Instagram isn’t banning pictures of menstrual blood after all

Facebook has some notoriously aggressive anti-sexual policies when it comes to the content posted on its website and its subsidiary, Instagram. However, what constitutes as sexually suggestive is debatable and the company’s decision to remove an image of a woman whose pants have been stained by menstrual blood has drawn a bit of criticism due to the fact that there isn’t actually anything sexual about the picture,e specially considering the woman is fully clothed. 

From its removal of a page promoting a nude charity calendar to its ban on art critic Jerry Saltz for posting artistic representations of genitalia, Facebook’s policies on sexually suggestive material are among the most Puritanical of all major tech companies. That’s no small feat considering Google’s recent removal of adult blogs and Snapchat’s policy against porn stars making a living wage. But Facebook’s subsidiary, Instagram, went over the line when it removed a photo (shown above) taken by poet Rupi Kaur of a woman whose pants and sheets are stained by menstrual blood. After a user or multiple users flagged Kaur’s photo as “inappropriate,” Instagram deleted the photo — twice — stating that it violated the site’s community guidelines which ban “nudity” and “mature content” — a term that likely connotes “sex acts.”