New Yorker’s Cartoon Boobs Blocked On Facebook

There’s no place on Facebook for cartoon boobs! At least that’s the message the popular New Yorker received this week when the world’s largest social network temporarily disabled a post from the publication.

New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff wrote in a blog post:

“The New Yorker has a Facebook page for our cartoons, which a lot of you like, or maybe it’s just one person with a lot of time on their hands, liking the page over and over again. But in any case, it’s a whole lotta like. We like that.”

What we don’t like is that we got temporarily banned from Facebook for violating their community standards on ‘Nudity and Sex,’ by posting this Mick Stevens cartoon.”

After Facebook removed the cartoon, Mick Stevens redrew the characters with clothes on but then wrote “the gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor.”

At the time of the ban, Facebook claimed the cartoon violated its stance against “naked ‘private parts’ including female nipple bulges and naked butt cracks.”

Facebook over the last year has taken a tough stance on naked breasts, going so far as to ban breastfeeding pictures. However, in the case of the New Yorker, Facebook admitted they “went to far” and have an “unwritten policy that allows drawings or sculptures of nudes.”

In the meantime, the cartoon boobs are back in play and everyone seems happy for the time being. This is still better than Facebook remove photos of male/male or female/female kissing.

Update: Facebook’s PR team just sent us the following response to the cartoon ban:

“Recently, we mistakenly blocked a cartoon as part of our efforts to keep the site safe for all and quickly worked to rectify the mistake as soon as we were notified. Facebook is a place where almost a billion people share click more than a trillion links a day. Our dedicated User Operations Team reviews millions of pieces of this content a day to help keep Facebook safe for all. Our policies are enforced by a team of reviewers in several offices across the globe. This team looks at hundreds of thousands of reports every week, and as you might expect, occasionally, we make a mistake and block a piece of content we shouldn’t have. We have already taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”

[Cartoon via The New Yorker]