Censorship and vanity

By Borja Bandrés

It turns out that Meta's new technical director, Andrew Bosworth, has been caught saying he plans to institute "near-Disney levels of security" on the platform. A juicy and promising statement coming from a social network that, since its inception, has paid daily homage to the most sublime, prudish puritanism.

This work by Glauco Capozzoli , entitled "The Group" and belonging to our collection, was censored by Facebook.

A deeply ingrained custom, the censorship of nudity in art is in the DNA of what was formerly known as Facebook. A few years ago, it went so far as to label the publication of a thirty-thousand-year-old sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf, as "pornographic." And if this damning decision wasn't clear enough, the platform rejected the appeals of the user who shared the photograph of this voluptuous Stone Age woman not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. The matter had to reach the director of the Vienna Museum of Art—owner of the work—before Facebook, in its magnanimous generosity and as an exceptional measure, deigned to allow the publication because its usage policy "does not permit nudity, not even suggested nudity." An edifying policy that allows countless hookers, gigolos, prostitutes, actresses in adult films, aspiring actresses, exhibitionists, and all those seeking immediate notoriety to display bodies that leave little room for the imagination.

"The Napalm Girl" a historic photograph that marked a turning point in the Vietnam War.

Other notorious instances of censorship by the company and its subsidiary Instagram include the removal of a post of the Neptune statue in Bologna, deemed "sexually explicit" because the god "excessively displayed his body unnecessarily." This was a disgrace to Tommaso Laureti, the sculptor who, five hundred years ago, chose to sculpt Neptune's private parts instead of giving him a loincloth. Nor should we forget that Facebook labeled as "obscene" the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese girl fleeing naked and terrified from a napalm attack. The napalm, incidentally, was a product called Agent Orange, created by Monsanto, a company acquired by a well-known pharmaceutical firm that distinguished itself in Nazi extermination camps and shares shareholders with Meta. Although the list of milestones is endless, we will put a stop to it with the warning that a Danish MP received indicating that her publication of the Little Mermaid sculpture in Copenhagen was "too naked", because, pay attention to the fact, "the network must be a safe virtual place for visitors, including the numerous children who use it".

Photographer Spencer Tunick stages one of his large-scale group nude photoshoots in New York, 2019.

All this string of pronouncements and arbitrary decisions, however, did not fall on deaf ears and began to accumulate a considerable number of complaints, protests, and petitions that became somewhat of a nuisance to the company. Therefore, in 2019, Facebook invited twenty highly hopeful artists and curators to its New York headquarters to reconsider the social network's art policies. The results were not so encouraging, given how countless posts, ads, and accounts continue to be censored, deleted, penalized, or made invisible with the stroke of a pen. So much so that websites now exist that compile the works removed from Meta. Furthermore, several galleries, artists, and museums, including the aforementioned Vienna Museum of Art, have found no better solution than to migrate to platforms like OnlyFans, where one gets paid to show one's private parts and other less-than-reputable aspects of the anatomy.

This work by Egon Schiele, along with those of other artists from Vienna museums, has been published on OnlyFans due to Meta's censorship.

 

It's undeniable that Meta, but also LinkedIn, Twitter, and the other major social networks, have changed the game, enabling us, like never before, to connect, gain instant global visibility, access opportunities, and bypass traditional hierarchies. For example, between galleries and artists, where galleries previously assumed significant financial and reputational risks by showcasing talented, often emerging, creators, Meta has now imposed its own rules, which we have either accepted or simply ignored, prioritizing our desire and vanity to be seen and achieve results that, until just two decades ago, would have required years of work, if not seemed impossible. By acting this way, we have willfully overlooked the fact that the raison d'être of these companies is not to offer substance, transparency, or rigor, but rather to immerse us in an endless flow of content where anyone can publish virtually anything at any time. And neither picking up a pencil makes one a draftsman, nor does putting on an exhibition by throwing sand in the street to reflect a great existential problem make one an artist, as we discussed in the article, artists, geniuses and incompetents .

Ultimately, the problem isn't the censorship of historical works of art, or even of beautiful and recent creations, but the tens of millions of stupid things posted every second. Social media is nothing more than a mirror of society whose reflection, in most cases, validates what the Franco-Belgian humorist Raymond Devos said: "I have nothing to say, but I want it to be known."