s Buffalo mass shooting video was still on the platform.

One of the many depressing aspects of Saturday’s racist mass shooting in Buffalo was how the grisly video proliferated on social networks. According to CNN, the shooter livestreamed it on Twitch, and to that streaming platform’s great credit, the stream was cut off within two minutes. The Washington Post reports that only 22 people saw it.

But eventually Facebook enters the picture. Clearly some (if not all) of those 22 viewers were horrible white supremacist trolls, because according to the New York Times, the video was “was posted on a site called Streamable and viewed more than three million times before it was removed. And a link to that video was shared hundreds of times across Facebook and Twitter hours after the shooting.”

As of Tuesday, there were still a few copies of the video floating around on Facebook, according to that Washington Post report. And this is the unfortunate backdrop against which Facebook released a quarterly report on which posts they remove and why, as The Verge explains.  

The report was accompanied by a conference call, as Facebook’s parent company Meta now has these calls and reports quarterly, not long after the company's earnings calls. The call was scheduled well before the shooting took place, but obviously, Meta had some explaining to do.

“People create new versions and new external links to try to evade our policies,” vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said, according to AdWeek. “We will continue to learn, refine our processes and refine our systems to ensure that we can take down these links more quickly in the future. It’s only a couple of days after the incident, so we don’t have any more to share at this point.”

Meta also released the Facebook quarterly community standards enforcement report, which The Verge describes as “a document that has a boring name, but is full of delight for those of us who are nosy and enjoy reading about the failures of artificial-intelligence systems.”

And yes, human moderators are much better at recognizing genuinely problematic posts than bot moderators. Facebook counts up the posts they admit were “wrongfully removed,” and the bots wrongfully remove posts more frequently than human moderators. No surprise there.

What is a surprise, at least in the context of the current Big Tech censorship discourse, is that very little political speech is removed. The Verge sifted through the removed-post numbers and concluded “Very little of it is ‘political,’ at least in the sense of commentary about current events. Instead, it’s posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, and bullying and harassment.”

These are Facebook’s own numbers, and not independently verified, so take that into account. But some standout numbers are that Facebook removed 1.6 billion fake accounts, and 2.5 million posts labeled "Terrorism and Organized Hate."

The current conservative horseshit grievances about Facebook censorship try to frame this as an attempt to attack free speech, all done by a company where Left Coast Liberals are supposedly in charge. This is a huge part of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover discourse (to whatever degree said takeover is actually happening). And while I hate to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, it’s pretty clear that the censorship claims are driven by bad-faith attempts to blur the line between political speech and actual violence. But since those bad-faith efforts have proven an excellent political talking point, there is no amount of transparency from Facebook that will likely change this.

Related: Facebook Relaxes (and Then Reverses) Its Rules Over Calling for Leaders to Be Killed, Because of Putin [SFist]

Image: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash

Facebook criticised after failing to remove sexualised images of childrenhttps://t.co/zn8eVZG3Na pic.twitter.com/79xzA476Ez

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 7, 2017

As part of a BBC investigative report on Facebook's ongoing efforts to combat sexual images of children on its platform, the broadcasting agency reported 100 photos to Facebook that would pretty clearly appear to violate the social network's "community standards." These were images of children under 16 in sexual poses alongside obscene comments, images of Facebook groups for pedophiles to share stolen images of children, and so forth. The BBC also found five convicted pedophiles with Facebook profiles, in violation of Facebook's rules that disallow convicted sex offenders from having accounts. After hitting the "report" button to alert the company, Facebook, the BBC claims, removed just 18 of the images. Automated replies from the social network said that the other 82 images didn't breach community standards.

That was cause for alarm at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. "Facebook's failure to remove illegal content from its website is appalling and violates the agreements they have in place to protect children," a spokesperson told the BBC. "It also raises the question of what content they consider to be inappropriate and dangerous to children."

But what happened next might be even more troubling. When BBC reporters asked Facebook for an interview about its moderation systems, the social network's director of policy, Simon Milner, agreed to an interview — but first requested that the BBC provide examples of the material it had reported that wasn't removed by the moderators. The BBC complied... and Facebook reported the BBC to the UK's National Crime Agency.

Here's Angus Crawford, a BBC news correspondent:

"We have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards," Facebook wrote in a statement to the BBC. "This content is no longer on our platform. We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and take-down measures... It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation. When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry's standard practice and reported them to Ceop [Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre."

“The fact that Facebook sent images that had been sent to them, that appear on their site, for their response about how Facebook deals with inappropriate image... [The] fact that they sent those on to the police seemed to me to be extraordinary..." says BBC director of editorial policy, David Jordan. "One can only assume that the Facebook executives were unwilling or certainly reluctant to engage in an interview or a debate about why these images are available on the Facebook site."

Ironically, Facebook has been criticized for its over-censorship of images in the past: Last September, the company removed a famous Vietnam war image of a naked girl running from a Napalm attack. The photograph, called "The Terror of War" and captured by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Nick Ut, was included on Facebook among a list of "seven photographs that changed the history of warfare" created by Norway's largest newspaper, Aftenposten.

"Listen, Mark. This is serious," the papers editor-in-chief wrote in a front page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "First you create rules that don’t distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs. Then you practice these rules without allowing space for good judgment."

Later, in early January, the Facebook bowdlerized a 450-year-old Italian statue of the god Neptune, naked and holding a trident.

Related: Norwegians' Outcry Over Facebook Censoring An Iconic Vietnam War Photo Leads To Company's Reversal

Italian art historian Elisa Barbari just wanted to promote her work. With a focus on Bologna, Italy, her Facebook page titled "Stories, curiosities and views of Bologna” was in need of a promotional photo, and so the writer selected an image of the 1560s statue of the god Neptune which graces the city's Piazza del Nettuno. As The Telegraph reports, Facebook blocked her ad — calling the statue of the nude god holding a trident "explicitly sexual."

"The statue is shown from behind, not even as a close up, it's in the distance," Barbari told CNN of the picture she selected. "It's ridiculous. At first I was angry. Then I was surprised, I couldn't understand why they don't want to clarify. It's absurd."

The bronze statue is the work of Jean Boulogne, also known as Giambologna, and is a symbol of the Italian city. However, according to a Facebook statement, it's still too risqué for the platform. "The use of the image was not approved because it violates Facebook’s guidelines on advertising."

This is not the first bit of overzealous prudishness on the part of Facebook to make the news. In September the company was on the receiving end of an international backlash following its decision to ban an iconic Vietnam war photograph colloquially known as "Napalm Girl." And just last month Facebook officials banned a local San Francisco writer after he called supporters of Donald Trump "fascistic."

In both cases, Facebook officials reversed their decisions and later apologized — a pattern that seems to be repeating itself in the case of the nude ocean god. "Our team processes millions of advertising images each week, and in some instances we incorrectly prohibit ads," a company spokesperson told CNN. "This image does not violate our ad policies. We apologise for the error and have let the advertiser know we are approving their ad."

Which is good news for Facebook's 1.79 billion monthly active users — next time the company, helmed by god-fearing Mark Zuckerberg, tries to censor your content based on poorly defined criteria all you have to do is generate international outrage and you'll be allowed to publish as you see fit.

Related: Norwegians' Outcry Over Facebook Censoring An Iconic Vietnam War Photo Leads To Company's Reversal

Facebook is once again having to apologize for the actions of one of its community policing operatives after San Francisco-based writer Kevin Sessums was issued a 24-hour suspension for referring to Trump supporters as a "nasty fascistic lot." He was told he had violated the platforms "community standards," and he immediately took to Instagram to make his case for why this was "arbitrary censorship," writing, "To be censored and blocked rightfully naming the rise of fascism is a form of fascism itself and corporate collaboration... We are living in dangerous Orwellian times."

The suspension of Sessums's account came on the same day that Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos, whom Sessums calls a "celebrity fascist," announced that he'd gotten a $250,000 advance from Simon & Schuster to write a book titled Dangerous, filled no doubt with his indefensible arguments about why hate speech is free speech. And Sessums notes the coincidence as further evidence of our scary era.

As the Guardian reports, Sessums was responding to a post by ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd, who was himself addressing the Trump supporters on Twitter who attacked him with racist and homophobic language.

This was the tweet:

Sessums responded with the following:

But as those who do hold Trump to the standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is lucky he didn’t get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent trolls, you’re not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous. We’re past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you off the hook. You’re Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists.

Having quickly made a stink about the account suspension, Sessums got Facebook to reverse themselves, but the scenario is just another of many that proves how fallible Facebook's moderation system is, and how only those with the largest voices and greatest influence can take them to task when they make mistakes — much like how only celebrities can get Twitter to enforce their own rules against abuse.

Facebook issued a mea culpa, again, saying, "We’re very sorry about this mistake. The post was removed in error and restored as soon as we were able to investigate. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong."

It could be, though, that it's a lot more than "sometimes," and only when a well known writer like Sessums — best known for his celebrity profiles and two memoirs — makes noise does Facebook apologize and make things right.

NPR took a dive last month into Facebook's murky Community Operations department, which has a large hub of operations in Ireland but also employs armies of low-paid workers elsewhere to scan flagged Facebook posts and make quick judgements — typically within seconds — about whether they constitute violations.

A leaked set of training slides also surfaced earlier this month, apparently from this department, suggesting that many of the judgements that have to be made by these moderators are quite complex, like distinguishing statements of general prejudice ("The Irish are drunks") and specific bias or criticism ("My Irish neighbors are such fucking drunks") — the latter would be allowed, but the former would be grounds for deletion or suspension.

Facebook's "community standards" have been called to question especially in light of the election, which puts the site in the position of arbitrating between pro-Trump and anti-Trump posters, and trying to be even-handed about it. But a friend of Sessums, Peter Staley, who lists himself on the site as a "professional protester" among other things, writes, "This might become the new normal if we don't fight back. Trumpsters will file complaints with FB to get us blocked, and FB won't defend us unless we raise bloody hell."

In this instance, that indeed appears to have been the case.

Related: Leaked Facebook Moderation Doc Says Photo Of Fergie Peeing Is OK, Mocking The French Not OK
NPR Takes Dive Into Facebook's Content Management Process, Says It's 'Set Up To Fail'

Envelope-pushing novelist Dennis Cooper, known in the past couple of decades both for his sexually explicit fiction involving teenagers as well as genre-bending work like his 2005 book God Jr. that centered on a video game, has for several years been using the internet to write a novel constructed out of animated GIFs. Cooper was using his blog, which has been live on Google's Blogger platform since 2002, to write the novel, and says he hadn't saved or backed it up anywhere else, and now it's potentially gone forever after Google mysteriously disappeared his entire blog into the ether.

The Guardian picked up the story, framing it as one of censorship, because he received a "violation of terms and services" statement when the blog was summarily shut down and deleted. (Cooper had indicated that it contained adult content, and there was an age verification screen.) The problem is, because platforms like Facebook or Blogger are private companies, they have free reign to control and censor content as they see fit.

"In America you have first amendment rights but that only protects you against public censorship," Pati Hertling, an art lawyer, tells the Guardian. "Because it’s Google, they’re a private corporation, it’s a private realm, they can do whatever they want."

Artforum picked up the story as well, noting that "Cooper is [still] not certain whether Google merely disabled the blog or completely erased it," and in the latter case it would mean the loss of 14 years worth of writing and blogging. Google's legal department hasn't responded to him.

Cooper, who lives in Paris, previously published an HTML-based GIF novel in 2015 called Zac’s Haunted House, and this second GIF novel, which was stored entirely on the blog, was set to be published this fall. He has clearly gone to the press in the hopes that Google will relent and give him back access to his work. "Of all the things about this that concern and worry me, losing that novel is my greatest fear," he tells Artforum.

You can still find pieces of Cooper's blog via the Wayback machine, but it's apparently been removed from Google's cache as well.

Related: Google's Garbage April Fools' Prank Backfires, They Blame It On 'A Bug'

Hours after software developer MiKandi released an pornographic app for Glass called "Tits and Glass," Google banned porn from its glassware products. They added the anti-porn section to their Glass developer policy last week to include 11 new policies.

"When we first picked up our device, we were very careful to comb through all of Google's terms, policies and developers' agreement to make sure we were playing within their rules," MiKandi co-founder Jennifer McEwen explained to the Sun.

According to Google spokesman, this is all a part of the company prepping for a wider lauch once Glass is made available to the general public, telling SFist, "Our Explorer Program makes users active participants in evolving Glass ahead of a wider consumer launch. In keeping with this approach, we've updated our developer policies. We look forward to learning more from our users as we update the software and evolve our policies in the weeks and months ahead."

In addition to banning hate speech, bullying and intellectual property infringement, just to name a few, Google's revised developer policy now states: "We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material."

But. Google Glass, according to porn purveyors, allows for maximum porn-viewing titillation, with the hands-free device making for a more intimate experience. "Unlike other hands-free recording devices, wearing Glass is easy and familiar," McEwen later explained to Mashable.

The other most notable tech company to ban porn is Apple, whose late CEO, Steve Jobs, was famously puritanical when it came to sex and your screen.

Now that we are all digital immigrants living in a corporate town called Facebook, this is what neighborly favors look like in the year 2013: A tattoo shop in Ontario wanted to recognize a woman for her bravery and strength in overcoming breast cancer. Posting a photo of her chestpiece on their Facebook wall seemed like an OK way to tell friends about this woman. That is what Facebook is for, after all. Telling friends about interesting things. But Facebook, as tit-shy as it is, removed the photo. So the tattoo shop retaliated in a way they felt was, like, almost as brave and strong as surviving breast cancer: by courageously posting it to Facebook again in defiance.

Anyway, now it's all over the place: it currently has over 140,000 likes and 115,000 shares on Facebook. It's on blogs. It's on bigger blogs. Everybody in town has seen and commented on this lady's chest tattoo, basically. Sorry, Facebook, but Breast Cancer awareness always wins.

Custom Tattoo Designs can mark this one as a social media win as well: the photo came from a book called Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. That doesn't cheapen the breast cancer message at all, but since we're here let's recognize artist Tina Baforo of Seattle for her work on the tattoo itself.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Custom Tattoo Design's Facebook wall, concerned mothers weighed in on this photoshopped photo of a baby with tattoos:

"If this is real then the parent should be put in jail"

In an effort to become the most boring place on the world wide web -- or maybe it's just us? Since our friends post the most meh stuff now, we've resorted to following Arbor Mist's spectacular, frighteningly honest updates. Seriously. "Sparkling Raspberry put the sparkle in my smile ;)" beats the umpteenth pretentious Kanye West song lyric -- Facebook will "work with law enforcement agencies nationwide to remove accounts set up by inmates or posted on their behalf." Why? Well, according Associated Press, "prisoners are using the social networking site to stalk victims and direct criminal activity."

In Facebook's defense, they do have a point. One case in particular case, a convicted child molester sent Facebook pic sketches to one of his victims.

Last year a convicted child molester used a cellphone smuggled into prison to search his victim's Facebook and MySpace web pages, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in announcing the agreement with Facebook. The inmate then sent sketches to the 17-year-old victim's home. Though he hadn't seen her in at least seven years, the inmate used photos from her social networking pages to accurately draw the clothes she wore and the way she styled her hair, the department said.

While inmates are allowed to retain their social networking profiles that were created before incarceration, Facebook will yank their pages if they're used while the convict is behind bars. California's botched prison system, according Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes, could do itself a favor by "keep[ing] smartphones and other Internet devices out of prisons."

Several years ago, California corrections officers uncovered 261 contraband cellphones inside prisons. "They found more than 7,200 in the first six months of this year," reports the LA Times.

[Oakland Tribune]

A bit of bizarre anti-gay sentiment hit Arkansas this week after an issue of US Weekly was censored for featuring a too-hot-for-hillbillies Elton John cover.

Joe My God reports:

Last night Twitter user JennHudd tweeted out this photo she took at Harps, a grocery store in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Apparently US Weekly's cover shot of Elton John, his partner, and baby is just too shocking for children. Harps has over 60 locations in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Call their home office at 877-772-8193 or use their contact form if you'd like to register a polite protest.

The blocker appeared after a customers allegedly complained about the family-oritented magazine cover. However, right or wrong (psst, it's wrong), this is depressing, especially for us LGBT folks who look forward to adopting. Check out the uncensored cover here.

Oh, and the most shocking part of all? "16 Pages of Hot Photos" is still visible.

Some last-minute screenings of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly have been scheduled on Friday night as part of a national protest of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's removal of the video from their Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibit last week because it was declared “hate speech” by Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League, incoming House Speaker John Boehner, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

SF Camerawork and the Queer Cultural Center present a 7 p.m. screening of the 13-minute video, followed by a presentation by art historian, writer, and activist Robert Atkins. Atkins will also lead a panel discussion that will include queer activists, scholars, and artists. Jonathan D. Katz, curator of Hide/Seek, who was not consulted by the Smithsonian before the video was censored, will join in from New York via Skype. Space is limited, so RSVP at info@sfcamerawork.org or 415.512.2020 x 102.

Later, starting at 11 p.m. until 2 a.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will screen the video on a continuous loop during their Noël Noir event, which will run in place of the original midnight surprise movie. (Stay tuned for more info on this event coming in our "Week in Holiday Events" post.)

Last week, after Attorneys General in 17 states sparked the removal of Craigslist "Adult Services" section, Newmark and company decided to slap a brilliant "censored" protest icon on the site. Today, however, as CNET and SF Appeal notes, the bar has been removed.

For amorous types still looking for pay-to-play lovemaking on the site, the m4m, m4w, w4w, w4m, misc romance, and casual encounters sections are a good start. Blatant requests for cash, however, get weeded out, so look carefully for such terms as "generous" or "helping hand."

Conversely, Gawker has a helpful post-Craigslist guide to buying sex online. God bless.

After Attorneys General in 17 states nutted over Craigslist's adult services section -- where one could hire sex workers to quench a bevy of desires -- the San Francisco company finally shut it down on all their U.S. sites. Alas.

As TrechCrunch correctly points out, "The site has been embattled as old press and state attorneys general use any excuse to blame sex crimes on the site." Everything from, the "Craigslist killer" story to South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster's disturbing, "failed crusade" helped bring down the popular section.

The fine folks at Craigslist, however, aren't taking the forced shut down lightly; in fact, there's now a black-and-white "CENSORED" bar where adult services used to be.

by Amy Crocker

According to the Wall Street Journal, it's increasingly likely that Mountain View-based Google will cancel operations in China as negotiations with the government over censorship stall. There's a lot of legal drama in a story like this and we think it is much more fun when imagined as a Western showdown.

Taking ten paces to the left is Google, the American outlaw who wants to play by his own rules. And on the other side is China, who has been the lone sheriff of these parts for a long time now. The sheriff's cronies have warned Google that if he don't toe the line and quit blabbering on about unapproved nonsense, he'd "have to bear the consequences." And though 36% of the townsfolk have already clamored to Google's side, the young gunslinger's rakish grin won't give him an extra bullet.

Their hands are hovering at the holster. Women are weeping into white handkerchiefs as tumbleweeds blow by. This score will be settled within weeks.

Oh dear. From the editor's inxbox comes this heated missive over today's 'Photo du Jour' featuring gifted comedian Dave Chappelle. Black Betty writes:

I can't believe you have that bigot's picture on your site. Someone just sent me this on Facebook from one of her friend's "notes":

Homophobic and Transphobic Comments by Dave Chappelle at New Parish-Oakland
Today at 8:03am
I usually don't mass note but this was a very disturbing experience...

Dear Friends,

After what has been a long and stressful couple of weeks, my girlfriend and I were excited to go see the 8pm showing of Dave Chappelle at the New Parrish in Downtown Oakland. Comedy can be empowering and that’s always what I thought of Chappelle. I really needed a good laugh.

He began with a story of being in San Francisco and being approached by a "man" with "titty balls" and how weird that was and began to mock a gay male voice. He said he was trying to not look at this "man with titties." He talked about how he was uncomfortable and how he was worried about "US Weekly catching them together." He even said "I thought I was gonna walk away without his gayness offending me." He then talked about how the trans individual asked him out to lunch and he reacted angrily.

People were laughing. The environment was hostile and unsafe.