Facebook Welcomes Your Baby Penis Pictures
Facebook's absurdly prude content standards sparked another twisted saga this week when the company censored, then promptly un-censored, the iconic cover of Nirvana's Nevermind. Facebook welcomes all your (non-sexual) baby penises!
According to the Guardian, the cover was uploaded to the band's official Facebook page to promote the upcoming 20th anniversary of Nevermind. But Facebook took it down, sending their boilerplate explanation that, "Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence or other violations of the Terms of Use."
But now the cover is back up. And Facebook is pretending the whole thing didn't happen. They told NME:
The photo on the cover of 'Nevermind' album does not actually violate Facebook's terms. Facebook does allow photos of naked children 'that are clearly unable to stand on their own' in a non sexual situation – so in other words, babies. Why? Put it this way - if a parent wanted to share some photos of a newborn with their grandparents, we wouldn't want them to not be able to share them on Facebook.
So, add this to the completely opaque guidelines of what sort of racy pictures are and are not welcome on Facebook. They allow kid nudity, as long as it's just tiny baby penises. You can post nude paintings and drawings of adults—so long as they're not too realistic. And two fully-clothed men men kissing? That's questionable. As are porn stars in any sartorial configuration.
This makes my head hurt. It seems like the Facebook PR person is quoting from some internal document governing naked pictures—why don't they just release this to let users know exactly what's allowed? Probably because then we'd hold them to it.