Why Is Facebook Deleting Photos Of Pregnant Women?

A funny thing happened when this blog post about celebrity baby bump photo shoots was posted by an administrator on VH1’s Facebook page: Facebook deleted it.

A screen notified the user that the content had been taken down because it violated Facebook’s standards. “We don’t think it was ‘bad’ enough to be removed and I’m not sure if the FB people took it down or a robot did it,” said a tipster there, who preferred to remain anonymous.

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These were magazine covers that had met the standards of newsstands nationally. And given that a scantily clad pregnant women hasn’t been shocking as a conceit since Annie Leibovitz had Demi Moore do it exactly twenty years ago (it’s also an Internet meme), it’s surprising. So we asked Facebook whether bared flesh was held to a different standard when pregnancy was involved.

A spokesman for Facebook told us, “We don’t have a special standard for pregnant women. Our policies prohibit nudity and are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe and trusted environment for everyone, including the many children (over the age of 13) who use the service,” and promised to get back to us after investigating this particular incident, but said it was “almost certainly a mistake.” Six days of following up later, we haven’t gotten an answer.

So for now, we’re left to wonder: Did a robot get really grossed out by Pregnancy magazine’s cover line, “Pimp my stroller?” Is some Facebook employee really not a Christina Aguilera fan? Or is there still something more shocking about partial nudity when the woman is pregnant?

Update: Last month, a British woman complained that her Moore-style photos had been removed from Facebook. There have also been persistent complaints of breastfeeding photos being taken down by Facebook.

Update #2: The spokesman emails, not very informatively, “This was a mistake, and we encourage the person who posted the content to do so again, if he or she wants.”

Related: Celebrity Baby Bump Flaunters From The Prudish To The Shameless [The Fab Life]