"Facebook walks a delicate line when it tries to ban violent or offensive content without suppressing the free sharing of information that it says it wants to encourage. Its audience is vast, with a huge variance in age, cultural values and laws across the globe. Yet despite its published guidelines, the reasoning behind Facebook’s decisions to block or allow content are often opaque and inconsistent.
For example, the company flip-flopped repeatedly on whether to allow beheading videos on the service before recently deciding to ban them. In December, it blocked a page in Russia that was promoting an anti-government protest, then allowed copycat pages to stay up. And in October, it created an exception to its requirement that people use their real names on the service when it allowed San Francisco’s drag queens to use their stage names while continuing to crack down on others using false names.
“We’re trying to strike the balance based on the way our community works,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, said in an interview. “The landscape is complicated.”"
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/facebook-explains-what-it-bans-and-why/?_r=0
non-obvious questions; huge implications for how people communicate and sort of the moral norms of social media.
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