CHANGE.ORG

A petition on Change.org is asking Facebook to stop censoring photos of men and women who have undergone mastectomies.

A group of petitioners has a message for Facebook: stop taking down our mastectomy photos.

Revealing pictures of women and men who have had mastectomies are often removed from Facebook by the site’s censors, the petition posted on Change.org alleges.

Two of the affected Facebook groups are The SCAR Project, a series by professional photographer David Jay that depicts young breast cancer survivors bearing their mastectomy scars, and Stupid Dumb Breast Cancer, which has posted “survivor portraits” of women’s nude bodies covered in paint.

Facebook censors often remove photos posted on The SCAR Project’s page and several times have banned Jay from posting for 30 days, he told the Daily News.

“Women find it very, very supportive to go and look at these pictures,” said Jay, who has displayed the works in galleries around the world. Each photograph he posts gets “thousands of beautiful comments to the subjects themselves,” he said. “When they remove these photos, the comments go with them.”

The issue is apparently that the photos show breasts and sometimes nipples, which violates Facebook’s policy against nudity.

When Facebook users view content on the site, they have the option to report or mark it as spam, which flags it for review by Facebook employees.

Scorchy Barrington, 53, created the petition last week after reading a tweet from Jay saying he had been banned from Facebook. So far, it has racked up nearly 9,000 supporters.

“Facebook says these photos violate their policy – essentially putting these images in the same category as pornography,” the petition states. “The Scar Project, Stupid Dumb Breast Cancer and other pages like them do not objectify or sexualize the human anatomy. They document the physical and emotional toll of women and men who have undergone mastectomies. They raise awareness of the disease and reinforce the need for early intervention and research toward a cure.”

In response, Facebook issued a statement, saying it has “long allowed mastectomy photos to be shared on Facebook, as well as educational and scientific photos of the human body and photos of women breastfeeding.”

“We only review or remove photos after they have been reported to us by people who see the images in their News Feeds or otherwise discover them,” it also said.

“On occasion, we may remove a photo showing mastectomy scarring either by mistake, as our teams review millions of pieces of content daily, or because a photo has violated our terms for other reasons. As a reminder, our terms stipulate that we generally do not allow nudity, with some exceptions as laid out here.”

The site “review(s) millions of pieces of photos and content, we are also doing our best to make the right and best decisions as they pertain to photos,” the statement concluded.

The social networking site has come under fire in the past for taking down photos of women breastfeeding, to which it has said “photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”

Facebook representatives also met with Barrington, Jay and Change.org representatives in a conference call Tuesday.

Barrington, who has Stage IV breast cancer, said she was encouraged by the company’s response, but  still fears there might be misunderstanding among Facebook censors and the general public about what the mastectomy photos aim to portray.

“We are concerned that it all comes down to breasts and nipples,” she told the Daily News. “When you see a breast and nipple and there is a scar, you’re seeing a mastectomy photo.”