The SHOCKING Photos That Violated Facebook's Policies!
from the avert-yer-eyes! dept
Update: The account is now unblocked, with this message from Facebook:I'm so sorry for the inconvenience caused, there was a temporary misconfiguration in our photo review systems which caused a very small subset of users to be incorrectly enrolled in one of our checkpoints. There was no issue with your original photo, we have a combination of automated and human-review systems dedicated to keeping people safe, and a bug caused one of these systems to incorrectly enroll a small number of users into checkpoints.
We have since remedied the issue, and remediated all affected accounts. Please let me know if you or others are still experiencing any difficulties.
Yesterday I posted this adorable photo on Facebook:
Being a cute picture of a cute cat, it got a lot of "likes" and comments. A few hours later I followed up with this photo (accompanying text in the caption):
Another photo of Nut and me. Here you can see in more detail how Nut presses her face as hard as she can into mine. She does this all night, by the way. If I move my face away, she rearranges herself to grip the back of my head as tightly as possible. If I'm face-down on the pillow, she slides her paws under into my eye sockets and mashes her head into my ear. It's very cute but I don't think I could stand it every night.
Shortly thereafter, FB wouldn't let me view my feed, instead giving me this message:
"We noticed you may be posting photos that violate our Community Standards. Help make Facebook better by cleaning up your photos and removing friends that post nudity or other things that violate our standards."
Then it took me directly to all my photos and said,
"To keep your account active, please remove any photos that contain nudity or sexually inappropriate content. Check the box next to each photo you need to remove."
I didn't have a single dirty photo to check, so I checked none and then clicked the box that said, "I have checked all my photos that violate Facebook’s policies." For that, I was rewarded with this:
"Because you uploaded photos that violate our policies, you won't be able to upload photos for 3 days.
"If you have other photos on the site that violate our policies, be sure to remove them immediately or you could be blocked for longer. After this block is lifted, please make sure any photos you upload follow Facebook’s Policies."
Followed by another checkbox that says,
"I understand Facebook's policies and I won't upload any photos that violate these policies."
But I haven't checked that box yet, because I really don't understand Facebook's policies. At all. Maybe Franz Kafka could explain them to me. Can you?
UPDATE: several hours later, I still can’t see my FB home page/news feed. This is what I continue to get instead:
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: blocked, cats, censorship, nina paley, photos
Reader Comments
The First Word
“If you don't like Facebook policies, stop using their site. It worked for me.
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For now our only real hope is that cases like this one cause the companies involved to do some internal review and revise policies when executives finally realize how much damage they are doing to their brands. Executives are never reluctant to spend big bucks on advertising and public image, but they are not quick to recognize that this type of overzealous policy enforcement can undo in seconds all of that expensive brand promotion.
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Re:
I'm pretty sure that hidden in all the fine print on Facebook is this line:
"Abandon hope all ye who enter here"
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Robots attack
Sheckley described it very colorfully in his "Watchbird":
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579
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A simple solution for FB - if they are doing this, just explain why they are wrong.
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beloved FB reasoning
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Yes!
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Isn't it obvious?
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Re: Isn't it obvious?
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How obscene could she get... sheesh
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Hmm
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In all seriousness, this was probably triggered by the description. Without the picture and context, one with a dirty mind could read that as 'sexual'.
Here's a thought, inappropriate trolling. Take completely innocent photos and give them extremely suggestive sounding, but actually innocent descriptions, then call out FB when they get flagged.
(Picture of a smiling dog in a pool treading water with girl in a normal swimsuit)
"This is dick, Dick loves to be in the pool, but gets extra happy when his favorite girl is swimming with him. He loves swimming doggie style, though it makes him tired if he does it too long"
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Seriously? Do you ever read what you write before posting it?
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How about: "Method and apparatus for detecting contact between human skin and animals in a user-determined social media photographic archive"? Come on, Eastern District... let's get trollin'!
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Big surprise....
What the hell is this? Unnecessary censorship? Why not??? They've already censored everything else. Might as well censor that does not need censoring. Make a post on FB: "Oh look! There's a *bleep* walking her *bleep* down the *bleep*!" Then along comes Facebook: "Sorry! We've detected that you attempted to use verbs and nouns in your post. That violates our Terms of Service along with pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and infinitives. Please remove the offending language or we'll suspend your account!"
But in all fairness, I can see where FB might censor this picture. After all, that's a cat. And a cat comes from 'pussy cat', and we all know what word is offensive in that. "Sorry, you can't use 'cat', or even have a picture of a cat anywhere on FB. You also can't say 'pu**ywillow' as even though it's a plant and grows in nature, we've censored it."
Now, take this post I just wrote and post it to FB, and chances are you'll see this: "***** ******** **** ***** ****** ****** and ***** **** * ***** ******. (Note from FB: We are currently deciding if the word 'and' is offensive to some individual in the Arctic Circle who eats fish and berries to survive. If so, 'and' will be added to our ban list."
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My take...
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a) not able to sort out WIT A PERSON at FB what exactly is wrong
b) dont just go to another means of contacting their 'friends' making sure they all know what is going on!
i appreciate that there has to be care taken it what is/not allowed, but to have a piece of rogue software doing it, when it keeps going ga-ga is ridiculous!
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I've seen these types of attacks before, which is why I find it ludicrous FB's policy can't take time out of its own position to realize some reports are bogus.
Welcome to the next generation of the DMCA.
Now I hope people will understand why I don't like those comments being flagged by the community.
This is no different.
Looks like you're going to be in for a world of FB's customer service hell for a while.
Bring water. Gets pretty hot over there, I hear.
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those who can't stand your policy on copyright.
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1) Facebook does something "evil";
2) You complain loudly about how evil Facebook is, polluting the the Internet with yet another "Facebook sucks" article;
3) Later, despite all the harm Facebook caused you, like a Heroin addict, you return to using Facebook;
4) Return to 1)...what, you don't actually expect Facebook to get any better do you?
Sorry for being sort of a dick, but you have to admit that it isn't "normal" for people to flock to something that causes such misery routinely. And we're not even getting into the fact that Facebook is trading your personal information for cash.
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Like Mesonexian Eeve said above, this could have been instigated by a cadre of knuckle-draggers, which means there's an obvious flaw in FB's business structure especially since this function isn't working as intended.
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In fact, now that I *don't* have it, it's much easier to see how insidiously it's infected most of the internet.
It's great, I can instantly figure out which organizations I don't want to deal with whenever I see "you need to log in to Facebook."
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Er...
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Re: Er...
www.smallanimaldecency.com/
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If you don't like Facebook policies, stop using their site. It worked for me.
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*sigh*
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Here is the problem
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Re: Here is the problem
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Rats leaving a sinking ship
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Nuts
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Re: Nuts
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Nutella - Economy size Nutella form Costco - Nectar of the gods - sugar coma.
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Re: Nuts
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Nuts
Sometimes you feel like a nut... sometimes you don't.
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Nuts and faces....
That's a banning.
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Re: Nuts and faces....
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It probably measures the area and if it covers above a certain threshold it assumes is nudity.
Priceless.
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Full disclosure: I do have a FB account. I signed up a year or two ago just because there are certain things you can't do online unless you have a FB account. I have, I think, ten friends. And every one of them is an actual close friend or family member. I don't even log into FB most days.
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I have been on the internet for a long time now and have run into nothing I want to do that I need a Facebook account to do.
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I doubt it.
The story is that something that no reasonable person would think was violating anything was blocked, and then she was being asked to agree not to violate again, despite having no idea what the violation was in the first place. It's really not hard to grasp why this is a problem, unless you're the AC that has a pathological hatred of her because you watched her movie for free and didn't like it.
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Freckles
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Re: Freckles
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/3269-PHP-Determine-whether-an-image-may-contain-nudity.h tml
And of course there are versions in Javascript too.
http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/nudejs/
Don't miss the demo links below in the page.
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Re: Freckles
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Maybe someone knew you would write an article about this??
Maybe somebody knew that if they screwed with YOUR account, then you'd bother telling the world and bring attention to this problem?
Anyway, ridiculous stuff. I wish we had an open-framework for social networking like we have with e-mail. There should be a way to network via whatever system you want and not have to agree to any particular provider's policies in order to interact with other people in this way.
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Re: Maybe someone knew you would write an article about this??
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Unreal
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Too many cat pictures!
"We noticed you may be posting photos that violate our Community Standards. Help make Facebook better by cleaning up your photos and removing friends that post cat pictures or other things that violate our standards."
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Re: Too many cat pictures!
Sincerely,
A cat lover.
:D
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Using Facebook is asking for it.
When the "service" is free, the product is you. Using these kind of sites is begging to be used and abused. How intelligent is that?
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Re: Using Facebook is asking for it.
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Watch out...
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Retarded AIs
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Facebook Response
I'm so sorry for the inconvenience caused, there was a temporary misconfiguration in our photo review systems which caused a very small subset of users to be incorrectly enrolled in one of our checkpoints. There was no issue with your original photo, we have a combination of automated and human-review systems dedicated to keeping people safe, and a bug caused one of these systems to incorrectly enroll a small number of users into checkpoints.
We have since remedied the issue, and remediated all affected accounts. Please let me know if you or others are still experiencing any difficulties.
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Re: Facebook Response
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Re: Facebook Response
Thanks for posting your response here. Glad to see that Nina's immediate problem is resolved. But you are missing the bigger issue. FB blocked her access to her page, telling her there "may be" a problem with photos she had posted. FB didn't tell her which photos were at issue. FB didn't even explicitly say that nudity &/or sexual content was the problem, this was just hinted: "nudity or other things".
This is intolerably passive-aggressive.
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Re: Facebook Response
Who are you and what have you done with the silently icy, faceless monolith that we have all come to know and despise in such a reflexive fashion.
Well?
I'm waiting.
Still waiting.
Figures.
.
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Community
Just how I thought it worked. It's an automated reporting system, I watched where it took days for them to remove child porn... since about that time, assuming the problem was a back long of report to be humanly reviewed, it propassumes guilt by default.
All speculation and observation. *shrug*
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Update
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Shocking?
The moment you decided to use Facebook, you gave up every single right you have, put yourself in chains, threw away the key and handed them the leash.
They are a private company and can do whatever the heck they want. And right now, they are DESPERATELY trying to show a profit since their stock has never recovered from going public.
Facebook is cutting its own throat and I say... let them.
Once a company gets big enough that they forget that it was US who made them big, they need to go the way of the Dodo.
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Re: Shocking?
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I think the problem is temperature....
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Well now it looks like I'm going to pay my parents a visit, my mom's cat nuzzles you right beneath the chin while kneading your neck...he's tried to kill me several times that way :-P
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You totally should have noticed the 400 FB sponsored ads for cat clothing and bought some... then we could have avoided all of this!
Cat pictures on the internets... what is this world coming to!
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Mace Book
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Bestiality!
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LOL
(sorry i just had to say that - not cause you're ugly or sh*t.. just thought it wold be a lol thing to say, nhf :) )
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In the paraphrased words of Groucho Marks, I'm distrusting of any club that would allow me as a member.
If you post something innocuous to your friends, and FB tries to block you - let them. It's evidence that FB doesn't have your, or your friends, best interests at heart.
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Me too.
But I'm unblocked now after 48 hours so they backed off the three day ban.
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your pictures
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i m templorly blocked
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i m templorly blocked
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gross
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