Facebook has removed two fan pages of the radical Kyiv-based feminist group FEMEN for violating the company's policy on nudity, a Facebook representative told the Kyiv Post.
“We have a very clear policy on nudity and the administrators of the page in question will have received multiple warnings that content on their page broke our rules,” Linda Griffin, pan-Euro policy communications manager for Facebook, said in an email to the Kyiv Post. “This is a rule that we apply equally and globally,” she said.
Alexandra Shevchenko, one of the group’s founding members, alleged in a blog post on the Ukrainska Pravda website that Facebook had removed the pages because of concerns over pornography.
“The formal pretexts
for closing the platforms are absurd charges of distributing pornography and
promoting prostitution,” she wrote.
However, Griffin contended that Facebook “absolutely made no accusations of the page distributing pornography and promoting prostitution.”
She also stressed Facebook’s stance on free speech, saying that “we strongly believe that Facebook users should have the ability to express their opinions, and we don’t typically take down content, groups or Pages that speak out against countries, religions, political entities or ideas.”
Shevchenko wrote that FEMEN has challenged Facebook’s decision to shut down the group’s
main page, as well as the page of its outfit in France. The two pages had some 170,000
followers before being removed.
Not all of FEMEN’s fan pages on Facebook
have been removed. The organization’s German page is still live, along with a
handful of other country offshoots.
Shevchenko called the move “a
logical continuation of the Internet War waged against FEMEN (by) different
reactive groups, from European fascists and post-Soviet dictatorships to
Islamic fundamentalists.”
The self-styled “sextremeism” feminist group, which began in Ukraine in
2008 but has since spread throughout world, regularly grabs headlines with its
topless protests and attacks on opponents, such as Russian President Vladimir
Putin and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
While most photos of the activists posted to the social network were of
topless members, FEMEN did make efforts to abide by Facebook policy as it
pertains to nudity by covering activists’ nipples with tiny black dots.
Attempts to
contact Shevchenko and FEMEN leaders Inna Shevchenko and Anna
Hutsol were unsuccessful.
Earlier this month the organization grabbed headlines when three of its
members were found guilty of public indecency,
offending public morality and disrupting the peace in Tunisia after
demonstrating topless in front of the country’s Palace of Justice. The three women
demanded that authorities release Tunisian Amina Tyler, a FEMEN activist who
was arrested in May when she tried to hang a banner on the wall of a mosque
while baring her breasts.
Tyler gained notoriety months earlier after she posted topless photos of
herself on Facebook with the words “My body belongs to me and not the honor of
others” painted across her torso.
International human rights groups, including Article 19 and Amnesty
International, have decried the Tunisian court’s decision to jail the activists
and called for their release. The Tunisian government has showed no signs of
lessening the four-month jail sentences.
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.
