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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> Here's a question: what are the conditions under which Facebook will censor the content in the US/European market?

Breast-feeding mothers in Europe and US have had their images removed.

EDIT: Not sure if that still happens, but it's easy enough to find articles on WWW about it.

Also in the current news is a Frenchman suing Facebook for closing his account for posting Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, an artwork which depicts a certain part of the female anatomy very prominently.

Several years ago an image of a friend I (re)posted was subject to FB policy-based deletion. I'm not sure whether this was because reposting other people's images was frowned on at that time or the sight of the top of a male ass wearing female underwear poking out from jeans in a group called the "ass appreciation society" was a bit too racy (I can't find the email I received about it, and I believe the original pic is still there) but I'm convinced it was several orders of magnitude less likely to have caused anyone offence than a Muhammed-cartoon-meme.

I too posted Courbet's painting to Google+ a couple of years ago and it was removed. I contacted Google on the subject but never received an answer.

Freedom of speech, blah, blah. Zuckerberg is a lier, he should be a politician.

Good piece in The Economist about how Facebook's "arbitrary and capricious" censorship policies are inconsistent, invisible, unaccountable, and affect far more people than, say, the US Supreme Court.

Should pages that advocate violence be removed? What if it's political, like "Death to Israel"?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/08/fa...

>What if it's political, like "Death to Israel"?

Or what if it's in line with official US policy? Like "death to ISIS," or "death to Boko Haram."

Then it will get tons of likes, and funnel through data aggregation channels to later be part of a bar graph of patriotic support for the war effort.

Who said Facebook's censorship was arbitrary?

Ha, I didn't know about that-- that is really insane.

Naively, we can now say Facebook views breasts as "offensive" as pictures of Mohammad or decapitation videos.

Articles like this appear pretty much every month. Anything from gay activists to artists to mainstream political parties have been subjected to Facebook's puritan censorship.

It's become a bit of a running joke.

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