Michael Stokes is a well known photographer with a thriving business. His beautifully staged images of physically fit men are familiar to many. He’s also a photo collector and historian who recently produced a book with Taschen on WW2 photos of soldiers at ease and quite naked.
Stokes has a large following on Facebook, with more than 260,000 likes, but he says the experience there has been befuddling and frustrating. Stokes says that, according to Facebook’s own standards, he has not broken the rules of what’s allowed and yet photos repeatedly get censored. He suspects homophobic users are reporting his page and trying to get him banned, but the inner-workings of Facebook’s moderation system are opaque. Most recently, Stokes’ account was blocked from posting altogether, only to be reinstated after appealing.
Complaints to Facebook are regularly met with apologies and reinstatements, only to have his work removed again. The Advocate contacted Facebook for comment about Stokes’ case and received what is becoming a fairly standard explanation from a spokesman: “We mistakenly removed a post from this Page after it was reported to us. As our team processes more than one million reports each week, we occasionally make a mistake. We apologize for the inconvenience that it caused.”
Authored By Christopher Harrity- See the Full Story at The Advocate
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