It seems Facebook is courting controversy these days. There are a lot of users unhappy about begin forced into the new timeline, no one likes change after all, but more worrying are the blurring issues over privacy and who is managing that, and how.
Facebook seems to be getting in hot water very regularly these days over pictures that are deleted and then not deleted. But one issue, that of the breastfeeding controversy, has left us genuinely scratching our heads.
We can’t decide if it is simply a badly advised move, a bout of prudishness or a twisted PRplot to get ‘yet another Facebook’ controversy getting the world and beyond talking about them (around the same time Facebook is going to stock market, by the way).
As breastfeeding mothers took to the streets worldwide this week to demonstrate against Facebook’s ban on breastfeeding pictures, we feel a bit confused by the whole issue. And we are even more confused by Facebook’s reaction.
The site has defended the ban, waving its policy guidelines at enraged users: images posted by Facebookers can be deleted if they ‘contain nudity, drug use or other obscene content’, they say. So, as it stands, according to Facebook, sharing breastfeeding pictures with your family and friends on their site falls in that category.
We have seen plenty of drunken night pictures, many rude comments and a ton of Facebook posts that had made us cringe over the years, but we find it hard to believe anybody (specially from your own circle of friends and family) would consider the image of a mother feeding a baby to be ‘obscene’.
Maybe we are just naïve or maybe, like love, obscenity lies in the eyes of the beholder.
It seems Facebook is courting controversy these days. There are a lot of users unhappy about begin forced into the new timeline, no one likes change after all, but more worrying are the blurring issues over privacy and who is managing that, and how.
Facebook seems to be getting in hot water very regularly these days over pictures that are deleted and then not deleted. But one issue, that of the breastfeeding controversy, has left us genuinely scratching our heads.
We can’t decide if it is simply a badly advised move, a bout of prudishness or a twisted PRplot to get ‘yet another Facebook’ controversy getting the world and beyond talking about them (around the same time Facebook is going to stock market, by the way).
As breastfeeding mothers took to the streets worldwide this week to demonstrate against Facebook’s ban on breastfeeding pictures, we feel a bit confused by the whole issue. And we are even more confused by Facebook’s reaction.
The site has defended the ban, waving its policy guidelines at enraged users: images posted by Facebookers can be deleted if they ‘contain nudity, drug use or other obscene content’, they say. So, as it stands, according to Facebook, sharing breastfeeding pictures with your family and friends on their site falls in that category.
We have seen plenty of drunken night pictures, many rude comments and a ton of Facebook posts that had made us cringe over the years, but we find it hard to believe anybody (specially from your own circle of friends and family) would consider the image of a mother feeding a baby to be ‘obscene’.
Maybe we are just naïve or maybe, like love, obscenity lies in the eyes of the beholder.