The F'n Boot Facebook page, once known for being abusive, has been removed from the social media site a number of times for violating the terms of service. Now the Marine veteran running it says he wants to stop the abuse and use it as a forum to help other vets.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of F'n Boot
A page administrator for the Facebook page "F'n Boot" calls from the dentist's office, where he's taken one of his kids to get a tooth pulled. Shane Eckberg, who identifies himself as a former mortarman and rifleman who served two tours and got out of the Marines in 2004, is quiet and friendly, something of a surprise considering the furor that variations of the "F'n Boot" page has caused over the years.
Now an estate jeweler in Phoenix, Eckberg says he and a varying team of administrators have managed a version of the page since 2011. The page itself started up in 2007, when Facebook was still relatively new, and groups built around envelope-pushing, crude Marine humor were not the headache for the Marine Corps they are today. If Eckberg remembers right, he was the 21st fan of the page that he and others say inspired a field of imitators — each a little more daring and more offensive than the last.
Now Eckberg said the page has taken a new identity, avoiding harassing or abusive content in favor of offering neutral humor and veterans' resources. For years, the Marine Corps has worked quietly to close problem pages down and hold active-duty offenders accountable on a case-by-case basis. But the turn taken by "F'n Boot" raises the question: Could the community of offensive Marine Facebook pages be on its way to disbanding?
This community of Marine "humor" pages on Facebook — with names like "Just The Tip, Of the Spear," "Pog Boot F****s" and "F'n Wook" — received national attention in 2013 when Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif.ornia, raised the issue to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and then-commandant Gen. Jim Amos, citing examples of explicit photographs and comments that promoted rape and the denigration of women. Not for the first time or the last, the pages were shut down by Facebook, only to revive shortly thereafter with similar names and content.
"F'n Boot" was one of the pages got shut down too in the firestorm, though by then it was no longer one of the worst offenders.
Today, said Eckberg said the page, and an accompanying "F'n Boot: Original Intent" website, no longer looks to post misogynistic content or target specific individuals for mockery and harassment. Once a self-appointed watchdog that worked to find, harass and humiliate Marine fakers, the page now focuses on connecting veterans with community and resources and raising awareness of veteran suicides, which reportedly take place at the rate of 22 per day. It has changed hands quite a few times, he said, and early administrators who Eckberg describes as "trolls" were ousted.
"We tried to clean up our open page a lot," Eckberg said. "No more bashing people, no more bashing female Marines or admin guys. We all serve under the same flag. We can't afford to be stupid anymore."
Growing pains
It's hard to know how much of this change in tactics was spurred by exasperation from having to revive the page every time it violated Facebook's terms of service and how much is due to a genuine change of heart. While Eckberg said he thinks other pages have gone too far, especially in targeting individual users and exposing their personal information, he's not very sympathetic to those who complain they've been bullied by these Facebook communities.
"As far as bullying, grow up," he said. "Turn off your computer."
The "F'n Boot" Twitter account linked to the page and last used in late 2013 contains plenty of offensive content. It featured explicit nude photographs of women, allegedly self-portraits sent in by fans. On May 13, 2013, the account posted, "New page is up. DOD, some congress [expletive]whore and the facebook Nazi's shut us down. I am the clap I will always be back."
But whether from pragmatism or a new mindset, the content on the "F'n Boot" Facebook page has become tamer. Last shut down about six months ago, Eckberg said, the site has about 12,000 fans.
That's a significant decrease from the page's heyday, when it reached upwards of 30,000 likes. On other pages, too, the follower counts seem to be getting smaller each time Facebook pulls the plug. The most popular page, "Just The Tip, Of the Spear," is now on its 26th iteration, having been shut down again in early January. It has around 11,500 followers now, down from more than 50,000 when Marine Corps Times first reported on the page in 2013.
It may be that these pages, which have caused Marine Corps leadership angst for years, are losing steam all on their own.
Maryland-based attorney Bradley Shear, an expert on social media law, cited the Streisand Effect, which got its name from singer Barbra Streisand's ill-fated 2003 effort to get photographs of her California home in Malibu taken off the iInternet. When iInternet users caught wind of her efforts, they circulated the photographs far and wide.
"Sometimes it's best just to ignore the situation," Shear said. "Bullies keep calling you names to get a rise out of you."
Marine vet Braden Griffy says he remembers when the offensive Facebook pages experienced their population boom. He was a fan-turned-administrator of "F'n Boot," he said, who came on board to help run the page around 2009 and stayed with it for the better part of a year. During that time, he said the page rapidly grew from a few hundred fans to about 20,000.
In those days, he said the seven or eight administrators who then ran the page would have conference calls about what to post on a given day and who would be doing what. Griffy, a single-term rifleman who got out as a lance corporal in 2004, said he didn't have a problem with the site when it mainly poked fun at "boots," or junior, very inexperienced Marines. But as the follower count grew, he felt that the page was being pressured to post darker, more offensive content. He said he began to have qualms about what the page was posting and grew less and less comfortable being involved with it.
"It wasn't supposed to be about some attack page and calling in fire missions on random people," he said. "It's all supposed to be friendly banter back and forth."
But the shock to the system for Griffy came in June 2010, when a source sent him a forwarded email from then-Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlton Kent to the officers and staff noncommissioned officers of Marine Corps Logistics Command containing a PowerPoint that identified Griffy by name and photograph as the individual behind "F'n Boot."
"Ask that you push this information throughout the Marine Corps about Marines being held accountable for negative comments about fellow Marines/sailors, and elected officials on Facebook and other social network sites," Kent wrote. "Marines/sailors must understand without a doubt that these sites are open to the public and their comments will eventually get around the Marine Corps … the Marine Corps is not joking around."
That was the last straw for Griffy, who responded by leaving "F'n Boot," closing his personal Facebook account, and essentially going off the social media grid.
"When the sergeant major of the Marine Corps has something with my name and my face on it, it was more than I was prepared for," he said.
'A radicalized community'
Before Griffy called it quits, "F'n Boot" was no longer a group of moderators on a single page. Griffy recalled an instance in 2010 when the original page was shut down by Facebook. While he and the moderators were contemplating what to do, multiple unrelated copycat "F'n Boot" pages began to pop up, each with hundreds of followers. The phenomenon was out of control.
Marine veteran and blogger Brian Adam Jones experienced the dark side of this coarse community when he wrote an August 2014 story for the website Task and Purpose exposing the identities of seven active-duty Marines who posted explicit and misogynistic content on a number of the pages.
He received threatening emails and had photographs of himself circulated as Internet memes with insults attached. He was disturbed to discover that one of the pages had appropriated and posted images and the phone number of a female coworker so that users could mock and harass her.
Jones said the pages, which still seemed harmless enough when he was a junior Marine in 2009 and 2010, had been condensed to their lowest common denominator over time.
"Because they ignore Facebook's terms of service, there's this constant self-selecting sample," that has to actively search for new pages every time the old ones are deleted, he said. "The only person who would do something like that is someone who really buys into this. You're left with this really hyper-radicalized community."
Whether or not the mainstream influence of these sites is dwindling, Jones said the Marine Corps still has the responsibility to educate Marines about avoiding them and to dole out punishment to offenders.
"There needs to be an institutional knowledge in the Marine Corps that starts at boot camp. If you do this … you're going to [receive nonjudicial punishment]; Your career is over," he said. "If they NJP'd 100 dudes, those pages would fizzle out and die."
Headquarters Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Eric Flanagan said he couldn't provide a tally of Marines who had been punished for their postings on these Facebook pages, because these actions are handled by Marines' individual commands. He said Marine Corps officials have worked to close more than three dozen Facebook pages, however.
"The punitive measures from social media misuse have ranged from formal counseling, relief from position, military protective order, or nonjudicial punishment," he said.
Griffy, who still avoids Facebook but now has a personal Twitter account under the moniker "F'n Boot," but still stays away from Facebook, said education wais the key to convincing active-duty Marines to leave the problem pages.
"I hate to see good Marines get burned because they say something stupid on social media," he said. "They need to be hit with a senior drill instructor moment with a full-on PowerPoint citing tweets, names, specifics."
Eckberg, meanwhile, said he's working hard to keep the current "F'n Boot" site's nose clean so it can keep from running afoul of Facebook and the Marine Corps and continue to do what he thinks is most important: provide an informal online community and safe place for Marines and vets.
"You get a feeling of being back in the barracks without being the in the barracks," he said. "For whatever reason, it helps me more than any other source."
