Earlier this week we wrote about the efforts of a collective of activists pressuring Facebook to remove content encouraging rape and violence against women from the site. Now we’re happy to say that Facebook noticed their campaign and has promised to take action.

A collective that includes Women, Action & the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project and Soraya Chemaly released an open letter to Facebook last week asking why the site banned images like those of mastectomies or breastfeeding but allowed ones that pictured acts of violence against women or encouraged sexual assault. It was a good question, and their campaign spread quickly, which probably helped them get this response from Facebook on Tuesday:

In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want. In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.

We’re happy that Facebook responded so quickly, and we hope they really do work to get this kind of stuff off their site. It’s among the worst examples of rape culture, and really damaging for people who have been victims of assault themselves and find such violent images triggering. And really, who wants to see that kind of misogynistic crap … well, ever, but particularly when they’re just trying to look at some cute kitten videos their aunt posted?

Good work, guys! It’s great to see an example of the worst of the Internet turn into an illustration of its power to push for change. We hope these activists and their supporters keep their eye on Facebook to make sure these changes actually happen. We’re going to.