by The Editor's Blog, with Bob Bounds
Monday, March 7 2011
Today's Medway Messenger has an update to the story about Melissa Tullett, the Rochester mother whose Facebook page was banned by the social media giant for containing an 'offensive' picture of her reconstructed breasts following a double mastectomy. The page has been reinstated following our requests for a comment plus a Facebook campaign which attracted over 1,000 members complaining about the decision. As I wrote in Friday's editorial comment, we can understand why Facebook needs to police its website for inappropriate material but surely it should have used a little common sense in this case. The picture wasn't pornographic or even nudity. It was one woman's celebration of defeating a terrible disease that affects and kills tens of thousands of women. The page is back up but the picture, which we used on this site, isn't. That's a shame.
There had been some debate in the office about whether or not we should publish the picture. Some argued if we didn't then we could have been accused of hypocrisy - on one hand criticising Facebook for censorship and on the other doing exactly the same as them. In the end I decided that publishing the picture in the paper was a step too far because newspaper readers don't have a choice about whether they view the image or not. On the website you can give people the choice - so that's what we did.
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