According to San Francisco Chronicle, several hundred women around the world are upset with Facebook for removing their breast-feeding pictures from the social networking site – to voice against this the women will be protesting Monday by staging “nurse-ins” – in which they will be breadt feed their children’s outside the social media giant’s office worldwide – including the company’s Menlo Park HQ.
For Vancouver mother Emma Kwasnica, a breast-feeding advocate and a protest organizer, “This is discrimination,” There’s no other way to look at it. We’re being treated as pornographers. Breast-feeding moms, especially ones with infants, spend hours a day with their children at their breast. They’re not trying to be sexually explicit. This is just part of their everyday lives – she has had about 30 of her photos flagged as inappropriate and her account shut down four times — once for 30 days.
Facebook allows its users to flag photos they believe are inappropriate. Employees go through the flagged photos and remove the ones that actually violate the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities – a set of standards that follows pretty much the same rules as television and print media – the company claimed it couldn’t allow pictures of breast on a site where teenagers roam.
A spokeswoman for the company said the removal of breast-feeding photos is in no way malicious — just an honest mistake that happens when dealing with sheer volume of photos that come in each day. “In the course of processing billions of photographs and millions of reports each day, human error does occasionally occur,” said the spokeswoman, who did not want to be identified.
Kwasnica, who has three daughters, said “she thinks Facebook employees should undergo sensitivity training to prevent these errors from happening.” Added further, “People ask, ‘Why do you share it on Facebook?’ and I say, ‘Why do you share anything on Facebook?’ While Facebook apologized to her publicly about two weeks ago for removing her photos, “People share their whole days on Facebook, when they’re eating, where they’re eating, pictures of them feeding their kids spaghetti. We just see this as feeding our children.” – But still in one or another case, mothers often found their accounts frozen and their breast-feeding pictures removed.
(Image Source: Facebook)
