A Doula and Birth Photographer is calling on Facebook to change their strategy when it comes to birth images.
Morag Hastings, who has 3 children, took to her website to call out the social media giant for censoring a birth photograph that she shared on her business page.
Her website post was titled ‘Banned – Unpublished – Censored by Facebook again’ and was in response to Facebook removing the below image.
Image via Morag Hastings/Apple Blossoms Families website
She wrote: “I wish my clients and other women could feel #Liberated and have #Confidence with their unsexual birth images. I keep thinking the world has changed and we are no longer shoving “women’s issues” behind closed doors. But then I wake up to find a message from FB saying that I have been banned for 30 days and my business page, with 22,000 followers that I worked really hard to acquire, is going to be unpublished because I posted an educational image of a baby being born. This image did not show “full buttocks” and definitely did not contain “sexual content.” The image that they removed showed a powerful woman catching her own baby standing up, there was a bit of the bottom of my clients bum, thighs, baby’s head…. and some blood.
“When I posted this image on Facebook 2 weeks ago it got a lot of traffic. I think it was shared over 2,000 times and viewed by over half a million people. I got lots of messages from women that felt empowered to catch their own baby or try birthing standing up after seeing this image. I am sure my image was reported when I first posted it. But two weeks later, Facebook’s algorithms picked it up and determined it was against FB’s Community Standards around nudity, even though it is fully in the limits of the nudity criteria. This happened to me twice in November 2015 here and here over an image that also was within Facebook’s nudity requirements.
“WHY IS THIS HAPPENING????????”
Apparently this isn’t the first time Morag has seen such a notification. She explains in her post that her page was banned in 2013 for images that, again, were within Facebook’s Community Standards. She added that it’s frustrating because there is nobody she can contact about the issue, she simply has to wait for her page to disappear.
The mum, who is based in Canada, has called on people to join her social media campaign by sharing a message which calls on Facebook to “stop censoring birth”. She is hoping that it will encourage the platform to change their policy or at least adapt so that people who want to see these images can see them (perhaps by clicking on an image with an overlay).
You can read her full post at her website here and don’t forget to let us know what you think on either Facebook or Twitter.
