Facebook is Speedophobic!

Zuckerberg's platform bans budgie-smuggling

The American social-media company Facebook recently took down a post from last year with a link to my article here on America’s Speedophobia, which featured an auto-generated preview of the pink Speedos at the top of the article.

'Your post goes against our Community Standards on nudity or sexual activity.'

As you can see, there is no nudity or sexual activity in the post or image. Just the pic at the top of the linked article, featuring Speedos. And not a particularly noticeable ‘budgie’ being smuggled either. The image is slightly more 'zoomed' in on the Speedos, but that's something Facebook does with article images automatically.

The Speedos are however very pink. Maybe that made someone feel ‘unsafe’.

I appealed the decision, hoping it was just a prudish algorithm thing. Shortly after it was reinstated by an admin. Then shortly after that it was taken down again by another admin.

Now the only appeal is in writing to the 'Facebook Oversight Board' - which 'gets thousands of appeals per week and selects just a handful per month'.

So, in other words: forget it, Mary.

I haven’t visited a US beach in a long time, so don’t know how Speedophobic they still are. But the ageing e-beach that is Facebook is clearly cracking down on swimming undercrackers.