GuySpy, the location-based gay dating app we may or may not be well-acquainted with, has run into problems with Facebook’s Community Standards before, which allegedly prohibit pornography and explicit nudity. But it seems that those standards don’t apply for everyone.
Previously, Facebook blocked GuySpy for over 30 days for (we’re guessing/hoping) particularly steamy content, leading the Spies to familiarize themselves with the ‘Book’s Community Standards:
Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and imposes limitations on the display of nudity. At the same time, we aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo’s David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.
Then on September 24 they posted this pic to its page only to see it taken down within hours by the Facebook powers that be. While certainly risqué, the kids at GuySpy found that their pic was nothing compared to some of the other content that slipped past Facebook’s ever-vigilant and all-seeing eye:
[T]he page “Hot boy sexy ladies of Dhaka” was created back in May, and shows something even more revealing. This site has been up for five months, and our photo was taken down in a couple of hours? This doesn’t make sense, unless, perhaps, facebook is just a tad homophobic and sexist to boot! Exploiting the female body is just fine, but showing a beautiful man almost completely nude is a disgrace. Somewhere, Donald Trump is smiling.
We’re not gonna argue over facebook Community Standards, but we are gonna argue over playing fair. As long as those girlie shots get the thumbs up from Mark Zuckerberg, we’re gonna call him out for being a dick–and not in a Michelangelo’s David sort of way.
Hey, either everyone gets exploited or no one does. Give us the liberty to see naked men or give us the death of trashy, badly-lit porn!
How about we take this to the next level?
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Wayne in NYC
One thing that I have noticed quite a bit is that postings made in other countries, even those that are primarily Muslim are not policed by Facebook with the religious fervor that postings by Americans are. I have seen a number of guys who have full frontal nudity posted and their photos have been on their profile, some even as the primary photo for months, with no repercussions whatsoever. I’ve mentioned to them that they should remove them so their accounts don’t get deleted, but it doesn’t happen. There certainly IS a double standard, but it’s not necessarily gay/straight. Americans are prudes and have a tattletale mentality which is sad.
The Real Mike in Asheville
And, what’s your excuse, then, Queerty?
You attempt to inflame ire by posting a heavily cropped picture [and oh, yeah, he’s a hottie] that makes your example appear that Facebook nixed a relatively harmless yet sexy pic. No fair-minded person would nix that photo as cropped by you. Great, you make some sort of point.
Wanting to see the comparisons, I first clicked your link “Hot boy sexy ladies of Dhaka” to see which pictures Facebook allowed. Well, that was a bunch a nothing, the pics shown at the link were as modest in sexiness as the one you posted above. Fail.
So I clicked the other link “some of the other content” and WTF??? The first shock was the full picture of the hottie above — in the full picture, he is shown completely naked with one hand covering his junk but not his pubes — completely naked. So, yeah, thanks Queerty, you must be so proud to punk your readers.
And then, there are the real pictures too from “Dhaka”! And oh yeah, the pics there are definitely that “you know porn when you see it” porn. Soft porn, but porn nonetheless.
And so, Dear Queerty, you fail to make the bigger point by hiding actual content — just how big the gap is between displays of man/man and solo men VS man/woman and women solo, and just truly homophobic Facebook is in distinguishing any difference. Well, not ANY DIFFERENCE , the “gay” shot, the model (the one above) is completely naked and clearly a violation of Facebook rules; the Dhaka pics, each model is wearing clothing, not naked.
Dumdum
@The Real Mike in Asheville: So if you are the real Mike where is the fake Mike? Just askin.
Lester Brathwaite
@The Real Mike in Asheville: The models may be wearing clothing but their breasts are exposed and are engaging in sexual acts. GuySpy’s pic is implied nudity, probably still violating FB’s standards, whereas those other pics are pornographic in nature and should also be considered a violation.
tazz602
@The Real Mike in Asheville: – you miss the point entirely.
This is not the first time Facebook has dealt a double standard to us – str8 people kissing, OK – gay people kissing – blocked, nearly naked female underwear models on some pages, OK – nearly naked male underwear models – blocked. It happens all the time. Now admittedly Queerty could have picked a victim and an example that wasn’t nude with a hand covering the bits, but the truth is there, it’s real. This double standard exists.
It exists for one reason, Facebook relies on USERS to report content. Facebook denies this, that content is blocked automatically based on user reporting content without someone reviewing it, but it does. We got the Chik Fil-A Appreciation day page blocked just for reporting it as hate speech (it did come back after 24 hours AFTER someone reviewed it I’m sure) It’s rather easy to do, I don’t know what the threshold is, but it wasn’t hard.
It would not surprise me if there are “good christian people” trolling Facebook for gay stuff and reporting everything they see, we just don’t have the same dedication on our side to to the same to the heterosexual borderline pages, because we think we should all be able to have that, so for taking the high road we get hit in the balls by the bigots.
To wake Facebook up maybe we should start reporting every semi sexual female picture, straight people kissing picture and straight dating group pages, etc until Facebook comes up with a better solution. I dunno, like a setting to make a page or group adult and thereby have a warning and not let users under 18 access those pages?
Gigi Gee
@The Real Mike in Asheville: Do you get paid to agitate or is it something that you do just for fun? If it’s the latter, you’re the only one who gets any joy out of it.
PRINCE OF SNARKNESS aka DIVKID
seeing that queerty felt the need to censor the image — WITHOUT TELLING US! — reveals where they stand on it’s appropriateness.
you’d have to be an idiot not to know it was inappropriate OR maybe engaging in a publicity stunt for a business by cynically invoking homophobia as a way to garner greater brand recognition. but, c’mon, who’d be stoopid enough to fall for such a low publicity stunt…DOH!
yes, there does need to be even handedness in the way these matters are treated, but that’s a separate though related issue. nevertheless it’s sententious nonsense for these freedom crusaders to claim they didn’t know this was a dodgy picture.
as for mr pubey, i sooo would.
viveutvivas
There is a lot of talk of evenhandedness, but nobody seems to be questioning the underlying assumption that FB should puritanically censor pictures of any gender. Essentially, I believe they are doing it (as is Grindr and many other sites) so that Apple won’t ban their application from Steve Jobs’s regressive and repressive iWorld. Why is everybody allowing something very like the Iranian or Saudi virtue police to run the internet in the 21st century?
viveutvivas
By the way, just to show how bad it is – I recently made a post on FB jokingly complaining about my socks and underwear disappearing in the wash – turns out that just the word “underwear” will get your post censored in that it won’t appear in the newsfeeds.
Cam
@The Real Mike in Asheville:
Mike, I’m missing something here, in your first post, you made it seem like the site that showed women was nothing, had them covered etc… you didn’t mention that they were topless or engaged in sex acts. If your point is valid then there is no reason to be vague.
As for Facebook, more than once when setting up a charity fundraiser for one of the gay groups around, I have had to go toe to toe with them for denying an ad without explanation that had no nudity, but may have had the word gay, drag, etc… They were apologetic, but when it consistently happened it did start to seem like the policy was “Deny it if it’s gay, but if they complain back down” The problem is, if you are placing an ad on Wed. for a Friday event, and they deny it, it basically prevents you from having enough time.
I think they have gotten better in some areas, but it still seems like Zuckers minions have a little bit of gay panic.
hyhybt
Is it possible that the pictures that got pulled were complained about above whatever threshold FB uses and the ones that weren’t weren’t?
tidalpool
@real mike, its always the messanger who speaks the truth who is attacked by those with no horse in the race. I appreciate your time spent in checking out the facts. Most sites have an agenda. its good to see the objective facts as opposed to the subjective opinions. carry on man!
IzzyLuna
It’s happened to me as well and I didn’t even show a glimpse of nudity. I posted a photo of me with a big black bar over what was someone’s crotch at a street fair. It was taken down and I was punished by not being allowed to post anything for 3 days. (again: the photo was of my face and a big black censor bar between a guy’s legs). No glimpses of anything.
nycbearman
You reported Hot boy sexy ladies of dhaka’s photo.09/29/2012Removed
Um, that wasn’t very hard to rectify.
The Real Mike in Asheville
@Dumdum: Well href, a few months ago there was a Queerty poster who was creating their own accounts using the names of regular posters. Now that Queerty has changed their policy requiring logging into an account, it has, at least for now, seems to have ended the pirating of user names.
The Real Mike in Asheville
@tazz602: Sorry Tazz, but you are the one who has missed the point: while there is a very real issue that Facebook uses homophobic guidelines in its policies regarding sexual nature of gay related and straight related posts, that does not change the fact that Queerty too grossly manipulates its posts if gay biased ways.
Here, Queerty deliberately posted a highly cropped photo from a gay Facebook post without stating they had done so. Queerty wanted its readers to believe that Facebook was going so overboard that even that shot was cut. That was not the case though; the shot that was removed/censured shows from the crop down to the guys knees, that he is completely naked, and has one hand cover his cock but not his crotch.
To make the point of the Queerty post, they should have posted the full offending gay shot next to the non-offending straight shots: then, crystal clear, you see naked gay guy VS mostly naked women with men fondling them — that shows just how homophobic Facebook is.
The Real Mike in Asheville
@Cam: Sorry Cam, what I said was, when I clicked on the “Sexy boy” site, the pics were hardly anything ones doesn’t see every night on prime time; when you click on the “some other content” wow, its very porno.
Queerty should have shown both the uncropped gay photo (also quite soft porno since that hottie is completely naked, holding/covering his cock pubes showing) and the porno straight shots that Facebook has not censured.
cwlangleyNYC
Mike, What you obviously don’t realize or understand is the simple fact that IF Queerty HAD put that uncropped photo with this article, posting the article to share it on Facebook and on other social media would have gotten it deleted and blocked, making it unshareable and they couldn’t get the word spread. They had to make the photo “Facebook friendly” in order to make it shareable. If they were trying to mislead anyone, they wouldn’t have provided the links to the actual photos.
StudioTodd
Maybe it’s because I graduated from an art schoool and had nude life drawing models in front of me almost daily…or maybe it’s because I live on the west coast (doubtful, as I find it to be generally as uptight as any place else in the U.S.), but the level of prudery, hypocrisy and delusion in this country when it concerns human skin is incredibly frustrating–to put it mildly.
Even in this discussion (where the sample images have been described as “gay,” “soft porno,” “offending,” “semi sexual,” etc.), it’s apparent that people in this country become slack-jawed drooling idiots when exposed to a naked body. The male image shown was completely non-sexual–it showed no sexual activity and no genitalia.
Even if it had, so what? Why get so freaked out? What is so offensive about a penis or a breast that we must go to extreme measures to prevent people–especially **gasp** THE CHILDREN!!!–from seeing them?
Anyone with even the slightest awareness of reality knows that when you make something taboo, it becomes even more tantalizing–especially to a kid. And that even though you might succeed in blocking images from one website, there are literally millions of other sites where images are not censored.
So it’s really less about shielding your precious childen from seeing the evil penis-monster and more about avoiding having to ackowledge that your kid HAS seen it (or is curious). You get to pretend that your 13-year-old isn’t going to “adult” sites to whack off like a monkey in a zoo every time you leave the room, while your kids learn to perpetuate the childish and prudish idea that nudity and sexuality are something to be ashamed of. Instead of parenting (actually discussing the issue with your child), you continue the tradition of sticking your head in the sand.
If nudity is so offensive and detrimental that it must be scrubbed from any venue where a child might see it, then you need to shut down every school locker room and swimming hole in the country. Or is it somehow ok to be in the same room with a real-life penis–just not with a picture of one?
I am so sick of having everything we see or discuss in this country having to pass the “what-about-the-children” litmus test. We are a nation of hypocrites.
tidalpool
@ studio todd,
Perhaps its not so much hypocricy and ‘the children’ as the very nature of our country. I have noticed in America, there are fundamental moralities we all seem to be inculcated with. The Puritan ethics of our English ancestors. The religious beliefs of the later English and German ancestors who defined what is today our north east.The Catholocism brought to these shores by Spanish priest and armed men who established beacheads in Florida and the southwest. The catholocism of the french who entered from the North, and swept down to the Gulf of Mexico, leaving forts, priests and fundamental catholocism along the way. We then deveolped our own, and Mormons entered the public dialogue, and from the NE to eventually Utah, Idaho, etc we had a new form of fundamental religion at play. Add to this home grown variety the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentacostals and a raft of other extreme fundamentalists, and you begin to see my point. A constant steady stream of imported and local religions that affected our country at its root level. America has always claimed to be a christian country, and may even be. However, it is worth noting it has always been, and continues to be a country where religion is practiced by the majority of the citizens of this nation. Given the patriarchal origns of most religions, the use of women as titillating views of evil has provided this nation with an outlet for its sexually restrained population. Men however, are the embodiedment of God’s laws. The head of the church, the head of the household, etc. They are never to be held up as sexual obejects, thereby showing them in a weak and distorted light. Homosexuals, some 2.5 to 3% of our population have neither the mass nor influence to affect the majority when it comes to establishing young men as sexual objects. Again, not so much hypocricy, as the result of a stead dose of values and morals of fundamentalist churches impaxcting us at our core. Should you doubt my hypothisis, ask the male models in your art classes what they were paid to pose nude, as opposed to the women. Even in the midst of what might appear to be the most accepting construct, men are still viewed and valued in a very different sexual light.
newphillyboi713
There is so much nudy on facbook I mean like u see in the dirty mags..everything