May 19, 2013

Facebook Censors Photo After Mistaking Elbow for Breast

In the wake of recent breastfeeding photo controversies, the (NSFW) blog Theories of the deep understanding of things decided to test Facebook's terms of service and censorship policies by posting a photo of a bathing woman to its Facebook page.


The grainy photo features a blond woman in a bathtub flashing a single pink elbow, which could look like a breast at first glance. It was posted last Saturday with the caption, "Once again, testing Facebook alertness." Facebook moderators must have taken only a cursory look at the photo because they removed the post less than 24 hours later on Sunday.

"FB moderators can't tell an elbow from a dangerous, filthy, uncanny and violent female breast. No questions were asked the and the post is down. Imagine our surprise," TOTDUOT wrote after the post was taken down.

According to the Daily Mail, workers in Morocco and other countries are paid $1 an hour to moderate Facebook pages and remove any content that might violate its policies. When Facebook realized they had censored an elbow, they promptly reinstated the photo. They issued this apology to HuffPostUK: “This photo does not violate our content standards and we have already restored the photo. We made a mistake removing the picture and apologised to the page admin.”

Article 3, Section 7 of Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities states that users "will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence."

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