Facebook hasn’t done much to curb its disastrous fake news problem, but when it comes to confusing photos of birds, the social network isn’t taking any risks.
Earlier this year, Facebook cracked down on a photo of a goose that appeared to be on fire. Now it has apparently suspended a user for “nudity” over photos of a rubber duck.
The craziest part is that the duck was wearing clothes.
The pair of pics was posted years ago by one Charles Foster Lime, but Facebook has just gotten around to flagging them as “nudity” and suspending Lime for 30 days. There was no nudity, though: one photo showed a pair of pants with a conspicuous crotch bulge. The other showed the fly of the pants open, revealing that the bulge was a rubber duck.
It’s not even clear that anyone’s in the pile of clothes. There’s no exposed penis here, and there might not even be a covered one. Nice going, Facebook.
Once the photos went down, Lime’s friends began reposting them in protest of Facebook’s bizarre, uneven enforcement of its “community standards.” Unsurprisingly, Facebook took those down, too:
The users protested the removal of the photo, arguing that it was just a photo of “a duck in a pile of laundry,” but things only got more ridiculous. Facebook reviewed the photo again, in light of the fact that there was no actual nudity, and decided it still somehow violated the site’s rules.
Whether you’re running past a campfire or popping out through the fly of a pair of trousers, it’s hard to be a bird on Facebook.