Facebook Blocks Mom For Sharing Breastfeeding Images, Banned For Three Days

Social networking giant Facebook blocks mom who posted breastfeeding images. She’s a very passionate breastfeeding advocate and manages a Facebook page about the practice, which the site banned her from updating.

Kemp moderates and updates the Facebook Page, Breastfeeding Mama Talk, a breastfeeding support group page she manages with a friend.

Kemp was outraged when she realized that Facebook pulled several images of women nursing their children from the page. “I was shocked,” Kemp told Fox40, “I’m trying to do good for mothers and I’m getting kicked off for posting pictures of the most beautiful act a mother can do for her kid. It’s not right.”

According to the San Francisco Gate blog, Facebook and nursing moms have been at odds with each other since the social networking site first took down breastfeeding images in 2008. Facebook, at the time, told ZDNet that it pulled the images because it was concerned that photos of breasts will be exposed to members of the site whose minimum age for users is 13-years-old. However, after thousands of women complained and flooded the site with breastfeeding images, which led to a media firestorm, Facebook decided to allow nursing images and created a formal policy, which has evolved over the years.

The current policy states that breastfeeding images are allowed, but those images that showed a fully exposed breast while the child isn’t actively nursing is not allowed on the site.

Kemp first ran into trouble with the site when one of her 4,300 fans posted a close-up of an image of a nursing baby and FB removed the picture. She was blocked from the page for 24 hours.

After a day, Kemp returned to the site and saw an image of a woman nursing her 5-year-old. The site quickly removed the image and again Kemp was banned from her page. This time, however, Facebook blocked the mom from accessing the page she built for three days.

Kemp created the page to provide supportive space for moms who believe in breastfeeding.

The breastfeeding advocate and dedicated Facebook page manager reached out to Facebook to ask why they removed her photos. She never heard back from FB.
Fox 40, who broke the story on Kemp, contacted the social media site and heard back from a spokesperson who said that “the removal was an error and the company apologizes.”