Mette Gjerskov’s Facebook post (screenshot via Mette Gjerskov/Facebook)
For more than a century, Edvard Eriksen’s bronze statue of “The Little Mermaid” has perched quietly on a waterside rock in Copenhagen, offending virtually no one. It’s the country’s most photographed statue, snapped some 5 million times every year. According to Facebook, though, photos of this bronze rendering of a fairy tale character are too obscene to post on the social media site, as one Danish politician recently learned.
This past week, Facebook prohibited social democrat MP Mette Gjerskov from posting an image of “The Little Mermaid” on her page because it featured “too much bare skin or sexual undertones.” This, despite Facebook’s community standards policies explicitly stating the site “allows photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures.” Apparently bronze mermaid boobs are an exception.
When Gjerskov appealed to Facebook, the site reversed its decision and agreed to free the mermaid nipple. (It’s worth noting that Eriksen’s statue is arguably less risque than Disney’s hypersexualized but Facebook-condoned rendering of the Little Mermaid character as “a sexy little honey-bunch with a double-scallop-shell bra and a mane of red hair tossed in tumble-out-of-bed Southern California salon style,” as Michael Wilmington described the cartoon in the Los Angeles Times.)
Once clear of Facebook’s overzealous censors, the Danish politician ran into another hurdle when she tried to to post an image of the sculpture on her blog, which she writes for the Danish public news station TV2 — it became a potential copyright violation. Eriksen’s family is notoriously aggressive about enforcing the statue’s copyright and has been known to sue media outlets for displaying or broadcasting images of it.
“It turns out that you can’t take photos [of the artwork] … without generous payment to the artist’s heirs. It’s the law — which Parliament adopted,” Gjerskov wrote.
This is only the latest in a slew of Facebook censorship cases that have sparked outrage among the social media site’s users. In 2011, for example, a French teacher had his Facebook account suspended after posting a photo of Gustave Courbet’s painting “L’Origine du Monde” (1866), which the site’s moderators took for pornography. This sparked a four-year (and counting) legal battle.
And back in 2013, Hyperallergic itself was Facebook censored for posting an article that included artist Kate Durbin’s photo of a woman’s exposed butt. Despite this and other brushes with Facebook law, we opted against censor-barring the nipples of “The Little Mermaid” in this article, because we’re just that transgressive.
h/t CPH Post