Facebook Is Flagging/Banning Accounts For Posting An Admittedly Strange Children's Book Illustration
from the no-leg-to-stand-on dept
I'll admit that very few things in this existence we all share give me as much pleasure at poking at the prudish censorship employed by Facebook. The overly broad puritanical guidelines, theoretically designed to save our sensitive eyes from anything as horrible as a breast or a penis, often instead results in the censorship of parody, renowned artwork, and bronze statues. That sincere but misguided attempt to keep things PG on its site is inherently funny, but nearly as inherently funny as is the fact that the following image was (rather innocently) included in one of a collection of children's books in France, entitled Images of Ponies and Horses.
Right about now you're thinking that you just witnessed a French how-to manual on having a horse be all that it can be inside of you. But it isn't! Honest! What this actually is is an attempt by the illustrator to show how similar the bone structure of human beings and horses are by aligning their respective physiology in this way. A rep from the publisher told BuzzFeed:
"Obviously, we never wanted to shock our readers with that drawing," a Fleurus spokesperson told BuzzFeed. "We publish educational books and make realistic or explanatory illustrations. In that case, our goal was to make the child visually comprehend that the bone structure of the horse and the human being are similar," they said. "Putting them in the same position makes the likening more understandable and concrete."
So, we have an unfortunately designed illustration that was supposed to be educational now going viral entirely because of the context our own dirty minds adds to the image. BuzzFeed wrote a post on the image, only to find that -- you guessed it -- Facebook had begun flagging the article as it was being shared on the site.
Well, things got even weirder with this horse thing. Facebook seems to be flagging this article — the one you're reading right now — as pornography. And then, after Facebook removes this article from your feed, it makes you go through your photos and verify that none of them are pornographic. In fact, Facebook's moderators seem to find this horse picture so inappropriate, a member of BuzzFeed's social media team received a 24-hour ban from posting on BuzzFeed's Facebook page.
And this is why Facebook should get out of the morality business to every last degree possible. An article about a hilarious, but innocent, educational illustration is being flagged, users are being hassled about their other photos on the site, and some folks are even getting banned. Because? Well, because it appears that Facebook moderators have the same perverse baseline psyche as the rest of us, resulting in an image of a man and a horse being compared physiologically becoming suspected horse-man-porn. And the article pointing out what it actually is is the one that got flagged. That's as much of a failure of this sort of thing as we could hope for.
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Filed Under: bones, errors, flagging, horse, social media
Companies: facebook
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And how stupid would it be to depict the horse upright, "arms" extended beside a human doing the same?
That said, banning Buzzfeed seems like a bonus.
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Women's elbows that look like her breasts.
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Re: Women's elbows that look like her breasts.
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Yup
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Finely catching on?
Finely catching on?
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That horse looks like it's smiling, or at least smirking.
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A Horse, of Course
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Re: A Horse, of Course
I also think they're very naughty to put a naked human in such close proximity to a non-naked horse (clothed exactly as nature intended). But that's the French for you.
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It took me five seconds...
After that the human bent down that way made sense: The horse's forelimbs were made for walking. ours aren't.
This is how censorship begins. Things start with what is considered popularly obscene. Then they get into what is considered by minorities to be obscene. And then they get into what is just generally kinda odd.
In the meantime, cat murder videos and ISIL beheadings: AOK on Facebook!
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Somewhere in there is the incidentally implicative.
As implicatedly inappropriate as it might be, a friend of mine recalls playing it as a girl and it being a total giggle-fest for kids under ten.
Facebook, and by proxy US society, may just have to get over itself, enjoy the giggle and move on.
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I've reported probably 5000 posts on Facebook so far today - and am going to keep at it until they don't have the resources to censor opposing views.
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Just a thought. . .
A content filter that was user controlled but that had default setting to protect even the most easily offended would be better for both the users and the company.
It would keep the user responsible for content and protect Facebook from any liability for user content. It would also lessen the possibility that content filtering could or would be used as a way to shape or manipulate users opinion in any way.
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Re: Just a thought. . .
/s
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Missing dog
Wonder how that got removed from the internet and real world.
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Next Time
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Catherine thought it was just Great.
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Believe it not
I'm still having a hard time believing that Barrack Hussein Obama was legally qualified to be President of the United States of America. Believing this is nothing more than a French physiological illustration will have to go on the back burner.
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Re: Believe it not
And then with all Romney's millions, the only charity to which he spared alms was his own church (which itself is frighteningly stingy about causes outside itself).
And we have no indicator how Mr. Robber Baron would have fared in the White House. Remember what happened the last time we let a Republican in there.
Obama is far from a saint, but his crimes have mostly been continuations of Bush policy. I seriously doubt we'd be seeing a different course of action from Romney. He was a stay-the-course kinda guy.
Except maybe more people would be dying due to lack of medical care. But fuck those guys, right?
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Gaah! Stupid markups.
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face book employs people with dirty minds.
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Re: face book employs people with dirty minds.
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Even a small amount of Education could cure this.
I was reported because "She knew what a fallacy is, and it was offensive and disgusting. I bought her a fucking dictionary.
The picture is worth a thousand words - or maybe a book or two.
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