Facebook has long had a policy of removing content flagged up as being potentially offensive to other users. This makes sense to some degree because the age range of Facebook users varies from five to 105 (or thereabouts).

However, users aren’t happy when they see content being removed when it really isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be able to offend anyone. Last year saw a backlash from users on Facebook after the social network deleted photos of women breastfeeding their babies. The pictures were deleted because of their offensive and pornographic nature. Despite breastfeeding being a totally innocuous and natural occurrence.

Now, Facebook has provoked a new storm over its content-flagging policy by deleting photos of mastectomy scars. The Daily Mail reports how Sharon Adams uploaded the pictures of the outcome of her breast removal to warn those in her friends’ group about breast cancer and to urge women to check themselves regularly.

Within a day of the pictures going live on the site, Facebook had deleted them for being “sexual and abusive.” When they are quite clearly neither of those things. They are pretty shocking, which is why I’ve just linked to the original story rather than publish the photos here, but sexual and abusive they most certainly aren’t.

Adams wasn’t too happy with Facebook’s decision, and neither were the 900 or so people who joined an online group calling for the photos to be reinstated to the site. Adams commented:

The idea had been to spread the message to people within my circle. I couldn’t believe it when the pictures were removed.

Thankfully, people power prompted Facebook to do the right thing, and put the photos back on Adams’ profile. The site also apologized for the action and tried to explain the procedure which saw the photos removed in the first place. A spokesman said:

Our user operations team reviews thousands of reported photos a day and may occasionally remove something-that doesn’t actually violate our policies. This is what happened here. We apologize.

As I previously mentioned, the photos aren’t pleasant, showing the results of a horrific but entirely necessary operation. But they were not uploaded to provide sexual titillation or even to offend anyone. They were instead uploaded in order to educate people.

I understand that Facebook has to moderate millions of photos and content uploads meaning this kind of mistake is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it correct.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 5:05 pm under Health, Internet, Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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