Facebook’s Nipplegate hits the front page
Hey, I was there first! :-) On Saturday I wrote Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images, about how my wife Victoria Buckley was told by Facebook she couldn’t show nude dolls on her Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.
Today the Sydney Morning Herald has featured this as its top story, with a headline Facebook nipplegate row and story by Asher Moses titled Now Facebook bans doll nipples. It says:
Facebook’s prudish police are out in force yet again, this time threatening action against a Sydney jeweller for posting pictures of exquisite nude porcelain dolls posing with her works.
Victoria Buckley, who owns a high-end jewellery store in the Strand Arcade on George Street, has long used the dolls as inspiration for her pieces and hasn’t had one complaint about the A3 posters of the nudes in her shop window.
But over the weekend she received six warnings from Facebook saying the pictures of the dolls, which show little more than nipples, constituted “inappropriate content” and breached the site’s terms of service.
The article goes on to discuss the previous controversies about Facebook banning breast-feeding and mastectomy scars, and Victoria’s response to the situation.
To avoid problems with the Victoria Buckley Facebook page, which has well over 1,000 fans, Victoria has moved the offending images to a new Facebook group Save Ophelia- exquisite doll censored by Facebook. Join the group if you don’t like this kind of censorship!
Interestingly the story concludes:
Ironically, while Facebook is overzealous in targeting relatively innocuous images on the site, it has been criticised by police for its unresponsiveness to real criminal issues. The Australian Federal Police has said the site’s woeful relationship with law enforcement bodies was hampering police investigations and putting lives at risk.
[UPDATE:] A lot has happened on this story since this post – a bit of a review here.
