There is a group on facebook called Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook)
The reason this group exists is because facebook seem to have something against pictures of breastfeeding.
This amazing website – http://www.tera.ca/photos12.html has been collecting the banned pictures, and the stories behind them.
All the text below is from http://www.tera.ca/photos12.html
“Facebook routinely deletes from its site photos of breastfeeding. It has labelled them obscene and pornographic. It says that it has rules for what is allowed on its site, but its careless actions show it does not.
Facebook’s clueless manner of censoring is not just pointless but harmful. There are other ways to deal with unwanted material than by immature, arrogant, and foolish removal of what one doesn’t like, especially when photos of breastfeeding are claimed to harm children—a claim Facebook has made for years.
Here we present the first page of photos banned from the social utility Facebook, as well as a few that haven’t been. With several hundred million users, Facebook still removes from its pages photographs of women breastfeeding, despite complaints about that practice beginning as long ago as June 2007.
Facebook claimed that breastfeeding photos violated its terms of service if they showed “an entire breast.” Eventually it dropped the vagueness and the euphemism and claimed that all photos with a visible nipple or areola were “obscene,” “pornographic,” or “sexually explicit.” This claim by Facebook is at odds with legislation, case law, and actual practice throughout the USA. In addition, breastfeeding itself is allowed in public, exposed breasts or not, in almost all states in the country. By its attitude and action, Facebook is wrong. It demeans and stigmatizes women and breastfeeding.
In May 2009, the same Facebook spokesperson responsible for the above claims said that Facebook removes only a small number of photos of naked women breastfeeding. That would be funny if it weren’t so ignorant. Facebook also claims that images of breasts harm children. That’s absurd. Facebook wrongly uses children as an excuse for its immaturity and errors.
Facebook is undoubtedly a great utility, both useful and fun. Its worldwide acceptance on the Internet confers upon it a responsibility to do better.
The protest against Facebook’s removal of many breastfeeding photos isn’t really about legality. It’s not even about rights. It’s about what is right.
No. of photos in this collection: 170. Of those, 154 have been banned, some more than once. The others are here for comparison. (Many, many more have been banned than we have collected.) Comments from the photos’ owners are often illuminating.
http://www.tera.ca/photos6.html
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