"Facebook's prude police are out in force yet again, this time threatening action against a Sydney jeweller for posting pictures of an exquisite nude porcelain doll posing with her works.
Victoria Buckley, who owns a high-end jewellery store in the Strand Arcade on George Street, has long used dolls as inspiration for her pieces and hasn't had one complaint about the A3 posters of the nudes in her shop window.
But over the weekend she received six warnings from Facebook saying the pictures of the doll, which show little more than nipples, constituted "inappropriate content" and breached the site's terms of service.
The warnings said Facebook would remove the images and Buckley is worried she will be banned from the site if she posts them again.
It comes after the site incurred the wrath of mothers all over the world by banning photos of women breastfeeding their children, calling such shots "obscene content". Facebook has also come under fire for banning images of a British woman's mastectomy scars, published on the site to raise awareness of breast cancer.
Buckley said Facebook was behaving like "philistines" and blamed the issue on "American puritanism".
"Really here we're talking about nipples on a doll - I've got A3 posters of her in my window in the Strand Arcade that have been up for months and we haven't had one negative comment. The doll herself is in the window," Buckley said.
"Somebody's got a Michelangelo fan group on there and they do have a picture of the Statue of David ... why is that OK and this isn't?"
And these aren't just regular barbie dolls, they're high-end porcelain figures designed by Marina Bychkova of Enchanted Doll in Canada, featured in art and culture magazines all over the world.
Those who want to buy one face a two- to three-year wait. The dolls can cost from $5000 to $45,000, which is the price one sold for on eBay in January.
"The shoe designer for Louis Vuitton collects her dolls and they're really hard to get hold of; they're really precious things, they're not just a barbie or something," Buckley said.
"They're the right scale for my jewellery, they interact with it visually, so I actually design collections around these dolls and their interactions with my jewellery."
For now, Buckley has censored the images of the dolls on her Facebook fan page but has posted the uncensored versions on a new group dedicated to the doll called "Save Ophelia - exquisite doll censored by Facebook".
Buckley wants to gauge Facebook's response to the images being posted on that group before deciding whether to put the uncensored version back on her own fan page.
Her emails to Facebook have so far fallen on deaf ears, although this may be because Sunday is a public holiday in the US. Buckley had also posted the photos to Flickr but these were removed for similar reasons.
"I've invested quite a lot of money in this campaign for my jewellery and I'm quite reliant on the Facebook page to get the message out," she said, adding thousands of people had said they love the dolls and imagery.
"You can invest thousands of dollars and months of your time building a new campaign and you put it on sites like Facebook and Flickr and it just takes one person [complaining] to bring the thing down.
"I've got another campaign coming up soon with another doll but I don't know what to do."
Ironically, while Facebook is overzealous in targeting relatively innocuous images on the site, it has been criticised by police for its unresponsiveness to real criminal issues. The Australian Federal Police has said the site's woeful relationship with law enforcement bodies was hampering police investigations and putting lives at risk.
Facebook has been approached for comment."
I've seen so much offensive content on Facebook that doesn't seem to be policed. It's mindless automatons who work behind the scenes that are doing stuff like this. If you object to this type of random and harmful censorship, I suggest you take some kind of action to let Facebook know. But how does one even contact Facebook? Is there anything but a chimpanzee on the other end of the line?
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