Facebook admitted on Sunday making a mistake after it banned an advert featuring French artist Eugene Delacroix’s famous work, « Liberty Leading the People, » because it depicts a bare-breasted woman.
The 19th-century masterpiece was featured in an online campaign for a play showing in Paris when it was blocked on the social networking site this week, the play’s director Jocelyn Fiorina said.
« A quarter of an hour after the advert was launched, it was blocked, with the company telling us we cannot show nudity, » Fiorina said.
He then posted a new advert with the same painting with the woman’s breasts covered with a banner saying « censored by Facebook », which was not banned.
Delacroix’s subject who brandishes a French flag in the painting is not just any woman—she’s Marianne, a national symbol of the French Republic.
Fiorina had already tried twice before in June without success to use the painting, which once featured on a franc bank note, in publicity for the theatre.
But by Sunday the US social media giant had a change of heart and apologised « for this error ».
« The work ‘Liberty Leading the People’ rightly has its place on Facebook… We have immediately informed the user that his sponsored publicity is henceforth approved, » Facebook manager in Paris Elodie Larcis said in a statement.
« In order to protect the integrity of our service, we verify millions of publicity images each week and sometimes we make mistakes, » she said.
With over one billion users, Facebook is often challenged over its authorisation or not of content on its site.
On Thursday, a Paris court threw out a case brought by a French teacher who wanted to sue Facebook over his claims that his page was censored when he posted a nude painting by Gustave Courbet.
The court however added that Facebook had made « a mistake » in not specifying to the user the reasons for its move.
Explore further: French court throws out Facebook ‘censorship’ case
