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A T-shirt bearing the message “Girls Do Not Need a Prince” which Megalia sold for 20

After the Facebook page of Megalia, an online community that advocates “hating misogynists,” was deleted two times last year, community leaders are taking legal action against Facebook. As of June 13, they organizers had raised almost 112 million won (US$95,000) to fund the lawsuit, more than 10 times the amount of the community’s original goal.

“Around this time last year, Megalia 2, a site that we were running to draw attention to feminist issues in Korea and overseas, was suddenly shut down. When we set up Megalia 3 afterward, that was shut down as well,” Megalia leaders said on May 25. “Through screen captures that we found on a number of men-dominated websites, we learned that ‘biased comments’ were the cause of the deletion.”

“There were a huge number of requests to shut down The ‘kimchi woman’ page because of the video about wanting to beat ‘kimchi women’ to death, but that page was not deleted. We decided to bring a civil lawsuit against Facebook because we are fed up with this biased treatment.” (“Kimchi women” is a term used to disparage Korean women online.)

In order to fund the lawsuit, the community leaders launched a fundraising drive on a crowdfunding platform called Tumblbug (http://tumblbug.com/mersgall4) on May 28, with the goal of raising 9.25 million won (US$7,860). Instead of simply soliciting donations, the community asked donors to support the fundraising drive by purchasing a T-shirt bearing the message “Girls Do Not Need a Prince” for 20,000 won (US$16.98).

The community has received donations from around 3,500 people.

Megalia announced that it would use whatever remained of the proceeds to keep an attorney on retainer, to help victims of sexual and domestic violence who wish to take legal action and to assist community members who are in legal trouble because of their activism.

“We never imagined this,” the Megalia leaders said, referring to the enthusiastic response [to the fundraiser]. “This society has become more aware of misogyny after the murder of the woman at Gangnam Station, and that has made it possible for people to express their anger about Facebook’s discriminatory treatment.”

By Park Su-ji, staff reporter

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