14 DAY TRIAL // Fatshamming is becoming an unacceptable social behavior and Facebook is reinforcing this notion after it recently banned a Facebook page and Instagram account where so-called "artists" were photoshopping larger women to look like skinny models.
The Project Harpoon page was created as a community for a "collaborative art project open to interpretation," where its creators and other willing participants would submit photos of larger women, reinterpreted with their own views of female beauty, which was skinny, thin, bony, gaunt, slender, fit, or any synonym for these words.
While Facebook is quite liberal in its views of what it considers acceptable, the problem is that these "geniuses" not only took photos of celebrities and slimmed them down, they also began pulling photos of real people, photoshopping them, and then leaving a mean caption with each photo.
Project Harpoon resurfaces as Operation Ahab
Facebook was quick to bring the ban hammer on the page and the Instagram account, even if today some of the content that was on the Project Harpoon page surfaced as Operation Ahab.
Judging that this page was founded by some of the users of /r/ThInnerBeauty, they are probably used with Reddit's liberal policy, and haven't really understood that making fun of other people is generally not tolerated on Facebook these days.
Even if short-lived, this page has been noticed by some celebrities, like plus-size model Tess Holliday, which told E! News that "It's abominable that this [page] is using my image without permission to promote themselves. This kind of hit piece is exactly why I started #effyourbeautystandards."
According to The Telegraph, right before the page was taken down, a campaign led by women that wanted to fight back against this newer form of hate speech was flooding the comments section of each photo with positive messages.
UPDATE: As expected, the Operation Ahab page was taken down by Facebook engineers as well.
