Heinisch received a two-hour warning before her electronic umbilical cord was severed. The forced withdrawal from a virtual universe as real as anything she's known was palpable when we talked Monday morning.
"Go ahead and tell me to get a life, but I'm a stay-at-home mom in a one-car family," explains the 32-year-old Croydon woman. "Facebook was my sanity, the one place I could meet people, talk to them, and read about their lives. My entire support network is gone . . . over a breast-feeding photo."
Too hot to handle
Shocking as it may seem to those of us who have seen more than we care to from prolific posters, Facebook has a visual standards policy. Photos cannot be "inappropriately sexual" or "contain nudity."
Monitoring a social network with 600 million users can't be easy, but Facebook has proven spectacularly inept at policing propriety.
Playboy's Facebook page has 4.9 million "likes" and twice as much cleavage. I got paid to gasp at the explicit material on "I Love Boobs," but anyone else would be fired doing that at work.
And yet, Facebook's censors have zapped hundreds of breast-feeding photos and deleted scores of "lactivists' " accounts. In 2008, a company spokesman said: "We've made a visible areola the determining factor," but Heinisch shows none of the forbidden skin. Could the real problem be that the hippo is naked?
"I've had my account deleted four times and had 35 to 40 photos removed, and [Facebook] is never very clear about how or why," explains Emma Kwasnica, an outspoken birthing and breast-feeding advocate from Montreal. "The last time, they said, 'If this happens again, we will not reinstate you.' But it happened again, and they reinstated me. So they don't play by their own rules."
