Facebook apologises after John Snow Kiss-In pic of men snogging taken down 'in error'
By Michelle Loh
A second event has been booked in for the John Snow after its locked its doors last Friday.
The offending kiss, which was fine enough to appear on EastEnders. Picture courtesy BBC
Facebook has been forced to apologise to its users after a picture of two men kissing mysteriously disappeared from its website.
In an email to news.com.au, Facebook’s US-based Public Policy Communications Manager Andrew Noyes said that: “The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The picture in question is a publicity still from BBC series EastEnders, and was used to promote the John Snow Kiss-In - an anti-homophobia event held in a London pub last Friday.
The event was held after Jonathan Williams, 26, and James Bull, 23, were kicked out of the John Snow in Soho, by a woman who claimed to be the landlady accused them of being "obscene".
Both the picture and event notice mysteriously disappeared from Facebook last Friday night, sparking a wave of online protests in support of the event.
It was later revealed that the event disappeared because it was made private by the organiser. The missing picture is another story.
Niall O'Conghaile, the UK-based DJ and writer who originally posted about the event woke up last Saturday morning to a terse email from Facebook informing him that the photo was in violation of Facebook’s usage policies.
In it’s email, Facebook said that the photo had been removed because it contained “nudity, or any kind of graphic, sexually suggestive content”, and was consequently “violated Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities”.
When LA-based talk show host and fellow Dangerous Minds writer Richard Metzger posted O’Conghaile’s piece to his own Facebook wall, that post also mysteriously disappeared.
Metzger then responded with this angry post questioning Facebook’s decision to remove his original post, which resulted in the PR catastrophe that Facebook is currently facing.
As it turns out, the webpage for the Kiss-In was not taken down by Facebook, but retrospectively made private by event organiser Paul Shetler in a bid to avoid homophobic trolling.
In a comment to Dangerous Minds, Shetler says:
“I just want people to know that FB have NOT removed the kiss-in event page; it’s still there, but I made the event private and only visible to those who had been invited as there were starting to be trolls posting abusive nonsense on it”.
At the time of writing, the event was only available to people who had previously RSVPed yes to the original invitation - a self-selecting group of people who would presumably be unlikely to post homophobic comments on the website.
However, Metzger is still waiting to hear back from Facebook as to why his post on the incident is no longer available.
In an email to news.com.au, Metzger observed that Facebook could have saved itself a lot of trouble by setting up usage policies that didn't default to the most conservative troll on the page.
“It's regrettable” he said.
“I don't think that company is in any way homophobic, I just think they need to review their policies, if for no other reason to prevent things like this happening again, the appearance of a real slight to a lot of people.”
Facebook page for Dangerous Minds now has a picture of Batman and Robin kissing. Another kiss-in has been organised at the John Snow on Friday.
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