The social media campaign #FBrape wants Facebook to crack down on hate speech against women on its site. The women’s rights initiative, which fired off 60,000 tweets and 5,000 emails protesting gruesome images on the social network, puts into perspective the power of women in the social media world.

“We’re not marginalized group on these sites,” Soraya Chemaly, a writer and activist who was among the leading organizers of the campaign, told the Christian Science Monitor.

“This isn’t some pet project special interest they’re supporting – it’s more than half their users.”

The majority of users on sites like Facebook are women, and they spend more time and create more content on social media platforms than their male counterparts, according to Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

Taking notice of the campaign, which according to experts has been successful because the demographic that launched it is women, Facebook announced Tuesday that it would update its guidelines around hate speech.

In a blog post, the company wrote, “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.”

Facebook wrote that have been working over the past several months to improve their system to respond to reports of violation but added, “We need to do better – and we will.”

Organized by activist groups Women, Action, and the Media (WAM) and the Everyday Sexism Project, along with Chemaly, the #FBRape campaign began last week with a call to Facebook users to contact companies whose ads were appearing on pages beside the violent and misogynist content, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

The campaign asked users to tell these advertisers to stop advertising on the site.

Within a week, activists sent out more than 5,000 emails and 60,000 tweets and prompted more than a dozen companies to pull ads from Facebook, according to WAM.

A study released in April by the Pew Internet Project showed that of all Internet users, 71 percent of women used social networking sites compared to 62% of men.

Female social media users in North America spend an average of 12 hours on social media sites each week, revealed another study by global communications firm Weber Shandwick.

Facebook taking note of the hate speech awareness campaign is important for their existence as a social network. But at the same time, the company doesn’t want to police the boundaries of good taste, social media expert Gerald Kane tells the Christian Science Monitor.

He noted, however, with 1 billion users, there’s only so much Facebook can do.

“They don’t want to be purveyors of hate, but a certain segment of the population will probably always be ugly.”