Ah, Facebook jail. I’ve spent many an hour carving hashtags in those brick walls while waiting for some minor offense to fade. I’ve come close to losing my account completely a couple of times over the years.
It’s easy to joke about, but for people like me whose livelihood depends on social media and who aren’t just scam artists that don’t care if they burn through 200 identities a year, the prospect of losing an account or having a page shut down after you’ve spent years building it up can be a major threat. Late last year, a fairly huge page where I was co-administrator was shuttered by FB for some repeated violations (by other admins). I’ve not talked about what I know about that situation, but today I’m going to share what I learned from that, and from my other brushes with the long arm of the Zuck.
Let’s get started! Use the header button below to navigate between pages, it’s a fairly long post and I didn’t want to wall-o-text you.
There are two very broad categories here. Let’s knock out the easy one first, and this goes out to the men: nobody wants to see your penis unless they ask you to see it, and if they do don’t show it to them on Facebook even in a private message. I can’t believe I have to say that out loud, but my female friends assure me that this is still a near-daily problem. STOP IT. If someone wants to see your junk they’ll ask you to see it. If they do, don’t show it to them on Facebook.
The second category is a bit tougher, and that’s the stuff that can reasonably be described as “artistic depictions.” FB is more relaxed than some about this – if you throw a giant emoji over your crotch in a photo, you’re usually safe so long as the subject is clearly an adult. There’s been a ton of controversy over artistic depictions, and that’s softened up a bit; I’ve seen painting or statues with full frontal nudity that weren’t taken down, and pictures involving life-like prosthetic penises as well, but then others get yanked. Best to avoid. They’ve also softened up on photos of breastfeeding, which was a big controversy a few years back; these days the rule of thumb seems to be that if you can’t see a nipple or any part of the areola, you’re okay.
