With billions of subscribers, Facebook is the closest thing you will ever get to having a universal platform for people to communicate. As you can imagine, people post just about everything they can. However, the social media platform walks a fine line between trying to ban ‘offensive’ content and allowing users a free information sharing platform. With such a vast audience, you can expect diversity in age, cultural values, laws and the kind of content likely to be posted.
“It’s tempting to think of free expression and having a voice as black and white — either you have it, or you don’t,” says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “But giving people a voice, like most things in our society, is something that we must make incremental progress towards.”
Facebook has always been banning porn. According to its community standards, the company ‘restricts the display of nudity or sexual activity because some people in our community may be sensitive to this type of content. Additionally, we default to removing sexual imagery to prevent the sharing of non-consensual or underage content. Restrictions on the display of sexual activity also apply to digitally created content unless it is posted for educational, humorous or satirical purposes.’
That said, Facebook understands that nudity can be shared for many reasons. If such content is posted as a form of protest, to raise awareness about a cause or for educational or medical reasons, they make allowances for the content. For instance, while the company bans images of the female breasts with nipples showing, they allow “photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring.”
Facebook has also explicitly banned content promoting sexual violence and revenge pornography which the company defines as intimate images “shared in revenge or without permission from the people in the images.” But one thing has not changed: Facebook is not planning to scan posts to flag sexual content automatically. It continues to rely on users to report such content, and although it has dedicated review teams working all hours across the globe who look at every report, the process can take time, at least 48 hours if there are safety concerns. This is a long damn time in this era where something can go viral within minutes.
There is still porn on Facebook
Instagram has banned a host of terms that were deemed too hot for the site. However, its corporate owner is lagging behind in the race to censor content. Facebook allows users to search for just about anything. For instance, I searched for #boobs, and there were several pages with thousands of followers dedicated to showing wardrobe malfunctions and nip slips featuring celebrities and ordinary women. Some are as explicit as you can imagine.
Facebook allowed clickable hashtags in June 2015, letting users access public posts using a certain tag. The intention was to allow users to jump into conversations about certain in topics as well as compete with Twitter. But Facebook has been unable to ban terms in a similar manner to Instagram. After searching some of the banned terms on Instagram, I found a load of pages advertising fetish sessions and selling pornographic videos, escorts openly advertising their services and locations, and some hardcore pornography.
While some of the content may be pulled down after being reported by the holier than thou battalion, you can trust users to find ways to upload such content again. Some banned hashtags on Instagram as #nipples, #boobs, #bigboobs #nsfw, and #xxx show no search results on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they have been banned outright. Pages with sexually explicit content exist all over Facebook, and as mentioned, the company has not shown aggression in banning such content. According to a Facebook rep, offensive hashtags can be reported and may be blocked just like offensive content, but the rep could not disclose the list of banned tags.
One may wonder why Facebook is not as aggressive as Instagram in banning explicit content, but while Facebook is the gram’s corporate parent, it is run independently and can choose whichever tags to ban without having to go through Facebook’s huge corporate bureaucracy. Even then, Instaporn has found its way through the barriers. Ultimately, porn is still winning.
In addition, Facebook allows people to post sexually explicit images and are taken down only after they have been reported. By the time they are pulled down, most of them usually have already gone viral. You will find girls on mirrors showing off their bare asses, dudes posting nudes of their naked ex-girlfriends (sometimes without blurring the faces), and in some instances even sex tapes. I actually saw one Latina girl with her finger up her ass through some leggings!
Final word
As is usual with anything that’s forbidden, people want more of it. There are many free porn tubes from where you can watch porn, but there is that extra thrill of bumping upon some explicit content on social media. However, should you feel like that’s too much work for you, hit the top porn tubes section in my directory and find lots of places where you can get free hassle free smut.
