Safe sex groups slam Facebook for censorship

Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images A mosaic of user photos shows the Facebook logo.

By most measures, The Great American Condom Campaign would seem a pretty easy cause to get behind. The national youth-led effort, through which volunteers distribute contraceptives on college campuses and educate young people about the importance of safe sex, features an array of colorfuladvertisements and clever teases like, Do It For Your Country.

Its the perfect mix of passion and practically, packaged with, if youll pardon the phrase, cold hard facts about the precarious mix of youth and sexuality. So when the Washington-based nonprofit organization behind the effort -- Advocacy for Youth -- tried to promote one of the ads on Facebook, representatives were shocked to learn that it was rejected for violating the sites ad guidelines concerning adult content.

Its hypocritical, said Rachel Cooke, Advocacy for Youths associate director of communications. Compare it to all of the other sexualized content thats allowed on Facebook, or Instagram or other online platforms. How can information that could be protecting you and saving your life be censored?

The rejection was no fluke. After some experimenting, the organization found that Facebook ads using the phrase safe sex, when targeting an audience of 18 and younger, were frequently blocked. In a phone interview Thursday, Cooke said equating sexual-health information with adult content sends a dangerous message to the people who need it most.

Young people are eager and theyre seeking out information, because they dont often have that at school, she said. And when they cant find it, they find the worst sort of information.

Advocacy for Youth, Cooke said, has been reluctant to place safe-sex ads on Facebook ever since the initial rejection a few years ago, but as it turns out, the problem of distributing important sexual-health information continues to be widespread across various social media platforms.Everywhere from Twitter to Pinterest to Yahoo, groups seeking to educate the public -- be it about safe sex, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual violence or any number of issues -- say they are finding their ads lumped in with prohibited content like pornography and ads for sex toys, all due to policies they say are unable to distinguish between sexual health and sexual gratification.

We were shocked when our efforts to increase the profile of vaginismus -- a health condition -- on Facebook were denied, said Deborah Arrindell, vice president of health policy for the American Sexual Health Association. Facebook decided our add was promoting a sexually explicit product. All we were promoting was sexual health information. This is a condition that causes painful intercourse. Women are embarrassed to discuss it, even with healthcare providers.

Lets Talk About Sex -- Or Not

Despite sometimes being championed as bastions of free speech and progressivism, major tech companies like Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google Inc. tend to be quite conservative when it comes to sexual or graphic content, at least as it pertains to advertising. Twittersadvertising policy, for instance, allows messages that promote safe sex, but only if they are not sexual in nature. Facebooks ad guidelines prohibit adult content, including nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative."

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Safe sex groups slam Facebook for censorship