Facebook has sent out a clear message to its users: It doesn't appreciate foul language and will suspend anyone who uses it to title a page -- even if it's part of a town's name.
That became clear on March 19th, when Benoit Kieffer -- the mayor of France's Ville de Bitche -- tried signing on, only to find the town's page had been removed due to a "violation of conditions applying to Facebook pages." He says, "At first, you wonder, 'Was there a technical problem?' However, with the length of time, it can be considered a real censorship." Kieffer says he wrote an appeal to the website but received no response.
Finally, after nearly a month of haggling, Ville de Bitche's page was restored on Tuesday -- with an explanation from Facebook officials that says the page had been "removed in error." As for Kieffer, he's taking the incident in stride. "We can be happy that social networks take responsibility, that they remove illegal, problematic content," Kieffer says. "But the other problem is to consider that the human gaze has the upper hand on artificial intelligence."
Is "bitch" even considered a swear word these days? Is it wrong for Facebook to censor users' content?
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