Facebook under fire for its aggressive anti-nudity policy

Facebook has tendered an apology for removing a post by the French newspaper, Le Monde, about a mammogram screening, after yet again coming under fire for its aggressive anti-nudity policy.

The lead image of the article, which was published by Les Décodeurs, a data-focused site run by the paper, shows a woman having a mammogram and one of her breasts is exposed.

That seemed to be enough for the Social Networking Company to enforce its wide-ranging anti-nipple policy, and remove the article shortly after it was posted.

The site’s community standards prohibit nude images, albeit with exceptions for “photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring”, but it has frequently come under fire for a heavy-handed approach in how it enforces the policy.

Following the deletion, Les Décodeurs reposted the article to Facebook accompanied with an image of a male torso and the caption, “Facebook having censored the image of a mammogram that accompanied the article, we have replaced it with an image of a nude male torso which does not itself violate the social network’s terms of service”.

Facebook itself apologised on Tuesday for removing the post, and restored it the same day.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, “The post was removed in error and restored as soon as we were able to investigate, Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong. We’re very sorry about this mistake.”

This statement is however Facebook’s typical response. It is the same, word for word, as the company’s apology for removing posts about a Californian rapist, closing pages of Palestinian journalists, removing video of environmental protestors, banning a Black Lives Matter activist, and deleting the profile of a Chicagoan artist.