Porn Cops

Facebook employees who remove inappropriate images from the social networking site.

Nick Summers described the work of Facebook’s diligent porn cops in a recent article for Newsweek:

It’s just before lunchtime in the sunny, high-tech headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, Calif., and Simon Axten is cuing up some porn. A photo of a young couple sloppily making out pops onscreen. It’s gross, but not against the rules, so Axten punches a key to judge the image appropriate. Next up: a young woman in panties only, covering her breasts with her hands. “That’s pretty close,” Axten says, pondering the image.

There’s nothing arbitrary about his judgments: at Facebook, they have developed semiformal policies like the Fully Exposed Butt Rule, theCrack Rule and the Nipple Rule. In this photo there’s no visible areola, he decides, so it stays. The next photo is a male clad only in a black thong and angel wings. Utterly nonplussed, Axten OKs the picture.

Facebook’s censoriousness has, on occasion, provoked anger – in 2008, thousands of women demanded that images of breastfeeding be exempted from the rules. More recently, some users have questioned why the site removes inappropriate images while tolerating groups alleged to be racially and religiously offensive – as The Lede reported:

Two bloggers, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Brian Cuban of The Cuban Revolution, have been hammering the social-networking site Facebook in recent days for refusing to delete the accounts of groups like “Holohoax” and “Holocaust: A Series of Lies,” which act as forums for Holocaust deniers.

Analyzing this apparent double standard, Bobbie Johnson wrote in The Guardian:

Given that the company runs a 150-strong team of so-called “porn cops” to patrol for risque images … why does it feel that hate speech isn’t worth the same amount of trouble?

In many ways, the controversy is a direct product of America’s conflicted relationship with morals. The country is largely puritanical when it comes to sex, yet cherishes the right to free speech even when (in some cases) that becomes the right to offend. That’s at the heart of Facebook’s dilemma: it grew up in a culture where it’s wrong to see a nipple, but somebody suggesting the death of millions of people – and calling them snakes and liars – is merely a conspiracy story is acceptable within the limits of free speech.