Remember the movie Untraceable? Yeah, neither did I until a few minutes ago. It came out in January, and starred Diane Lane as a cyber crimes expert tracking down a serial killer who lured people to a website so they could watch murders take place. Yeah, y’know, another entry in the torture porn genre.
Now Untraceable is angling for a release in Europe, but it’s hit a snag in its promotional campaign. Variety reports that Facebook has refused to host a page that tied in with the movie, allowing users to see more video of one of the film’s torture scenes the more people who came to the page. Facebook banned the page based on the rule that “pages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed."
I haven’t even seen Untraceable, but good on them. The blurring of the line between torture-as-entertainment and torture-as-uh-torture has been going too far for years now, especially given that the United States is doing real torture at Guantanamo as we speak. If Untraceable were a quality movie with interesting things to say about crime, then maybe I’d cry foul at Facebook’s censorship, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for a callow promotional campaign for a callow movie. Plus, Facebook, unlike the government, is a private company, so it can censor all it pleases.
Even if you’re not being a whiny liberal like I am right now, you can probably agree that Facebook advertising is just plain annoying. So thank you, Facebook, for saving us all from more irritation, not to mention some pretty offensive torture.
