Blocked Again! @DenyseBridger

Facebook has me Blocked Again!

Once again my personal profile on Facebook has been blocked. This time for seven days, which in some respects is a better deal than the summary deactivations that used to be the result of unsubstantiated reports from disgruntled idiots. Today’s infraction was reported by a man who saw, and I quote: “A naked man–where is censorship?” The naked man he is referring to is a young model whose picture was posted to my fan page today… the most “suggestive” thing about the image was the curve of his ass showed. (I wonder how offended he would have been if this had been a nubile young woman stretched out on a table? I'm guessing that would have been very acceptable to him.)

I have a very popular page on Facebook, my Romance and Fantasy page often receives as high as 15K visitors in the run of a single week. Not dazzling numbers, but not too bad for a nobody author. The bulk of the visitors I interact with are women, and the page is set to be visible ONLY to those over 21 years of age. It’s been over a year since I did that, and the reports stopped. Today, I posted the model lying on a table, head turned to the camera. It began getting a lot of “shares” from the visitors who come to the page almost daily. TWO of those shares resulted in complaints I saw–one from the woman who said she didn’t want pictures like that on her newsfeed. (She should count herself lucky if this is the worst thing she sees, as most of us know.) The second was from the gentleman who wanted me censored. Apparently he saw fit to do just that.

My fan page is administered by four people, each of the four admins was locked out of their personal accounts until they answered the question “Do you want to unpublish your page until you have a chance to CLEAN UP your account?” Clean up the page, as if it was infested with pornography. I was the one who posted the image, and my co-admins have not had their accounts blocked, only me.

What pisses me off about this is the number of times I have seen genuinely disturbing and sexually explicit images on my own newsfeed–images that have been shared sometimes thousands of times, and have thousands upon thousands of likes. It takes time for any picture to made the rounds to that extent. Yet, a young male lying on his stomach is considered pornographic and in violation of standards. I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of the slant on this is if a popular page is reported, you get nailed a whole lot quicker.

For those of you out there who use Facebook and have no idea how to edit the content of your newsfeeds–learn! Please. You can remove any content from that home page that you personally find offensive for whatever reason, without reporting the individual who posted it. That person is often a stranger to you, but one of your friends chose to share something from a public page. You CAN turn off the ticker so every move your friends make is not visible to you. Of course those of you who are lurking and watching for something to jump on, that might mean you miss something, right?

For the next 7 days none of my shared media posts will be allowed to post to the over 10,000 people in my group and on my pages. None of my Twitter feed will be visible, nor my blog postings. All because a couple of people objected to this:

Yes, that is the offending image, and I’m sure you’re all shocked and appalled. The first time my account was shut down I was told using this image as a profile picture was deemed offensive and against the Terms of Service.

Apparently the graphic and explicit image of two naked men having intercourse that was shared 22,000 times wasn’t in violation, but this couple was–who knew?

See y’all in a week or so!!